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Live Design (2006) - Hitchcockian Style

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Abstract

For the video element, projection designer [Elaine J. McCarthy] created the moody, high-contrast content, looping and manipulating very short clips from The Birds and Psycho, licensed from the [Alfred Hitchcock] estate. The imagery flew around the audience during pre-show and on the runway during the show via two Christie LX100 projectors attached to two High End Systems Catalyst TM mirror heads and controlled by Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers. Three Hippotizers, in total, were used on the production, one for the main screen and one for the two moving projector heads, with a backup in line. All of the media servers were controlled by Art-Net via TCP/IP from the console. KVM network switches were also used in the Hippotizer rack. In addition, three Barco R12 projectors triple-converged to project onto the window set piece. Scharff Weisberg also provided cages and trussing to hang the Catalyst mirror heads. All content was prefabricated from the Hitchcock material for the show, with no live footage of the runway used. McCarthy prepared test edits and the final selection of clips with the support of the Scharff Weisberg Media Resource Center (MRC), the production company's post-production facility in midtown Manhattan, and loaded them into the Hippotizers on-site, where they were treated, layered, and tilted to fit the angled window frame. Some of the more complicated sequences were broken up into several clips to provide many different playback options. "This proved handy for building abstract looks and looping things over other images," says Cory FitzGerald, who programmed video for the show on an MA Lighting grandMA, which controlled all content via the Hippotizers. FitzGerald spent a day at MRC with Randy Briggs with the Hippotizer and console setup in order to start setting up a show disk and a generic disk that could be used on the show. "Randy loaded all the content on the Hippotizers onsite, and we stepped through it there, setting each specific clip up as a preset for playback," says FitzGerald, who was brought in by Scharff Weisberg because of his extensive experience with both media servers and the grandMA console. In addition to Randy Briggs at MRC, Lars Pederson also managed and operated the media technology.