Ghost Tech Writers in the Sky
Hey, I got asked to ghostwrite a short discussion of live performance software for one of the deans here…it’ll be delivered to a semi-tech-literate audience with no visual aids. (They’re theater people…which in my experience means they’re comfortable with computers in familiar theatrical roles–”the light board” and “the sound board”–but get skittish around video gear, aka “The Technology.”) Has anybody got some ideas for improving this writeup….?
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Over the past twenty years, computers that record and play back video have become commonplace tools in the arts. Only in the past few years, however, have they seriously begun to infiltrate the world of live performance. The problem wasn’t that earlier machines particularly lacked for power and speed, but that they didn’t work reliably, as theatrical equipment must. An occasional breakdown is an acceptable price to pay when creating a pre-recorded video piece with an exciting new technology, but a similar risk is too great to take in theater. Thankfully, though, the situation has improved significantly, and plenty of new live performance software has sprung up to take advantage of it.
These programs may each take different approaches, but they all start with the same idea. Once you’ve created a series of video clips than you want to use as cues in a performance, you use the software to design the way they’ll be played back and controlled. Isadora, by Mark Coniglio, isn’t the most powerful of the lot, but it’s probably the easiest to learn and use, and also one of the cheapest. Maybe the most attractive thing about Isadora is that it’s designed with theatrical performance in mind, which distinguishes it from more general-purpose live-video-processing software. This restricts it in some ways, but it also results in a program that’s streamlined and oriented towards a single goal. For example, when you load in your video clips, they arrive in a “cue sheet,” and you can break them down into “scenes,” anticipating the way you’ll need to organize your material for a show.
Isadora’s basic design concept is similar to that of Cycling 74’s Max software series, which may already be familiar to theatrical sound and video designers. You create your desired setup by choosing objects from a list, and then draw lines that link them together to perform various functions. For example, to make a simple series of video cues, you’d draw lines between the “video player” object, a “counter” object that counts up from zero, and a “keyboard” object that will recognize when the space bar is pressed. The resulting setup will play the next video cue each time the operator hits the space bar–a basic theatrical need. More complicated Isadora setups can be created to manage fades, dissolves, and special effects, all triggered by the operator with the keyboard or mouse. If you want, you can also add elements that are not directly controlled by the operator, responding automatically to MIDI messages from another computer, or to live video and sound from the stage.
This last feature has particularly interesting implications; it allows the performer onstage to take control over sound and video playback, using only their own bodies. By linking a few objects together, you can make a video camera “watch” for movement above a certain threshold and trigger a sound in response, or you can make a microphone “listen” for sound above a certain volume and play a video in response. And because you can connect one object to any other object as you like, you can come up with simple, elegant tricks that work very well in a theatrical setting. For instance, in a 2002 CalArts performance, artist Carole Kim hid a microphone in a wooden cutting board, leading to an Isadora computer that would speed up a video clip whenever it picked up a very loud sound. As she chopped apples on the cutting board, the video drove rhythmically forward in time with each impact. In another example, a 2004 performance by Nick Fox-Gieg and Sean Clute pointed a camera at a blank pad of drawing paper, and had Isadora “key” video into the dark marks left by an ordinary black marker (the same process that puts an animated map behind a TV weather reporter). Onstage, a slight touch with the pen would create a large, fiery red streak on the projection screen.
It’s important to keep in mind that a computer running Isadora is significantly more expensive, more complicated, and more difficult to operate than an ordinary DVD player. But wherever the demands of theatrical video design are greater than simple playback, it can be an invaluable tool.