Recent projects

I recently had the pleasure of doing projection design for Gustav Holst’s The Planets.  The Butler Symphony Orchestra had it scheduled for a while and the conductor, Richard Auldon Clark, and I sort of joked about doing “some projection”.  One thing led to another and whadda ya know- we did it.  I thought that projecting images of space and the actual planets would seem kind of contrived so I started to look around for footage that would portray the general feel of the piece a little better.  In my search I came across a couple of outstanding artists, Philip Bloom and Eric Schockmel, who were both kind enough to allow me to use some of their work (with proper credit in the program of course…..).  Their work is crazy good and a lot of it fit the Planets perfectly.

I’m a huge fan of the entire Qatsi trilogy and other visually stimulating films, so a lot of what I was doing was kind of leaning toward that.  The technical end:

My screen was 42′ x 18′ (roughly Cinemascope, or 2.35:1), a not-so-typical size.  My projectors are capable of 1024×768 as far as resolution, but that size doesn’t really fit C-scope. So I decided to keep the horizontal rez and adjust the vertical giving me a final size of 1024×440…not exactly hi-definition, but close enough.  All of my footage had to match that. I was using Isadora ( a piece of software I rave about often) for playback, since a lot of the cueing needed to be pretty precise, and this also presented an issue….framerate.  Some of the footage was 24p, some was 29.97, some was 30fps.  Izzy likes to see the Photo-JPEG codec so I needed to find a balance there….I ended up using Apple’s Compressor to render the clips 1024×440, P-JPEG, at 30fps, and that seemed to give me the smoothest playback.  I have a pretty beefy Macpro, but not beefy enough for what I needed….it’s all about balance.  Anyway, I was projecting roughly 120′ so I needed to find a balance between brightness and contrast as well.  Check out the following clip for an idea of scale.

All in all, the orchestra played wonderfully…it was attended by 1000 or so people, and we received a standing ovation at the end.  My hat is off to the Butler Symphony and Richard Clark…also to Philip Bloom and Eric Shockmel.  I hope to do some more stuff like this soon….but not too soon….I need to sleep.

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