Broadway projection designer Daniel Brodie went from child actor in Phoenix to designing for Godspell, Jekyll & Hyde, and Motown the Musical. He got into projection design after a guest lecture sparked his interest, and now he's the last major designer hired on shows, which creates conflicts with lighting and sound over set colors. Only a handful of schools teach projection design formally.
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What do you get when you have a Broadway professional and a camera crew? Long story short, you get a lot of cool info when you get Showbiz U Luminaries. This week we talked to Broadway projection designer Daniel Brody. He designed Broadway's Godspell, Jekyll and Hyde, and Motown the Musical. Daniel also designed projections for the Bonnaroo Music Festival and Kanye West.
Where did the bug land that said, you know, this is something I might want to do?
When did that moment happen? Well, I started as an actor as a kid. I did children's theater from maybe age 10 all the way through high school, and I went to a performing arts high school, Arizona School for the Arts in downtown Phoenix. I did that into my first or second year of college when I discovered I wasn't tall, so I stopped getting cast. And I mean, there may be other reasons I sort of attributed it to that, but it helps. To be tall. And so I decided I would be a director. The last year, the fall semester of my last year at school, Jake Pinholster, a media designer, came and taught a guest lecture, which was sort of an audition lecture in media design, and everything sort of clicked in my brain. I didn't even really know that projection and video design was a thing. I did some media here at the school. I was always precocious with Photoshop and with Final Cut and just technology and always felt that directing is very pen and paper, very hands-on. There's little or no technology involved, and I always felt like I was sort of ignoring a calling. You know, I was lucky to have a natural sort of affinity towards computers and technology. When Jake came and taught his lecture, like I said, it all kind of clicked in my brain. I was like, oh, that's a thing. Like, there's a— it's a discipline and it's just like lighting design or sound design. It's a— there's a process and it's a, you know, a part of the production the same way. And he offered me a position of assisting him on the next show that he was designing. He had a few shows left that he was designing out in New York. And the following year I moved to New York and assisted him on a show and, you know, he had a new job teaching so he was done being a designer really. He did a few more shows but, you know, I sort of was on my own and assisted here and there and kind of picked things up and, you know, the rest, as they say, is history. I just kept doing it and kind of the pieces fell together.
You work in a lot of different disciplines. You've got Broadway, you talked about tours and other types of shows. I'm going to venture a guess here. For Broadway, you're probably not the first the first person hired?
No, almost definitely not. Usually in my experience, I'm the last designer of the 5 major designers. Usually projections is the last. In my 3, kind of 4 Broadway shows, the projection was the last person on every time. Even in the case of like Jekyll and Hyde, I came to that— Jekyll and Hyde where the projection is a core concept, They reimagined the sort of famous confrontation scene. Instead of the same actor playing both Jekyll and Hyde and doing a physical transformation, in our version they did one actor on stage with a digital projection of the other version of him on stage. And even in that show where projection is a core concept, I was the last designer on board. And I feel like the best projection design scenarios are when they're conceived of early enough to get input from the projection designer. Like a lighting designer always wants everything black so you can isolate it. Projection designer wants everything white or gray, really, you know, light gray would be perfect because then you can put something on it. But a white or gray set with lighting just makes everything bounce around, so there's like a conflict there. You know, like, it's really convenient for a lighting designer to carve out space, to have a big empty black space and carve it out with lights. You can make different areas. But a black set is very difficult for a projection designer. It's, you know, you need— everything has to be brighter, which just makes the sound designer mad because we can make it brighter, we have to make it louder. You know, so there's— it works best when you get everyone in the same room and collaborating at the same time.
Now you've gone from your mentor who gave you your experience, to now you are mentoring other people and you have assistants. What do you look for if somebody emails you and said, "I have to do this"?
You know, the best possible scenario would be someone who is like, "Hey, I've been someone else's assistant 20 times and I have all this watch-out or media server programming experience and I'm an expert at After Effects and for some reason I'm just not competing with you." I mean, that would be the best, but that never happens because all of the people in general that I would want to be assistants are out making their own careers that are very soon to be doing way better than I am, which I was sort of lucky enough to, I kind of went through the same process with my mentors and that happens is that right now at this moment in history, there aren't enough projection designers really. There aren't enough education programs. There are only a few. There's Wendell's program at Yale. There's Peter Flaherty's program at CalArts. There's Jake Pinholster's program at Arizona State. And there's a few other things. There's a thing at Long Island University, but in general there aren't a ton of media design programs. There's only a handful, and so you, you just don't have a lot of graduates. There's kind of two kinds of assistants I'm looking for. There are design associate collaborators where it doesn't really matter their technological skill. It matters their conceptual design sense. And we can work on the After Effects and Photoshop of it all later. But if we can talk about the way to represent loneliness in this scene is the image of a rose, and here's why, that's a thing. That's a real thing that we can talk about. And we can represent an idea with an image. That's great. You know, and that's a super important skill. The other thing I'm often looking for is just brute force software and hardware skills, networking and, and After Effects, Photoshop, all of the stuff, all of those sort of hard skilled labor stuff, understanding file formats and codecs and having the computer skills where I can sit someone in front of a computer program they've never seen before and I know they're gonna take it apart and figure it out in a couple of days or weeks because the skills translate. And there are plenty of both of those kind of people, and often they're the same person. When you find someone who can do both, that's the best. But someone who's strong in either, I would gladly, gladly take that.
