Wednesday, October 01, 2003

I just found out I won a 'Triangle' award for my lighting of the Broadway Concert in North Carolina... The Triangle are theatrical awards given for regional theatre productions in North Carolina.  Small potatoes, but hey, it's my birthday and I just find out !  No complaints.  AND the show DID IN FACT kick major ass... 4:40:18 PM    comment [] Some good press for Parsifal ! Seen in Seattle: Something old, something new. Last week there was lots both old and new at the Seattle Opera. The company's former home has been renovated into the newly named Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, after a $127 million rebuild that made the auditorium narrower by 32' and greatly improved the acoustics (thanks to acousticians Jaffe Holden). Schuler & Shook served as the theatre consultants (Todd Hensley, project manager), working closely with the primary tenants, the Seattle Opera and the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Built in 1927, the hall has gone through several renovations, with this one stripping everything back to the shell of the auditorium. The room now seems more intimate and has a bright color palette of reds, greens, and blues that evoke its Pacific Northwest environment. Parsifal. Photo: Chris Bennion. The first Seattle Opera production in the new hall is Wagner's Parsifal, in a new and critically-acclaimed production directed by Francois Rochaix, with sets and costumes by Robert Israel, lighting by Michael Chybowski (making his Seattle Opera debut), and sweeping projections by Seattle's own Bob and Colleen Bonniol of Mode Studios. Their images covered the full width of the stage and were projected via a double bank of eight Digital Projection Thunder 10K units provided by Scharff Weisberg and hung on a double row of truss backstage for rear projection as one large seamless image. The hyper-realistic images provided a dramatic backdrop for Israel's more abstract sets that included a surprising raked deck 35' wide that raises like a drawbridge into a vertical position, and a 77' tall tower built in two pieces: the bottom half rises from the trap room while the top piece rolls onto it from offstage. The two pieces create a towering staircase that eventually collapses with great panache back into the trap room. The color palette for the sets and costumes ranges from beige to darker earth tones, in contrast to the bolder colors of the projected images. Chybowski's lighting seems to have taken full advantage of the new Electronic Theatre Controls lighting system in McCaw Hall, using a very large rig of conventional and automated fixtures. The moving lights, including Martin Mac 2000 units hung both overhead and backstage were rented from Christie Lights, along with large format Chroma Q scrollers used on the Digital Projection projectors. Given that the length of Parsifal is just about five hours, patrons of the opera had ample time to contemplate the new hall, and the verdict is that they like it. Robert Schaub, technical director for the Seattle Opera (and part of the Eddy Award-winning team for their innovative Ring Cycle) worked closely with the consultants throughout the renovation period and says, "On opening night of Parsifal we finally heard the acoustics in a full house. There was an element of excitement in that, and the production received a standing ovation that was several minutes long." This is one opera house that is definitely of the 21st century, yet a perfect home for opera of any era. --Ellen Lampert Greaux 4:23:09 PM    comment [] When a system of 'meaningless' symbols has pattern in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning - indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is.  -  Douglas Hofstadter (author,philosopher) 3:25:11 PM    comment [] If you are reading this, and you live in California, than for gods sake get out there and vote.  I know it's been a long, stupid, side show exercise, but this recall vote represents nothing less than a subversion of republic... 11:37:01 AM    comment [] Today is my Birthday.  My last birthday before I will forever be a father.  Happy birthday to me ! 11:31:04 AM    comment [] SonicVision Reaches for Stars  By Michelle Delio  |   Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1 02:00 AM Sep. 30, 2003 PT NEW YORK -- Hundreds of people saw the light -- and the music -- here Monday night, thanks to a supercomputer running Linux, a team of video artists and one of the world's biggest virtual-reality simulators. SonicVison, a new show by the American Museum of Natural History and MTV2, blends technology, music and animations displayed on a 6,550-square-foot digital dome into a brain-melting fiesta of sounds and sights. Story Tools Story Images Click thumbnails for full-size image: See also Disney Animates Dalí's Flick Animators Show Off at Siggraph Anime Escapes the Underground Digital Actors in Rings Can Think A One-Man 3-D Moviemaking Marvel Discover more Net Culture Today's Top 5 Stories Ousted Official Back at Nuke Lab Rappers in Disharmony on P2P Palm Hands Off New Handhelds SonicVision Reaches for Stars Lawsuits Damp Down P2P Audience Set to open to the public Oct. 3, SonicVision features a musical score with tracks from Radiohead, Coldplay, Queens of the Stone Age, David Bowie, the Flaming Lips, Stereolab, Fischerspooner, Boards of Canada and Moby. Viewers watch as spiders spin webs that mutate into swirling mosaics. Aliens dance while fireworks explode. A volcanic explosion descends, sweeping the audience into space, where whirls of melting color mutate into hundreds of blinking eyes, which then morph into wheeled machines on the dome's 69-foot-wide, 38-foot-high ceiling screen. The music was mixed into a seamless presentation by Moby, who said he long has been interested in space and astronomy. Moby began work on SonicVision six months ago. "When friends asked me to describe the SonicVision show, I've had a really hard time because it is completely different from anything else I've seen," said Moby. For decades, the museum's Hayden Planetarium delighted city school kids with its classic constellations-on-the-ceiling space show. Older kids went to the Friday night performances, which featured lasers zipping around the planetarium's dome accompanied by the tunes of Pink Floyd. It was the ultimate in late-20th-century cool. But recently both the planetarium and its laser show had started to feel less cutting-edge and more like one of the museum's collected antiquities. So out with the old and in with the new. The planetarium has been redesigned and renamed. It's now the Rose Center's Hayden Space Theater, a 4 million-pound structure billed as the biggest and most powerful virtual-reality simulator in the world. SonicVision doesn't feature lasers. Instead, visitors get to really see, feel and hear the music via huge 3-D visualizations generated by the museum's supercomputer. Its new supercomputer, that is. Halfway through the preparations for SonicVision, staffers realized the museum's 78-processor supercomputer system was just too sluggish to process the 9 terabytes of data that make up the SonicVision show. Happily, Sun Microsystems donated some hardware, adding 40 servers to the planetarium's existing 78-CPU cluster computer. The system now boasts 72 Intel Xeon processors running Linux and 46 SGI MIPS processors running the Irix operating system. "Ever since the Rose Center opened in 2000, we had the idea of creating a new kind of music show that would take advantage of the Hayden's unparalleled technology and visual display system," said Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History. "SonicVision updates the popular laser show genre just as the Hayden Planetarium's digital dome has revolutionized the presentation of planetarium content." The planetarium's dome was designed to display data in three dimensions. It works great with star shows, but it really excels with abstract imagery. Some people at the press preview clutched at their seats or companions during the show, fighting off the feeling that they were going to catapult into some alternate Matrix-type world. The visuals were created by a team of 19 digital animators, including employees of Curious Pictures, a producer of television shows for the Cartoon Network, artists Alex Grey, Perry Hall and Darrel Anderson, and video jockeys Bionic Dots, Benton C., Madame Chao, Atmospherex and Vishwanath Bush. Video jockeys use moving images and audio clips to create art, manipulating visual and sound data in the same way DJs mix records. The animators for SonicVision used an assortment of scientific visualization applications and standard animation programs including Filmbox, Maya, XSI, Shake and Virtual Director to create the imagery for SonicVision. Sound analysis applications were used to make the images move in time with the music, which is piped through two 24-channel digital audio players and several hundred strategically placed speakers. Five hundred low-frequency shakers under the seats and on the floor of the theater produce interesting vibrations that certainly add to the experience of watching the images as they are projected by seven high-resolution video projectors mounted on the planetarium's walls. SonicVision cost about $600,000, not counting a $1 million donation of hardware and software from Sun. The show is now a permanent part of the museum's offerings and will be presented on Friday and Saturday evenings. 11:08:08 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Bob Bonniol. Last update: 11/11/2003; 5:17:50 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.