When I say nightmare I may be being a little harsh but this work week just before Xmas has been and will be bloody difficult! Lets rewind almost 3 years to January 2009 where I became involved with the video mapping, hardware and software on a big pink bus called Priscilla which was abut to make her journey to London’s West End. This was the beginning of my involvement with Priscilla Queen of the Desert London and it started in a freezing cold aircraft hangar in the depths of Yorkshire.
I was quite late onboard and was set with the mammoth task of planning the custom led layout and pixel-mapping this puppy. We spent a couple of weeks int he hangar with may people working on the bus Automation, scenic, LX and myself and a team doing Video/LED. I can safely say that this was one of, the most taxing, and intense jobs to date, 2 weeks had flown over and the bus was disassembled into its component parts ready to be shipped to London. The reason for taking apart what we had mostly put together was because the dock doors to the Palace Theatre we too narrow to fit the bus through and access in the centre of the West-End in London is tricky to say the least.
I wasn’t around for the load in but got a massive shock when I arrived at the theatre to see the bus, which looked much larger than it did in the hangar, onstage, with the frame fully assembled. How this thing managed to squeeze in through the relatively narrow dock door in I still cant comprehend! The following month was spent as part of the team putting together Priscilla my role as mentioned earlier was to look after video, the entire bus was to be pixel mapped which involved flashing the firmware on over 50 Artnet Driverboards, (Custom made by Stage One), and the use of around 400 universes of Artnet (2 sets of 200 on separate networks). I was responsible for programming and creating the media Server which runs the video on the bus.
THE MEDIA SERVER
The video content ran on the bus, created by Jamie Clennet is stored on 2 PC’s located at the rear of the bus, each PC takes the video source, samples the correct points of the video and route’s the colour information directly to the correct pixel, all in realtime. There is a secondary RGB mix layer allowing LX to mix the ‘Perfect Pink’, which there was much discussion over with the creative team. Also there are shutters which enables the LX operator to blank off any side of the bus to black which is used to black off the most upstage part of the bus away from the audience so as not to blaze light from the video-screen up-stage. All of these parameters are controlled over wireless DMX from Lighting and can all be changed in realtime. In essence, its 2 x V-Media servers pushing out 400 Universes of Artnet to 40,000 RGB pixels wrapped around a wirelesly controlled fully automated bus which can manoeuvre anywhere onstage, an Amazing piece of technology.
The whole process from getting into the theatre to pre-opening was massively labour intensive and hugely taxing, physically and mentally, another week and I may have broke. In the end we had a show, Priscilla had her quirks and kept everyone on their toes.
Fast forward to December 2011, almost 3 years later and Priscilla Queen of the Dessert the musical London is coming to a close. The show in London is closing, but Priscilla is being sent to Brazil to begin a new life! The challenge over the following weeks is to disassemble Priscilla in a fashion which she can be put back together again after being shipped to Brazil. This is no mean task and plans are been drawn up on how to achieve this. Im not taking Priscilla to Brazil, so I enlisted the services of my good friend and colleague Iain Walton who im passing on every detail I know about the bus in prep of the strip-down and rebuild in Brazil!
Iain looking very Russian after discovering how much is involved with this crazy bus, during our Recce on the bus to markup infrastructure ready for strip-out we may have found a blue fur covered box in which we proceeded to wear like a hat.
Shortly after this photograph Iain struck me down with a large fabric stuffed banana shouting, “why didn’t you tell me about all of this before i agreed to do this crazy move”