A musical based on the stories of P.L. Travers and the Walt Disney film, Mary Poppins is produced by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh. The show made its debut at the Bristol Hippodrome in September, playing a short season there before transferring to London. The DHA and Scene Change teams were led by Wyatt Enever, bringing his long experience in creating and pre-distorting projected artwork for stage productions into the world of projected video, together with Scene Change's Nigel Sadler. Enever, Sadler, DHA and Scene Change were selected to work with scenic and costume designer Bob Crowley to gather together material, shape that material and artwork generated by Crowley himself into a suitable form, then deal with the challenges of incorporating that material into the show itself.
"I think we were selected because I've worked with director Richard Eyre and designer Bob Crowley before on other shows and they felt comfortable that we could work with them to create the required effects," explains Enever. "Between DHA Lighting and Scene Change we have the experience of both projection and video, perfect for this show which required integration of both types of media."
On the practical side of generating the effects on stage, DHA and Scene Change worked closely with Paul Highfield and the team at E/T/C UK, who is supplying a 6kW PIGI projector with rotating double scrollers and a 4kW PIGI-S projector to the production, and with Blitz Vision who is supplying the two BeaMover 50 moving video projectors with shutters and a fixed Sanyo XP55 video projector. The video content is replayed from four of Scene Change's versatile Hippotizer Stage v2 digital media servers. Mary Poppins marked the debut of version 2 of the Hippotizer.
The projection created for the show includes both still and moving front-cloth projections of Cherry Tree Lane, the street where the Banks family live, and their home at Number 17, vistas of London, and other animated sequences. Enever's work included photography, image adaptation, multiple-plane keystone correction for still and scrolling images and colour correction, with the final projected images then being printed in high-resolution to give the best possible image quality.
Mary Poppins is directed by Richard Eyre, co-directed and choreographed by Matthew Bourne and co-choreographed by Stephen Mear. The production is designed by Bob Crowley, with lighting by Howard Harrison and sound by Andrew Bruce. The show's production managers are Simon Robertson for Cameron Mackintosh Ltd and Nic Harris for Disney Theatrical. Karen Monid and Bob Kronman served as the show's projection crew.
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
