Water for Elephants, which originated at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in summer 2023, and opened on Broadway on March 21, 2024 has earned an amazing seven Tony Award nominations: Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Director of a Musical, and Best Choreography. In addition, scenic designer Takeshi Kata, costume designer David Israel Reynoso, and lighting designer Bradley King were also nominated in their respective categories. How then is projection designer David Bengali also nominated for his work on this new musical inspired by the eponymous novel by Sara Gruen, when projection design is not a category? Therein lies a tale of the Tony Awards decision to not yet add a new category for projection/video design, but to co-nominate those designers in the scenic or lighting category: part of a much larger discussion to be sure.
Co-nominated with Bradley King for Best Lighting Design of a Musical, Bengali chats with Live Design about his work on the show, from research to content creation and playback systems.
Live Design: What was the artistic intent for the projections in Water For Elephants?
David Bengali: Water for Elephants is a very interesting project. It makes significant use of projection, but we don't want it to feel like a tech-driven show. Our director Jess Stone has often spoken about our goal to create an experience that feels analogue, that celebrates the human and the hand-made.
LD: How do the projections/video help inform the storytelling?
DB: The show takes the form of a memory. It is a story being told by an older character about a part of his life during the Great Depression — a time when he, and the circus community he joined, were all trying to figure out where they fit in to the world, sometimes struggling through personal trauma, sometimes celebrating life, love, and friendship, all while traveling across a big country they can't help but view as a source of hope and possibility. Sometimes in our production, we manifest memories using silhouettes and shadows of people and events from the past. This is a great opportunity for our department to collaborate with lighting designer Bradley King as we blend the use of shadows created by projections (made out of filmed and animated content) with shadows created by stage lighting. Hopefully the audience doesn't always know which is which! For outdoor scenes, we use projection design to create a sense of time, place, light, and travel, through a series of shifting, handcrafted skies. The design of each projected sky is carefully honed to support the emotional content of the scene and to subtly reflect the internal state of the characters, their hopes, dreams, and fears.
LD: What kind of research did you do?
DB: I was inspired on the one hand by matte-painting skies like the ones seen in great epic films of the 1930s and 40s, and on the other hand by paintings by artists of the Hudson River School. My research included some deep dives into those bodies of art. And of course, regularly looking up at the sky above!
LD: Please comment on the content creation from the visual images to software used...
DB: We built custom skyscapes by compositing together many photographic and video source elements and then manually relighting and painting into them in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. Because these scenes often take place on a moving train, we had to create artwork that was much wider than the stage so that we could then put it in motion for minutes at a time. For some of the shadow projection moments, we created silhouettes by hand, but for others we filmed performers and puppets in a large green screen studio and edited this content to seamlessly merge with live performance and shadows cast by stage lighting.
LD: What is the playback/display system — any challenges therein?
DB: We use disguise media servers to drive a pair of Barco UDX-4K40 projectors and a ROE CB5 LED wall. The content in this show, including many subtle gradations of color and soft edged shadows, is challenging for LED. We used NotchLC encoding, a 10-bit workflow in playback, and made use of detailed color adjustments in the Brompton processor along with live brightness adjustment over artnet to achieve the artistic and visual goals of the design. In order to keep up with the speed of tech, sometimes we pushed disguise to use it in ways that were more like an editing program, layering and masking many elements together and working with detailed color correction. We also used NDI to send our After Effects canvases directly to the stage to live-edit content which we then rendered for programming and playback. For a fun additional detail: I also worked with our choreographers Shana Carroll and Jesse Robb to create a secondary video system to help the performers all sway in sync with each other and the motion of the train. This animated visual cueing system system allows us to customize and adjust dynamically the speed and rhythm of a moving bar on a set of screens, for the actors to follow as the train motion shifts throughout a song. It's like a conductor monitor, but for train passengers.
LD: How closely did you collaborate with the other designers on the integration of the lighting, sets, and projection?
DB: The design process on this show has been incredibly collaborative. It has been really wonderful working with director Jess Stone and scenic designer Tak Kata and lighting designer Bradley King so closely throughout the entire process as the projection design took shape. Bradley and I were in constant communication to coordinate time of day, brightness, color, direction, and motion between lighting and projection to establish together the changing locations, times, and moods of every moment, including moving train scenes. We also shared the visual vocabulary of shadows across both departments, blending approaches between the tools we each had at our disposal to build the world of memory in the show. Jess, Tak, and I also worked closely together from the beginning of the process both on storyboarding through the concept and intention of each scene and on the physical material choices and techniques that would allow us to blend projection into the environment in a way that could feel analogue and unified with the circus.
LD: On the subject of the Tonys, congratulations on the nomination. Do you wish that projection was its own category?
DB: Thanks so much! I'm thrilled that the collaborative design work on this show has been recognized. About categories, that is a really good question. I think on a show like Water for Elephants, it makes a lot of sense to consider multiple elements, like lighting and projection, as part of a unified design. It is hard to draw a line between design areas on this show, and I think that is part of what makes it a really special experience for the audience. Overall, I do wish that projection had its own category in the Tonys as it increasingly does in many other arenas. It is a full department with an integral presence in an ever-increasing share of productions, and the number of projection designs nominated in combination with now three other design areas this year is a strong indication that it would be appropriate to consider projection as its own category.