It’s been quite a while since I’ve made a new entry here; however, after fielding quite a few questions since our show finished up about how we achieved the technical elements of the most recent production I managed, I figured now is as good a time as any to come out of “retirement” and do a technical breakdown on some of ‘The Addams Family’ Musical’s production elements.
The Why?
I’ve had a long history with The Addams Family Musical, a show I’ve been involved in five times across multiple clients and venues. It’s safe to say I’m highly experienced with the production’s themes.
For Varsity College’s latest run of the show, the Creative Team set out designing their sets, identifying early on that they were planning on having minimal physical scenic elements. This posed a new challenge for my team internally: Is there a way we can build out the ‘set’ cost-effectively and immersively that would directly benefit the overall story/production? The answer… YES!
The How!
When The Addams Family Musical first launched on Broadway in 2010, the original set and choreography (most notably the opening number) heavily relied on family portraits and photo frames as visual motifs; inspired by this, we further developed new thematic elements that would provide a “window” into each scene/location throughout the show. From there, 40 vintage frames were sourced, repaired, and painted before having their custom rigging hardware attached to each predetermined drop; these would later be hung from the pipe grid on either side of the proscenium arch at The Star Gold Coast’s Theatre.
Around a month out, our team started generating content for each scene using a temporary mask we originally generated from the rigging plot for each drop, allowing us to rough in any specific elements that needed to fall within particular frames.
The Gear
There are many ways to achieve projection mapping; in an ideal world, we’d be using a dedicated media server like Pixera. For this production, however, budget and efficiency were the highest priorities, allowing us to go back to basics and rely heavily on the preproduction of assets and the old faithful Qlab.
We had four Mac minis handling the show: two for projection media playback, one for SFX, and a fourth for network trigger redundancy out of the lighting console. The venue’s GrandMA3 Full Size console (running Mode2) handled all the initiating commands for the content via midi over RTP. Signal flow and routing were handled via an iConectivity mioXL unit, which ingested midi directly from the MA at FOH and sent over our showNET to the main control rack in the prompt side wing on stage.
Two Christie Roadster 20K Projectors produced the main images, which provided a bright and crisp picture from the dome room down to the stage.
Once we had all the scenic elements hung and projectors installed, we created our final mask that could be imported back into Adobe After Effects to readjust content as needed before accomplishing our final exports. Finished media files could then be dropped back into Qlab, replacing any previous temp files. From the moment the truck was unpacked to projecting the final images, it was a matter of hours, something we couldn’t have accomplished if we were working with media servers.
Doing it this way also meant we had fewer labour-intensive tasks running across our machines, with the transitions being the “most work” for our devices. All transitions were achieved by short five-second transparent videos that featured smoke that masked the previous scene whilst revealing the following looping media file. Doing it this way meant we only had to generate twelve different states (plus two extra overlays) that could be played in any order, allowing us to jump around without needing any real structure to the Qlab show file.
In addition to the LX Operator triggering each scene based on their lighting plot, we had our MD in the pit firing SFX from a Novation Launchpad, which at times fired a sound effect in tandem with a lighting state and a transparent video.
