With all the best intentions in the world I’ve been generally shite at keeping the posts and updates of this blog regular. So in an attempt the blog everything I’ve neglected to in the pat couple of weeks I thought I’d would write an uber long blogpost with all the details of whats been going on. Instead, beacuse its easier, and im a lazy bastard im going to pad this out with lots of photos!

So the last post finished of with me trying to stay up as late as possible before flying home from China in a vain attempt to rejig my body clock back to UK time!

The following day (same day, 2 hours after falling asleep) Dickie, Graeme and myself were in the car taking us back to Beijing airport, we slept most of the way but woke to see  a HUGE complex of tower-blocks being built along the motorway. Still currently under construction but it went on forever! Take a look at the picture photographed from the car, and have a guess at the numbers, i took a video and it took 3 minutes to get from one end of the set of tower-blocks to the other, you do the math!!!

We eventually got to Beijing airport, got a coffee, chatted for a while and then Graeme and myself headed to the checkin whilst Dicky was staying at the airport to meet his wife who was coming over for a week.
The flight home was awful, i can safely say it was the worst flying weather conditions I have experienced yet. The wind socks where horizontal on takeoff, it felt like the plane was fish tailing for about 20 minutes getting bounced side to side in our seats, I was genuinely fucking scared.When the plane stopped shaking i watched the new muppets movie on the inflight entertainment which was brilliant and the perfect distraction!

——-[Imagine there is a picture here with some relevant connection to the new Muppets movie,I think it’s 2012 but i have been known to be wrong with these things]——-

We eventually landed at Heathrow, only 1.30hours late which wasn’t bad at all, got to passport control, queue’d,  got through pasport control and went to bagage collection, waited, picked up our bags and went to leave and got stuck in the lifth for 15mins, baaaah, it was impossible to leave. Eventually we were free of Heathrow airport and headed into London. Me and Grame said bye at KingsCross and I headed up to Camden for drinkies and catchup with Meg’s. A great arrival home, and fun dragging a suitcase around Camden pubs on a Friday, yessss!

The following day i had to find a present for Jon;s birthday which loads of people were meeting at Jons for on sunday, Luckily, Lance the Sanity Panda was around and a suspect PVC Purple cat were on hand to help :-)!

Sunday was Jons, Birthday get together day, it was an ace day with lots of people coming and going and a great bunch around for the treasure hunt in the park! On the evening we all descended on the local pub for beer and food. Jo & Kat had baked the most awesome birthday cake in the shape and form of a projector, down tot he most intricate detail that it even had an HDMI input in the icing sugar backplate, IT WAS BRILLIANT!!!!!!

The following day, [Monday300512] I took a trip to see the chaps at 59Producitons new office in Hoxton, 1: to see people, 2: to talk about up coming work, and 3: because i wanted to see the new offices! Nice office space and good location, this notice in the loo in the corridoor amused me!

I arrived home that afternoon and packed my bags again for a week at Stage One starting the following day! I spent the next few days working on stuff for this big gig in the summer. In the meantime, a series of conversations had happened between me and Rich from the Philharmonia which resulted in me managing to book an IPAF 3a & 3b couse at stupidly short notice so i had my scissor-lift license for the beginning of the install of Universe Of Sound the following week. So this is what happened…….

Thursday, get conformation of the IPAF course for the Friday.
Drive home thursday night.

Friday: Do, IPAF course at NIS training, it was a good IPAF centre and a well taught course, get 30/30 on the theory and pass the practical! Yesss!! Below is a pic of Darren who I was doing the course with and Peter the instructor.

After the IPAF training I attempted to go to the GYM, but was raught on the way by a MASSIVE water leak in the road! I managed ot park the safe side and get to the gym to d a 7.5k row, I’ve neglected rowing for the past few weeks!

That night I went to James & Leslie’s and was treated to tea and a good catchup! :-), the following day i was back down StageOne to do ome stuff for this big gig in the summer!, Sat/Sun, back home sunday night and them time to have a bit of a life on Monday!!!!!!!

Monday was ace, loads got done, Mitch came around with his petrol strimmer and we tackled the Jungle/Garden, took a cabinet to the tipp which I’d been meaning to do for ages, put up a blind in the kitchen, tidied the spare room and set up my MA Command wing with the new touch-screens, measured up my drive for a rework, washed and laundered my clothes from the previous week, and managed to get to the pictures to see the Avengers Assembled with Mitch and James(Cheers for the suggestion Yvonne 🙂 )

Tuesday I was back at StageOne, again, more work, lots of soldering, cutting and planning. Si Bye, sent me this which is Ace!

I made more stuff the rest of the week, below is a picture of my new Apple which is a little different to the previous models…….

Finally, today [Thursday100512], it was a good day so Karl had the genius idea to have a cheese and wine night in the hotel lobby. Jo did his best to seduce Smithy to come and join us but in the end it was Jo, Karl, Musah and myself drinking wine and talking rubbish, what a brilliant night!

 

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while, and as usual, time appears to have escaped once again in the madness of work! So, ZENDEH!! Zendeh are a Northeast based theatre company lead by the brilliant Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh and her fine team, have a look around the Zendeh website for more info. I recently worked with Zendeh on their recent production Found which played Northern Stage & Berwick Maltings.  To give a brief explanation on what the piece is about here is an excerpt from the maltings website:

Take a walk in Anna’s turbulent imagination, where the modern world collides with memories of her Jewish grandmother in Paris during World War Two. FOUND explores the places and times when we find ourselves at our most vulnerable, and feel truly lost. It marks the journey of beginning to hear your own voice, finding the strength to listen to it, and move forwards.

Informed in part by the story of Abdol Hossien Sadari, an Iranian statesman and diplomat, who gave assistance to Jews in occupied France and saved many lives.

I was responsible for realising the digital projection aspect of the piece. In early January I had a meting with Nadia & Nazli to begin to get down some of the projection ideas and begin with a framework for the piece which turned into rather a nice hour long chat over coffee and fruit teas! After that I would be working remotely, as I was away in Berlin for 7 weeks working for59Productions. As I was away the Zendeh team were developing the piece and we were in communication via email & Skype (although not a particularly good internet connection at my end:-/).

Philippa Nazli & Nadia developing the piece in rehearsals at DanceCity

After finishing the daytime work on AlGran in Berlin on the evenings I had been getting basic framework from the ideas and began slowly bringing together different footage/media which could be edited down and used.

It was decided that we would map video onto various elements in the piece from several hanging orbs to the voile at the beginning of the piece. James managed to get me some measurements, photos and put together a great Sketchup so i could create a mask and begin to place the elects of video so they would line up with the real word orbs.

The above was one of the earlier setups before it was decided to cut some of the orbs used, but you get the general idea. We later, once orb numbers and positions were finalised did a LiveTrace* of the orbs in their position to get the most accurate mask. Well, when I said we, I really mean James kindly did the trace for me.

It might have been around this time I met Al Orange, over a very intermittent Skype meeting who was stage managing Found and now I can say is great fun to work with!
Also, Al did a FANTASTIC job of the soundtrack for the piece, good work on squeezing in that deep dark and dirty house track in there, t’was perfect!

It wasn’t until Late in february where things began to move pretty quickly, I was uploading content to Dropbox and we were exchanging emails and I was making changes, re-rendering and uploading. I can safely say it was a very productive week, doing technical rehearsals for AlGran during the day and then working on video content on the evening. Eventually I managed to turn all of the folders for the master project video files in the DropBox green which meant that was complete!

I finally got to meet up with the lovely Zendeh team at Northern Stage for the install of Found and put my input in with the projection setup. Louise Gregory had done a very complimentary design for the piece and didn’t seem to tire of my requests to “dim that lighting state, just a little” to help the projection punch through, (Cheers  ).

I finally saw the show on opening night at Northern Stage, it was strange because I had been involved in the process but had never seen the whole thing through, only fragments. The piece came in at under an hour but really didn’t feel that long, the story was sometimes hard to follow in some places but at the end left you with something like you didn’t fully need to understand everything but were left with the exact feeling it portrayed, definitely a WIN in my oppinion!

I haven’t had a proper chat with anyone on how the berwick shows ant but I expect everyone done a sterling job again!
It was great working with, Nazli, Steven, Nadia, Philippa, James, Al, Molly, Nichole, Phil & Louise top team, lots of work & great fun.

*LiveTrace
LiveTrace is what I call it anyway, other people pay call it other things but this makes sense to me! Basically, to create an accurate mask  so we only projected onto the things we draw directly onto the object via the projectors output.
Step 1: Is to set up the scene and the projector position, in this case it was the orbs and, a measured projector position from the orbs (height & Depth).
Step 2: Is to use some illustration package such as photoshop, hook your computer up to the projector as a second output.
Step 3: Make sure your resolutions mask, if you are going to be creating content at 1024×768 then the canvas must be fullscreen with no borders @ 1024×170 at 100% zoom.
Step 4: On a black background draw out or colour in the areas which you want to project onto, in this case it was several circles. This gives us a pixel accurate mask.
Step 5: Use this mask in an animation package or image manipulation suite to begin animating your video content which when played back fullscreen @ 100% will lineup perfectly if you get all of the real world elements in the correct place.

This is a very brief overview and i may do a full post on this method later, as always there are may other ways to do the same thing.