Pandoras Box pulls the strings on The Wider Earth
- Details
Christie provided the Pandoras Box Players, Pandoras Box Manager and Widget Designer software to control animated projection content for the 11m screen, which provides a vibrant and detailed backdrop for the actors and puppets on a revolving stage.
The Wider Earth blends the traditional storytelling medium of puppetry with creative sound, lighting and video elements in an impressive spectacle at the 357-seat venue located in the museum’s Jerwood Gallery. The screen depicts many of the exotic locations that Darwin explored, further immersing the audience in the action told by seven characters and 30 wooden puppets.
The backdrop is a three-way projector blend mapped to a curved canvas screen stretching over 10m wide and 2.5m high. Each projector relays its native resolution of 1920 x 1200, creating a 5000 x 1200-pixel canvas. Pandoras Box manages the warp and blend, as well as controlling the internal shutters of the projectors via Art-Net.
“The projection provides a powerful representation of the places that Darwin travelled to on the voyage, and it allows us to deliver the landscapes in a visually compelling way,” says Nicholas Paine, executive producer, Dead Puppet Society. “Pandoras Box combines with other elements - sound, lighting and of course the performers and puppets - to help create visual theatre.”
“The use of the timeline triggering through Widget Designer and a local preview of all three screens made it quick and easy to allow Lx (Lighting) to plot to a scene while vision worked a few scenes ahead,” says Sam Maher, technical manager, Dead Puppet Society.
“There are two extremely useful features in Pandoras Box that I wouldn’t want to go without again. One is the use of mapping the players from the Manager’s preview window via a simple and quick method. The other is the ability to send Art-Net straight from the timeline via a custom DMX profile. This has allowed us to perfectly time align the internal shutters of a projector to be frame accurate to the content every time.”
“It’s fantastic to be able to support this unique production, which is taking place in such an appropriate location of the Natural History Museum,” says Mike Steinbrecher, global technical sales manager, Christie. “Dead Puppet Society is committed to communicating compelling narratives in creative ways via its own medium of visual theatre. It’s productions like this that are the reason why Pandoras Box was created.”
(Jim Evans)
