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The field of projection design is changing so rapidly that it’s anybody’s guess just how much the technology will have advanced and how many sub-fields will have developed by now. Those in the know compare it to The Wild West. “That doesn’t mean it’s full of gunslingers, just that it’s so open at this point,” says projection designer Jordan Harrison who has assisted Lawrence Shea. “New technology comes out on a weekly basis that can be incorporated.” Read the beginnings of the discussion in Part One.
Andrew Bauer, projection editor for designer Peter Nigrini and others, started editing when his dad got a video camera in 1980, and he says he might have found himself in film had he not started hanging out with theatre people at UC Berkeley, where he started acting. In New York, he experienced the frustrations of breaking into the business and took a job in graphic design. He learned QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro, which reminded him of his early passion. He was doing film and TV work when he met Nigrini, who invited him to work on Biro, a show at the Public Theatre. He saw that the story about the tumultuous life of an immigrant, set in many locations, “could only be told in dynamic images.”
“You build in a context, and you have to keep that context in mind at every moment you’re working,” says Bauer, adding that the job isn’t finished when the movie is completed. “We don’t just show up at the theatre with a drive that we put in a playback machine. We come with editing equipment. When Peter sees it in the theatre, he can make specific adjustments.” For instance, if he wants to show moonlight and goes from sunset to clouds to clouds parting and moonlight, he doesn’t think of that as three files. “It may become 19 moments in a cue-to-cue,” he says. “It’s wonderful to be able to work on something and to have it change based on something real and concrete—an audience reaction, an actor’s timing—and be about how all the visual and sound elements come together in a particular room.”
For Here Lies Love, Bauer was in workshops with Nigrini for two years. “We wanted to make the room bounce,” he says. For Arthur Kopit’s Wings, Bauer helped Nigrini capture the perceptual changes in a stroke victim. “An aural and visual landscape happens around an actor sitting in stillness,” says Bauer. “What if you lose sensation in half your body, and you fall to the floor? What’s happening with color in the room? What’s happening inside a character’s mind?”
Projection designer, Dan Scully, who came to projection after training as a lighting designer at NYU, was an editor for Nigrini and others before he began designing. Now he brings in editors to help him on larger projects. He looks for two different skill sets when hiring an editor: technical facility and a strong aesthetic eye, just as a lighting designer might look for in a moving light programmer. He agrees with Nigrini that an editor is more than an assistant. “People who do wonderful editing for live performance don’t necessarily want to draw triangles on a piece of paper to figure out where to put the projector,” he says. “Editing is an art form. What’s great about the editors we work with is they want to be in the theatre, and they understand that the content they’re building has a relationship to living human beings performing for other living human beings. It’s not just about ‘how does it look’ but ‘how does it work on stage.’”
Scully notes that an editor drills down into details when he needs to keep an eye on the bigger picture as designer. “She can spend an afternoon working on a 10-second animation,” he says. “Video programming is the last step: taking the content, and mapping it onto the stage. When I did Rocky, we used 40 flatscreen monitors and a dozen projectors and were tracking moving scenery in realtime. That requires expert programming, but without an editor building content, there is nothing to play through all those devices.”
Production's Wild West
Scully doesn’t edit for other designers anymore, but when he did, he tried to work within the language of that designer. “You want to edit in their aesthetic,” he says. “When I built content for Peter Nigrini, he was really interested in nuance; we would drill down to get a specific detail right and let that inform the rest of the edit. When I worked for Darrel Maloney, the focus was rhythm, fluidity, and kinetic energy. Editing isn’t the same as designing, but the editor’s creativity and inventiveness are definitely reflected in the work.”
Shea doesn’t question the term “editor,” but he spends much of his time in Pittsburgh with students, focusing on experimental theatrical work and public projection installations, projects with longer development timelines, so it doesn’t make sense for him to hire someone solely to edit content.
He works in layers of imagery, assembling these with other designers during tech and making changes as needed. Any one cue can have many layers playing at the same time. His assistants do a variety of things, and sometimes, when a project has a lot of content that needs to be edited, and Shea wants to work on other things, an assistant will edit the layers. Is that assistant-editor a technician or an artist? “I don’t believe there is anything entirely technical in anything we do,” says Shea. “It’s all aesthetics. Even the technology you use to cue a show changes the feeling.”
Shea believes there is some debate about how to train projection designers and the function of roles. “Some people would prefer to do the visual design and not to do any technology, and some prefer to do technology,” he says, underlining that technical choices influence aesthetic outcome, and aesthetic needs affect technology.
With her students at Yale, Wendall K. Harrington emphasizes ideas. “If you understand the idea, the technology will follow,” she says. “That said, I try to be sure that my design students know how to build their own work, as initially they will have to, and know enough about how the technology works that no one can lie to them.”
Harrison, who has assisted Shea and now mainly designs his own projects, also doesn’t separate the art and craft. “When I’m not the creator behind it, I wouldn’t call myself a technician, but I am very detail-oriented,” he says. “Sometimes I can give a lot of input; sometimes it’s not necessary. Sometimes a designer will give free reign to assistants to implement changes; other times, it’s more controlled.”
Work varies with the project. Harrison does editing, file management, and programming. He edited portions of one show for Shea, created elements of another, sequenced pieces of another to make a movie. He’s built playback system using Dataton Watchout and structured cueing systems, too. For Angels In America, he did 3D lighting effects and manipulated footage shot in RGB+D DepthKit, while another assistant created looping psychedelic textures, and he was in tech the entire time with Shea.
Some projection artists work in ways that don’t require what others describe as an “editor,” while others use assistants or associates to do some editing along with other tasks. Some others are engaging a new breed of artists who enrich their work. With the field of projection design and its subfields continuing to develop in ways we can’t yet imagine, it’s hard to project what “editor” will mean next year.
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