Immersive Design Project

Earlier this year, I had the privilege to head a team charged with creating 3D rear projected backdrops for a live theater production of The Secret Garden.


The Secret Garden a Broadway in Boulder Production Directed by Angela Gaylor and David Ayers ® Parlando School of the Arts / Broadway in Boulder (video created by Noah Kloor)

The Secret Garden production began as part of a program to introduce collegiate acting students to the world of professional musical theater. The Directors' goal was to create a professional level production using costumes from the original Broadway production and a limited number of physical props. Because of the small performance space and the large number of sets, they used rear projection screens to display the story's numerous backgrounds.

Although projected backdrops are becoming popular in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles professional theater, the Directors and I wanted to take the medium a step further by making the projected imagery hold up as physical sets behind the actors. The sets would need to be photo-real, have perfect perspective, and align correctly with the audience's view of the stage from every seat in the house. As the project progressed, the production crew and I developed a process which would meet all three criteria.

We first created detailed CG models to establish precise and consistent perspective for every set element. Next, we rendered the screen images with my custom CG camera rig which was designed to compensate for the side screens' forward swing and to allow us to independently tweak and troubleshoot each screen image's perspective. During the troubleshooting process, we placed the images onto a digital, scale model of the theater to test how the perspective held up from each seat. Once the directors signed-off on each set, my team and I would render each final model with a black and white ambient light pass, and then send the images to our matte painting team in Germany who applied photo-realistic textures on top of the high-res images.

In addition to leading the CG team, I also discovered and championed a new cost effective media server which delivered and controlled the projections--saving the production thousands of dollars.

My sincere thanks to the Directors, David Ayers and Angela Gaylor; the head of tech, Noah Kloor; and the amazing artists who partnered with me on this project, Andy Gerding, Tony Elmore, Maciej Kuciara, Xenusion, and Sarah Gentry.

One Brush Wonder
One night, I discovered some really sweet PhotoShop brushes, so I decided to take a look at them by stamping each on a blank page and seeing what kinds of textures they could create. After using a few, I noticed that I was creating, what I thought, were some pretty interesting images ...ok it was really late--and my creative mind gets very lucid around 2:00 am.

Lines of Action and Line Weights:

^The first image was inspired by a photo from a fashion blog called The Sartorialist, which I stumbled upon while I was doing research for an art history presentation. I may later post the full story of how I stumbled upon this interesting blog (it's interesting, honest), but I really need to sleep now. The second image of the bunny-slippered pyromaniac started as a random doodle then evolved into a line weight experiment. Seeing the two images side by side is a little odd. A pattern? {^_^}

Shifting weight