The Experiential: It’s All Going To Go Wrong

It’s not in my nature to be negative. I don’t deal well with impossibilities. When a client or collaborator approaches me with something that seems technically impossible according to common convention or even common sense, that’s when I get excited. The people I work most with seem to gravitate toward these challenges. Let’s try out the impossible.

Now under those circumstances, you have to decide that everything is going to go wrong and prepare for it. It’s not irresponsible to try something that’s never been done, as long as you take the production apart at a granular level and put each piece of technology and design through a litmus test of “How could this fail? What will I do if this fails? Is there a way that exists to ensure this doesn’t fail?” Now this may seem self-evident for the complex shows…the advanced productions…the ones that are science projects. 

Here’s the secret sauce: It’s got to be this way on every production you are part of. Big and small.

It is irresponsible to not seek failure. 

Seek it with an unrelenting magnifying glass. Even in the simple situations.

When I design a system specification, I consider carefully every point where failure can occur. This means I try to eliminate every place a connection needs to happen. The best approach to distributing signal is to hew as closely as possible to output device>signal carrier>display device.

However, I need to violate that rule to plan for other kinds of failure. Maybe the media servers show up with output holes that aren’t spec’d or the other end of the chain needs an unexpected format. So prudence dictates that I stick a flexible box in that signal path to deal with the unexpected.  For me, that’s a Barco ImagePro-II.

This is a ‘plank’ in a plan for failures of devices, or of reasoning/communication on the part of distributed vendors and personnel. 

I try to make these evaluations and put in place proactive solutions in every category and layer of a system plan. When I am not directly responsible for this execution, yet I am responsible for overall success, then I ask the people I am working with if they are performing these judgements and taking measures.

On the art side? I hedge bets. For example, I find my clients and collaborators are often surprised by sets, content, or lighting systems when they are experienced at scale. The shade of blue or the texture they approved in the production process (inevitably viewed at no more than 4k, if that) looks very different at 50'x80'. I try to never find myself without skilled people and the equipment assets onsite I may need to make changes to scenic content right up to the moment the gig starts. 

Or that decision to block entrances of performers through the house? Or placing an aerial puppet over the audience down center? Or have big projection wings that extend all the way over the seats in the arena? Gathering information is my friend now…Does the downstage have entrance stairs? Have the producers cleared a kinetic aerial object over the heads of the audience with the production rigger and maybe a structural engineer? Are there rigging points for those wings, and how do you plan to get the truss up and out over the dashers? There are generally excellent answers to these questions, but if the questions go unasked, then you get to participate in that very tense moment when hours are short and solutions become reactions.

My partner Colleen likes to quip that everything always changes at the gig, and she’s right. It’s a version of the military anecdote that no good plan survives contact with the enemy.

I learned this from repeated episodes early in my career of either not thinking about every step and detail of something, or worse yet, seeing it coming and saying, “It’ll work out.” The moment you utter something like that, it is almost definitely going to bite you later.

So now I avoid complaisance. I relentlessly seek failure, and when I find it, I either proof against it, or make sure everybody knows it’s there lurking. I have built it into a habit. I recommend it.

Bob Bonniol is a director, production designer, and contributing editor to Live Design. He is known for his implementation of extensive media and interactive features in his productions.