UK - LSi is sad to report the passing of software and media server pioneer, Richard Bleasdale (1965-2024) at the end of September.
Rob Halliday writes: “Richard Bleasdale was one of those backstage artists whose work was never recognised in itself by the show-going public, but which enabled remarkable work by others that was, in some cases becoming era-defining. Some of these ‘secret’ backstage artists work in wood, some in metal, some in fabric. Richard’s medium was software: software which enabled shows to happen in entirely new ways.
Like a fair number of others in this industry, Richard studied at Imperial College in London, theatre a distraction from the actual course that would go on to shape his working life. Working at Vari-Lite at a time where you’d have one lighting console for the conventional lights and another for the moving lights, he realised there was perhaps a need to connect them together to more tightly integrate all elements of a show. Consoles couldn’t really do that then, so Richard created a tool to enable it, a bridge between devices – SAM-SC, Serial-and-MIDI Show Control. He wrote it on the artist’s choice of computer, the Apple Macintosh. As its name suggested, it would work by whatever means necessary, or whatever means the control consoles supported, which might be MIDI, serial comms or something else. Usually it would receive a trigger from one device; you could program the response to cascade triggers to other devices so they could all play along together. It represented a step-change, perhaps ultimately inspiring OSC and the support for it built into so many entertainment products which ultimately rendered SAM redundant.
Richard’s next project was more revolutionary still. It was becoming clear that lights and video projectors were converging: why did a video projector’s image have to be static? Why could the light projected by a moving light only be a simple gobo, not more complex animated content? Various companies were in the process of trying to integrate video into their moving lights. That other pair of pioneers, Tony Gottelier and Peter Wynne Willson took a different projector, adding one of their periscopic double moving mirror assemblies to the front of an existing video projector. That solved the challenge of moving the image. But it created a whole new challenge: how did you control this ‘moving light’ that, instead of having a few gobos and a bit of colour, potentially had an infinite array of images, still and moving, and the ability to shape, distort, keystone and adjust them in countless other ways?
Richard provided the solution: a piece of software, again running on a Mac, that provided the interface between the lighting console and this new kind of moving light. The entire system was originally called Catalyst; the name stuck around for Richard’s software. Today we’d call it a media server: it was really the first such product, and for a long time defined the category - much of every current media server is recognisable in Catalyst.
Catalyst had another spin-off, PixelMAD, developed for Radiohead’s 2003 world tour. This took pixels on screen and converted them to DMX values to send to lights. Suddenly you were treating arrays of lights not as individual fixtures to be programmed one at a time, but as pixels in a canvas that you brought to life by moving images or movies across them.
This wasn’t just new functionality, but a new way of thinking. It is so standard now – so obvious in retrospect – that it is now hard to remember quite how revolutionary it was then. Between them, Catalyst and PixelMAD were not just new bits of software, but invented an entire new way of working, a new range of visual possibilities, and enabled new sets of artists and technicians ready to put them to use.
Catalyst became Richard’s life’s work as he continued to support it – often turning up unannounced on a big new show that was using it, just to make sure everything was OK; sometimes seeing the show crew struggling to achieve something then working overnight to deliver a new software version that solved their problem.
Those who put this new invention to use on some of its earliest and biggest shows, including both a Christmas holiday display at New York’s Grand Central Station and Eurovision in 2002, note that in fact it was sometimes the biggest shows with some complex new challenge that you needed to hook his interest – “the weirder your project, the happier he was,” as they describe it.
As with all software that is loved, that is a process that never really ends, sadly until now. But the legacy of Catalyst and this new world of media servers is one that will be with us for ever more, and a fitting tribute to Richard’s genius.”
For those looking to remember Richard, donations to the Homerton Hope charity, who did much to support Richard after his 2018 stroke, are suggested:
