Coacoochee's Story

BUILDING THE EDIT

The immersive theater experience was designed so that the video screens would be seamlessly nested into the scenery of the stage. That is, the show is not just a video on a screen: it is the entire theater.

As a result, I could not edit the show in the typical way, with a timeline with a video track and two audio tracks. I needed to recreate the theater, virtually, inside the computer, so that I could place the imagery inside the environment.

In the past, it used to take several different pieces of software to create a virtual stage. Now, however, I was able to do the entire show, start to finish, from editing to final composite, in the Avid DS. BPI invested in the DS a few years ago and I have become a huge fan of the system, and node-based editing and compositing in general.

Below, some of the nodes in the "Coacoochee's Story" project inside Avid DS. Click image for the full view.

The Set Designer gave me stills of all of the dioramas as well as the entire theater set. I fed these into a 3D DVE node in the DS. Inside the DVE, I could position the stills and a layer for video to form a rudimentary 3D object that I could then rotate and spin when necessary.

3D DVE and editing inside Avid DS

I have done this kind of thing before, but this theater had a new component to deal with -- three motorized turntables. Two of the tables were bookends to the stage, and each held a vertical screen and two dioramas. The third turntable sat off-center, stage left, and contained three dioramas: Coacoochee in chains on the ship that was to take him from Florida; Coacoochee in his prison cell; and a Seminole warrior with a rifle hidden among some trees.


There were moments in the show when Bob wanted the audience to actually see the turntables move. For example, the first time that Coacoochee and Sprague each appear on screen, he wanted them to fade up just as the turntable settles into its position.

To correctly achieve this, I needed to find out the speed of the real, physical turntables, so that I would know how much time I had to play with to properly time my fade.

Unfortunately, the compacted production schedule meant that I was never able to get a decent answer to that question. That meant that the guys who actually did the programming on-site ended up trying to get the real turntables to match the moves I had created with my virtual turntables months earlier. I had figured that these turntables wouldn't be pivoting around like giant tops and then be able to stop on a dime, and luckily, my guesses proved accurate.

The next step was to hang the virtual scrims. For the uninitiated, theatrical scrim is a material that, when lit from the front, allows whatever is painted on it to be seen, but when lit from behind, you can see through the scrim to whatever is in back of it -- in this case the video screens and/or the dioramas.

The dioramas were created by the fine artisans at Jonathan Bean Design in Yorkshire, UK. Click image for larger.


I was also provided a graphic of the painting that was to be reproduced on the scrim, which I used as the top layer in my stage composite. By varying its transparency, I could achieve the illusion of lighting changes for the purposes of the edit.

Finally, I placed the two horizontal screens: an 8x5 foot LCD mounted near the top of the stage, and a larger projection screen mounted below and off-center stage right.

I finally had my virtual stage. Four screens in their proper positions, two of them rotated 90 degrees, all as 3D objects that I could control in nearly any way that I wanted. Now I could actually start editing the show!