Psycho Killer: Projection For American Psycho

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

It’s a hard season to open a new musical, but one is making some waves by tapping into our nostalgia for the cocaine-soaked, money-driven days of Wall Street in the 1980s. American Psycho comes to Broadway at the Schoenfeld Theatre and reminds us that the excess of Manhattan in the 1980s is both very close and very, very far away.

With an evocative and transformational set design by Es Devlin and direction by Rupert Gold, the Broadway production brings together the lighting, video, and sound designers Justin Townsend, Finn Ross, and Dan Moses Schreier, respectively. Devlin’s set is, essentially, a white cube on stage, which seems to conjure the pristine, superficial world of protagonist Patrick Bateman, but it also forms a palette on which her collaborators can paint the disintegration of that veneer. Read about the lighting design.

Projecting Issues

Video designer Ross is not new to Broadway; his Olivier- and Tony-winning work was seen in A Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time, one of the most highly recognized projection designs in recent years. The American Psycho collaboration with Devlin is a continuation of their work together, which has also included the West End production of Chimerica. Ross explains that the Broadway production is a big step forward, design-wise, from the “off-West End” premiere at the Almeida in London. “We have a lot more lighting now, a lot more automation, a lot more speakers, a lot more video than we had before,” he says. “There is a whole new piece of scenery that we did not have in London that is so big that it takes five projectors to cover it from all sorts of crazy angles. The Almeida, where we made it in London, is a small 300-seat theatre, so very different from the Schoenfeld.”

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

While the video takes center stage at times, the design for this new production comes out of a fruitful collaboration with the greater design team. The large presence of video wasn’t originally conceived of in the process, but later on, Ross says, “there was a collective realization that a lot more video was going to be needed to help bring out the show’s edge and attitude. At that point, it quadrupled our rate of production and budget.”

This was exciting and also, of course, intense for Ross and his team. The white cube functions as a projection surface for large sequences in the show, so Ross’ and Devlin’s teams worked closely. “We had to make sure what was being built could be projected on,” Ross say. “There was one piece of scenery that was exceptionally hard to hit with video, so Zach Peletz, our programmer and d3 Technologies system designer, made good use of all the new projection features in the d3 r12 software to work out how to achieve our shots.”

Killer Video

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Aesthetically, Ross explains that “to make strong video and lighting looks inside a white box takes a great deal of collaboration and conversation.” The white box presents a number of challenges for all of the designers. “It is the inside of a white box with very little room other than the open side to get lighting in,” says Ross. “So wanting a big video look and lighting look at the same time is a difficult thing to achieve, since every moment in a show with over 1,000 lighting cues needs a lot of balancing.” Projectors are all from Panasonic—five PT-DZ8700s, four PT-DZ13KUs, and a PT-DZ21KU, and the projection kit also includes an Avitech Titan Multiviewer, an Adderview CATx KVM switcher, and a Gefen 32x32 Modular Matrix router.

The programming was obviously complicated. Peletz used MIDI show control, MIDI timecode, Art-Net, and OSC for external control of the timeline and certain layer properties and, as Ross explains, “lots of new d3 labs tricks, like distorting one layer based on another.” The team also used the d3 Distort Module to use displacement maps. Projection also makes use of an ETC Eos Programming Wing. Sound Associates supplied the video and projection gear.

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

As if that wasn’t enough, Ross and Peletz were also dealing with automation tracking. The scenic design involves two different automation systems, from both PRG and Hudson Scenic, and, as Ross describes, they use the d3 system to “deal with a lot of automation data to move screens around and then faking a lot of other screens, taking in timecode and MIDI show control.” Ross and LD Townsend had to work very closely together because they share an ETC Eos control system to trigger both lighting and video cues. Sound designer Schreier was also part of this mix. As he explains, the three departments had to work together “because the sound department became the hub for sending MIDI timecode for syncing elements between all departments via sound’s QLab computer. And in turn, QLab is being triggered by Ableton Live to coordinate all events with the music.” Peletz elaborates, “We are pulling audio into the d3 servers and doing frequency analysis to have the video be audio reactive to the beat during certain moments of the show.”

In a musical, the nuance of timing can be everything, so they “worked very closely with the musical supervisor to make sure we are all using the latest versions of time codes etcetera so we keep everything on the beat.” Luckily, Ross says that some of the problem-solving was “not always fast, but always fun.”

Read about the lighting design, and stay tuned for the psychoanalysis of the sound design of American Psycho.

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