A Marvelous Order: Video Systems' Design
Client
Role
Video Engineer, Projection Engineer, Documentation
Team
Fubbi Karlsson, Seth Kirby
Year
2022-10
Tags
Projection Design, DOOH
Tools
LED, QLab, MadMapper, After Effects, Fuji XH2-S, Projectors
A custom built series of LED screens, now in their third variation in a decade and designed by two of my oldest creative engineer buddies, needed a system to drive it. I had to design a nice travelling show computer and Q infrastructure. Some high level information procured: Travelling racks are still cheapest at B&H. QLab is still the best Q software. M1 Studios support plenty of video outs if you do it right.
I'll do a nice breakout video later. For now, I'm just trying to pad my workload for 2022 and increase my new york city creative technology projectionist designer free covid 19 tests brooklyn hot hipster SEO or whatever. Point being: doing a sick edit of my QLab skills isn't a massive priority right now. Shout out to Luckydave, that guy is a god-damn legend. You guys know who I'm talking about? He's like the Rick Gerard of Figure 53, except he works for the company!
Working with the Director and Animation Designer, Joshhua Frankel, I had a great time bringing the creative vision from little preview screens, to big performance screens. I also had the oppurtunity to produce Bear Cam 2.0 which is an off shoot of an earlier project concieved with Ashur Rayis. You'll learn more about that when I finally finish this project case study, which for now: is complete nonsense.
Getting back to the task at hand, I had two weeks of R&D where I brushed up on middle-of-the-road media servers and non-ideal cable runs. Curious about low cost and medium risk? As long as I don't have any responsibilitty, I'll pretty much do whatever. Worth mentioning that I encourage this formula. Optical over HDMI is pretty good now. SDI adapters are still bad voodoo at low price points. Gremlins everywhere kind-of-shit. Curious about my findings? That's why I write down all of my findings and self publish them in a password-protected google doc that I share with my other Creative Technology cult members. Ask away...
That all being said, I had a great time working on A Marvelous Order, and a big part about that was the short hand I had with my colleagues and the wonderful production team that comes from an interdisciplinary art practice rather than a strictly theaterical one. Also: the hotel we stayed in near Penn State had a bangin' breakfast every morning. In all seriousness, really good teams of folks, I just really love making fun of anything theatrically adjacent. Remember when you could smoke on planes? I think Brecht said something about that. If you've got this far reading through this complete nothing, send me an email, use the code "sanyo for life", and I'll send you a vacationland.club sticker.
Alright, let's do the numbers 🎶
1 trip to Wassaic
1 very good Indian restaurant
1 very bad Sonic
1 week of R&D and systems buld
1 trip to College Station
2 (at least) of my buddies who had this gig before me
2 days of project setup
3 diifferent custom LED sculptures designed and built by Fubbi Karlsson & Seth Kirby
4 days of load-in
6 hours each way
10 years of development
So many god damn dongles