Marrying the techniques of American and Italian theatre, FITC's aim is to build relationships with the local Tuscan community through productions and outreach programmes. Most of its plays are in English, but for Agnes of God FITC needed to have the English dialogue subtitled by being translated into Italian and then projected on to the set. However, as a small company, having a separate video/projector operator was not possible.
This was an ideal situation for Rosco's Keystroke, a hardware/software solution designed for small technical teams, as it allows audio and visual cues to be automatically triggered from the lighting desk.
Available for both PC and Macintosh, Keystroke is a DMX trigger which allows a lighting console to control virtually any software programme running on an external computer - for example visual products like PowerPoint, Keynote Quicktime or Windows Media Player and audio playback programmes like ProTools, iTunes, Garageband and SFX.
For Agnes of God, FITC programmed the subtitles into a PowerPoint presentation and Keystroke automatically advanced the 'slides' on cues from the lighting desk.
"Keystroke was a great help in running our slide show for the subtitles," says Aaron Craig, co-founder of FITC and also the director of Agnes of God. "With over 90 cues on an 80 minute show, you can imagine how important it was for our lighting op to be able to keep both hands on the light board and have everything centrally located."
(Jim Evans)
