Winged Victory: Swan Lake Designs, Part Two

Photo by Costin Radu.

Director Nikolaj Hübbe called upon Mikki Kunttu, who had done lighting design for The Royal Danish Ballet a number of times previously, to design sets, lighting, and video for the Royal Danish Theatre production of Swan Lake at Copenhagen Opera House. With the creative team including choreographer Silja Schandorff and costume designer Mia Stensgaard, this is was what Kunttu calls “a dream team." Read about Kunttu's scenic design in Part One.

Kunttu says of his lighting design, “I still wanted to play with the traditional ways of lighting the stage, even though the tools are somewhat new. I consider elements of light, video, and sets as parts of the same thing, so at times, when you can’t necessarily tell one from another, it’s just perfect.”

Eight sidelight towers, “kind of a part of the stage sets,” says Kunttu, are fitted with 48 Harman Martin Professional MAC Viper Profiles and 16 Philips Vari-Lite VL1000 AS fixtures. “The towers were constructed for the production and play a major role,” the designer adds. “I wanted to have the fixtures exactly where I wanted them.” His backlight specials comprise 10 Harman Martin MAC III Profiles. The remaining rig is the opera house inventory, including Harman Martin MAC III Wash units, additional MAC III Profiles, Philips Vari-Lite VL3550s, ETC Revolutions, High End Systems Studio Color 575s, and LDDE SpectraConnecT5 LEDs. Fog is via MDG Atmosphere units. “No conventional lighting has been used, not a single unit,” Kunttu says, adding that he found the MAC Viper Profiles provided “very reliable and ‘clean’ light.” He also works in Vectorworks 2015.

Photo by Mikki Kunttu.

MA Lighting grandMA consoles run the show, and Kunttu preprogrammed for a month using MA 3D visualization software, with a Green Hippo Hippotizer for video. “I also used timecode, which enabled me to take advantage of ProTools memory locations and the fact that I could have a rehearsal video running in sync with the music all the time,” he says. “This proved again very worthy, as it makes things faster, and the preprogrammed timing more accurate. Now especially with DMX-controlled set movements, it was possible to animate everything needed in realtime on MA 3D.” The opera house supports MA-Net, and Kunttu has two simultaneous operators on grandMA consoles, with backup on an MA Lighting grandMA light, as well as MA onPC command wing stations.

The preprogramming sessions also enabled Kunttu to send recorded animations of set movements to the theatre in advance, which turned out to be more helpful than he could have imagined, since he had less than a full day to program lighting and video before rehearsals. “We needed to sort out everything technical about the sets first, then everything technical about the lights, before any real quality time could be dedicated for programming,” he says. “This meant it was all programmed while rehearsals were ongoing on stage. For me, the only way to make it work was to program everything but the set movements myself. On the other hand, you end up programming 9am to 11pm nonstop most days, which also means at least you are very much inside the production, and there is very little room for distractions.”

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Photo by Mikki Kunttu.

“If I look at the Swan Lake stage and forget about the technical definition of what is video and what is light and what are sets, I just see layers of visuals,” says Kunttu. “Then concentrating on the video, for example, the background for Act Two in the ballroom/castle, is built out of eight layers of video that integrate with how the sets are in the space. Lighting, on the other hand, lights through holes in the sets and also at times lets the background image be seen through the sets. This all creates one uniform look, not separate elements of light, sets, and video.”

Projection is done onto the set and onto a front-projection light gray sharkstooth scrim from Cronenberg and a rear-projection PVC film screen. “The scrim hangs against a blackout drop, and the drop flies out, revealing the stage bleed-through in the beginning of the show,” says Kunttu. The front and back projections are run by a Green Hippo Hippotizer v4 media server running v3 software with a full backup server. “The Hippo rack has a matrix that enables switching from active to backup if needed,” says Kunttu. In addition to projection, the production uses video via 32 Martin Professional 20mm VC-Strips for the second scene at the lake. The VC-Strips are run from a separate Green Hippo HippoCritter using a Harman Martin P3-100 System Controller.

Photo by Mikki Kunttu.

“Projection’s role is significant, though we’re not using a lot of material at all,” says Kunttu, who worked with David Nordström and Viktor Rundlöf of Green Wall Designs AB on screen content. “There is the opening sequence animation on the front gauze, and then the rest is traditional rear projection.” Kunttu created all the content from a single black-and-white 1,920x1,080 PNG file, “which is simply a cut out of the shape leg,” he says. “The animations and stills were then created using everything from Maxon Cinema 4D to Adobe After Effects to Photoshop. Materials and reflections were added as well as the animated movements. A big part of the creation is also using layers of content on the Hippo. That for me is the final mix, really.”

With all the layers on stage, Kunttu says, “It was pretty much impossible to imagine it all before seeing it. I found it was pretty awesome what a single source of light can create when piercing through 10 layers of moving sets.”

Pretty awesome, indeed.

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