All done over at The Goodman. It’s been a long six months and you could say I got my money’s worth. I worked on Shining City, Talking Pictures, The Trip to Bountiful, The Ballad of Emmett Till, Gas for Less, and Ain’t Misbehavin’. Six months ago I had zero theater experience. I didn’t know what a ‘cue’ was and I didn’t know that I didn’t know what a cue was. Thanks to Dave, Nick, Lilly, and Steph for showing me the ropes.

I took a lot of pictures and decided to include some of what I think to be the best.

Technical rehearsal for Ain’t Misbehavin’. Notice the purple stage. During tech there’s a lot of downtime for both cast and crew so it’s good to have something to work on. If I had to title this picture it would be “Laptop Parallax.” (June 2008)

Real world fire drill. This was during tech of The Trip To Bountiful. What’s not in this picture is of importance: hundreds of employees shivering on the sidewalk. (Feb 2008)

During tech of Ain’t Misbehavin’. I like this picture because everyone is doing something. This is during a rare period when the house lights are up, a good time for a picture. (June 2008)

From Matrix 3’s CueStation User Guide

The first step in creating a simple SpaceMap is to place a set of Speaker nodes in a configuration that represents the physical layout of the loudspeakers. This arrangement doesn’t necessarily need to be exactly to scale. After all, your physical system configuration may have to be designed for a room that doesn’t have the same proportions as the virtual space you are trying to simulate. How you accommodate to this situation will depend on too many particulars to provide any general rules. Try to keep in mind that you’ll always be striving for a compromise between physical space and perceptual space.

I love when user manuals reference serious dilemmas in a casual fashion.

Trying to make a space sound like a different space is an unusual task. Sound in theater is a good example of this issue. Suppose, for example, there is a living room scene depicted on stage. Let’s say there are three walls instead of the usual four, one taken away so the audience can see into the room and the ceiling is taken away as well for the view and lighting of the room.

In a few respects, the room is like any other room, however, it is also like no other room because it is placed on an enormous stage and is open for an even more enormous seating area. For a designer, this seems to pose a serious problem — the room looks like a room but does not behave like one. How do you treat the birds outside of that living room window?