Strange Sun Theater me to devise, oversee and execute a small festival of plays taking place online; Click, Fefu and Her Friends and Toys 101, a virtual reading and 2 workshop performances.
As Technical Director and Production Designer for all 3 pieces, I worked with directors and performers to optimize their home technology specifically for live streaming; spec'ing and sending Ethernet cables and adapters, and walking through best broadband settings for performances.
The most challenging/complex piece was the production of Fefu, helmed by director Nancy Rodriguez. Radical in its nature and breaking of conventional staging during the second act, we aimed to emulate the promenade staging through the use of zoom rooms. In each room a section of the virtual audience would see a different order of 4 scenes played before them. This meant deviating from a normal streaming setup and expanding the media system to each breakout room, initial system workflow pictured below
To achieve this, I built a small network and interface to send to the other operators on the show (Joss Green, and Lenora Gant) pictured below
This allowed the operators to control playback and volume in the breakout rooms independently of the larger system.
The larger system brought individual actor feeds from Skype into TouchDesinger, which allowed me to build a custom AB switcher with preset scene configurations. Mapped to keyboard strokes I could switch between performers and select groups of performers which would then be pushed to Millumin for scene effects and extra compositing.
For more information about the festival please visit: https://www.strangesuntheater.com/