In this interview excerpt, the speakers discuss the essential collaborations required for projection design in theatre. They note that projection designers must work closely with set designers to have surfaces to project onto, and with lighting designers to adjust lighting levels for optimal projection visibility. The conversation then highlights an often-overlooked partnership with sound designers, prompting a deeper exploration of how audio and visual elements must be coordinated in production design.
And if you look at that relationship with the creative team, it would be almost obvious to say that you're going to have to work with a set designer because you need something to project on.
Lighting designer, because obviously you've got to turn those lights down to get the projections up.
But you mentioned an interesting one that I, when you said it, it made sense, but I would not have thought about it. The sound designer. Can you expand a little bit on that?
Well, you know, uh, my collaboration with the sound designer happens in, uh, 2 or 3 primary ways. One is when we film a scene, when we either do live video, live on stage where we have to mic them and do the audio, or we do a pre-recording or an animation. Sometimes you'll do an animation or you'll do a big sequence and you'll hand that sequence over and you'll score it or Foley artist it with the sound designer. So you collaborate there to get the— at that point you're making a little film. And so you're working closely with the sound designer, very much the way you'd work with a set designer to get the look of the surface you're projecting onto, or you're working with the lighting designer to get the balance of the atmosphere right. You'd work with the sound designer to create this little short film. Another way is the noise of the projectors. They are loud. And the brighter they are, the louder they are, and it's a real thing. And there are solutions. There's baffling boxes, and it adds some amount to the expense of the project. and there are, there are placement issues and different things. And, uh, you know, that's another thing that has to be considered is that, um, if I didn't have to consider anyone else's design issues, I would always just put the projectors in the center of the audience, just right there in the center center, you know. Well, you can't because you have your whole subscriber series sitting under— those are your premium seats, you know. It's right where Ben Brantley sits, you know. Like, you need You can't put the projector there, so usually I compromise. I can't put it in the audience. It's not actually much of a compromise. You just can't put it there, although some touring houses you have to. I put it on the balcony rail. It's kind of right in the center and right on the lip of the balcony. The problem with that is that they're loud and they are also now kind of floating in the center of the house. They're loud for the people sitting under them and they're loud for the people sitting behind them. And you kind of have to work with the audio design to work out solutions for that. You know, and a third way that I collaborate with the sound designer is through the use of timecode sync, which happens in film all the time. Film and video people are very used to syncing all the cameras to timecode, but in theater, when we run a sequence that happens in time at the same time every time, either sometimes the orchestra will play along to a click track Or sometimes it's a movie where the audio originates from the sound console, but the video is coming from the video console. In order to sync all that up, the audio department will generate a timecode file, and that's just an audio file that's playing sort of audio data, and the computer is interpreted, and it locks all the computers together. So we play all the audio at the same time and all the video at the same time, and everything runs in mostly perfect harmony.
