Road Test: Strong Technobeam, page 40 - PLSN.com

NEWS
Paul Kolnik
Projection, Lighting and Sound
Bring Young Frankenstein to Life
A fusion of projection and lighting enhances the image of the
moon above the hayride scene with actors Roger Bart and
Sutton Foster.
NEW YORK — A combination of projection,
conventional lighting, moving lights
and sound creates the electrifying moment
when Frankenstein’s monster is jolted
to life in current Broadway production
of Young Frankenstein, using an automated
rig controlled by an ETC Eos system.
The musical’s light plot is based
around a mix of 120 Mac 2000s, including
Performances, Profiles and some Wash
units. “Eos is great for handling a large rig
like this,” said Josh Weitzman, moving light
programmer for Young Frankenstein. “It has
unique new tools that help you manage
that size of rig and work really quickly.”
The fusion of projection and lighting
starts in the musical’s opening scene.
“With projection,” Weitzman said, “you
can’t change the color temperature of the
lightning bolt; you’re limited to the tone
the image is. So we layered the moving
lights on top of the video projection. That
gave us a great deal more control — in
intensity of color, in terms of strobing. I
could make the light linger beyond the
image without having to re-render the
whole video.”
Likewise, during the musical’s hayride
scene, “we were able to enhance the image
and effect of the moon — deepening
its tones, changing its textures — all by
controlling the light that is layered over
the video projection.”
Weitzman credited the versatility of
the Eos system for achieving those effects,
and added that the new Query function
helped save time. “Let’s say you have a
palette that’s called “Monster Down Left.”
You can hit Query and then select that
palette button, and it will grab all of the
lights that are pointed at “Monster Down
Left,” and you can then change the colors
in them all at once— or change some
other parameter. There might be different
combinations and conditions used to
build the query. You can then select any
or all of the lights that meet the condition
you describe.”
Weitzman found Eos’s Trace button to
be another useful tool. “I use this feature
so much I can’t believe I programmed for
years without it. It saves so much time. If
you’re halfway through a scene and you
decide with the designer that the lights
should really be green here, not blue, you
can take that light to ‘green Trace’ and that
change will go back to where the color
was originally set. You don’t even need to
know what cue number you had stored
that color in.”
Weitzman noted that because any
production entails many changes until the
ideal design solutions are found, “the better
the board is able to accommodate you,
the freer you are to try different things.
If it’s effortless, you find yourself trying
many creative permutations. Being able
to do them quickly in real time with the
designer and the director looking on gives
you the chance to try out more things
than you otherwise would if you didn’t
have the confidence to do things quickly.
In the end you have a better production.”
As with any musical, the pacing of
the lighting needs to keep pace with the
dance numbers. “Eos was a big part of
making that work easily,” Weitzman said.
“You’re able to group fixtures together
into parts of a cue. And then when they
make an inevitable change in the choreography,
and you have to change time
or something like that, you can do that
quickly and easily without affecting what
the rest of the rig is doing.”
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