Dreaming Quick and Dirty

This month I have been busy working on CatKiller, a walkthrough theatre piece that takes place partially on film and partially in the real world. My work on this piece has mostly been looking at digital elements in the scenes and enhancing how interactive or visually interesting they can be. This has often meant having very short spans of time to go from initial idea to prototyping a piece of digital content. This is totally normal when working with live performers. Someone has an idea and a couple minutes later you are trying the idea on your feet. This is slightly trickier when your way of performing is by creating video content.

Example: we are building a scene for part of the walkthrough where the audience member is walking through a laboratory where the scientists are examining the behaviour of cats for scientific research. The set has computer screens on them that, when we arrived, had nothing being displayed on them. So we decided that there should be some content on these screens of the testing (not harmful or cruel testing, I want to be very clear about this.) Here's the catch: Catkiller is one part filmed and one part live, and in this particular scene the visual elements that will be live have to look the same as the elements on the video screen. So I get to work. For this whole project Isadora, Motion and the "Randomize" function have been my best friend. The reason randomize is so fantastic is that it creates movement and action in a piece that, if one had to decide themselves, would normally take hours. It also allows me to almost have two brains in that patterns arise (or don't arise) in ways that I would probably never come up with myself. In this case I was able to pull together something that looked great a matter of a few minutes using some quick content that I found on my hard drive or on the web.

Isadora running my sciency looking videos.

I find that the ability to be quick and flexible is invaluable when one's main medium through the computer, but working in a live form. It's also more exciting. The more I'm able to free myself from having to be on a track or have a turnaround time that requires me to be out of the space, the more effective I am and the closer I come to the idea of being a digital performer. The experience of Catkiller has really helped me flex the muscles of making quick choices that will effect the show moving forward, but make them in a way that looks great. I hope you can make it out to the show, running March 5-15th at Presentation House in North Vancouver. It's going to be really amazing. In all the show has 5 computers running content (not including the handheld device that you carry with you for most of the show) helping to create more than 20 immersive environments throughout the space. I've created a number of animations, some video elements and a few moments of technological magic that I think are really going to blow peoples minds. Once the show has opened I'll write a bit more about them. 

I'll end with a few more shots of pieces in process from the show. If you want to get tickets, follow this link 

Keep making magic.