WoE!? - Finished!

What On Earth!? premiered last week at the Rep Theatre in Dundee. Here’s a little edit of some of the footage I took at the dress rehearsals…

The video below, Joan Clevillé performing Duck’s Dream during the dress rehearsals, is my favourite part of the show I think, and probably the most successful bit of collaboration between dance, choreography and animation in the project. Both Joan and Solène Weinachter (who performs the same part in the other cast of the show) really bring the piece to life and I love the way they seamlessly react to what’s going on behind them - it’s better than I could have hoped for thanks to them, and of course Sally Owen who choreographed this section. Thanks guys!

Needless to say, there were one or two technical issues to sort out during the technical rehearsals, but I guess that’s what these things are for :) The biggest (and scariest the first time I saw it) was that the projector seemed to want to horizontally stretch all of my animations. This was probably caused by the wide angle lense being used and the fact that the projector didn’t seem to support the resolution I had rendered everything in. Not to worry though, I ended up simply squashing everything in Final Cut before rendering it out again so when it was stretched by the projector this time it just looked as it should do - not an ideal solution, but it was all I had time to do unfortunately.

Another slightly trickier problem to figure out was some quite ugly looking areas of the projection that appeared as glaring white spots in certain areas of some of the animations. It turned out that these were ‘hot spots’ on the screen, where the projector bounces any particularly bright parts of the image back off the white of the screen at the viewer. We tried to fix it by playing about with the colour and brightness options (as well as pretty much every other setting, out of desperation) on the projector, but I ended up having to adjust some of the brighter layers in one of the original animations (the clouds in Duck’s Dream) and re-render the whole thing. Apparently this is a common problem though that could also have been solved by hanging some white gauze in front of the screen to diffuse the light slightly. You live and learn :)

Those were the only major problems though, the rest of the setting up process was (for me anyway) pretty relaxed. The lighting designer, Emma Jones, did a great job of lighting the whole show in just a couple of days (so many cues!) and she was really sympathetic to the animations and made sure they all worked as well as they possibly could with all that light bouncing about. Thanks Emma!

The show as a whole went down really well with the kids, lots of random laughs and giggles at bits of the show that didn’t seem that funny to us usually, but that’s all good :) There are of course parts of it that I would do differently if I’d had more time to work on them, mainly to add more detail to certain bits such as the end of the Shadery section where you hear the sound of the trees being chopped down - it would’ve been nice to play around a bit more with that transition, as well as a few others, but it’s always the case that there’s stuff you’d like to change I think. Sally and Janet did an amazing job of pulling the whole piece together during the couple of days they had in the theatre leading up to the first performance. It was really interesting to see them refine all the transitions and connections between scenes and I was quite surprised at how much of a difference these seemingly subtle changes made to the piece as a whole. I think they plan to keep refining and editing it before the show hopefully goes on tour later in the year…

It’s always a bit sad when a great project like this comes to an end, but it’s been such a pleasure to work with everyone at the Scottish Dance Theatre - huge thanks to everyone there, especially Sally and Janet for being such generous collaborators, and of course all of the amazingly talented dancers who brought the show to life with such energy.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my ramblings about the whole thing too. I’ll shut up about it now :D