Hutchinson says: "Brothers in Blood deals with very emotive issues; it's set in Cape Town in the nineties and deals with people trapped in the crossfire of the vigilante groups of the time of which Pagad was the best known.
"I've known Greg Hamonn, the director; for a long time but it was the first time we'd worked together and it proved to be a really good working relationship. Brothers is a difficult piece because (at least in draft form) it's a screenplay rather than a play. It moves rapidly from location to location and both forwards and backwards in time with impossible costume changes, and while this may be easy to do on screen, it is fiendishly difficult to do on stage.
"After a lot of playing with ideas on my own, I called Greg one day and said: 'Neither of us can do this alone - we have to work together to solve both the scenic and staging problems at the same time.' This led to a marathon session where we literally went through the piece together moment by moment exploring our options along the lines of, 'If we do this we can do that, but then...'
"Somewhere in the middle of all this, I recalled the demo I had been to at the launch of the ROBE DT3000s. At the time I was more impressed with the units as a tool for a set designer than I was with their potential for lighting, but I now realised that here was a possible solution to the design concept for Brothers in Blood. Problem was could we source the gear within the available budget?
"After my session with Greg, I approached Carl Johnson from the Market Theatre and explained to him what I was hoping to be able to do. I described what the DT 3000s could do and how they could work for the theatre beyond this production as well. He asked some probing questions applied to applications beyond Brothers and became very excited at the potential for several regular requirements at the theatre. Problem was, no matter how we fiddled the numbers, even one unit was stretching things, and I wanted two!
"I already knew Mark Gaylard, owner of the rental company MGG, had also shown interest in this product. Mark has been coming to the party with long run hires for theatres quite regularly of late, and I suggested to Carl that we approach him and see if we could make a deal. Mark looked at the cost implications, decided it could be worth his while and offered the units to us at an affordable price. Well, affordable if I could bring the physical side of the set in very cheaply!
"One of the most exciting features of the DT3000 is that it allows you to shape the image in ways that are not rectangular. Life does not happen in 4 x 3 format and that has always been one of my irritations with onstage projection. Now, for the first time it is economically possible to conceive projection beyond normal aspect ratios (I love picture merge!), and to shape images to suit. In this case, the set comprised four screens, all irregular in shape. As the piece takes place on the Cape Flats, I wanted a sense of the (nearly) continual wind that blows there, taking newspaper and sweet and crisp wrappers in its wake and then depositing them on fences. Hence, screens made of diamond fencing mesh with newsprint stuck on the back! Not a classy screen, but a really interestingly textured and cheap one.
"One of the joys of the DT3000s was the sophistication that they allowed us. Firstly, we could scale images to suit the moment: covering all four screens with a
