last friday, we had a meeting with lukas kaltenbaeck, the boss of austrias
biggest (theater) lighting company. after lining out all the requirements
of our project 2 weeks ago, he came up with a brilliant idea.
there is a scanner system available (i forgot the name of it) which I'm not
really able to describe, but I'll try: the actor carries a small sender,
which reports the position of the actor to the console. a bunch of
luminaires, controlled by the console via DMX512, keep track of the actor.
several luminaires can be used and they can be located neary everywhere.
in our case, 4 luminaires would be located at each corner of the stage.
there is a 5th luminaire located in the center of the stage, but not at the
local stage; it is located at the other (remote) stages, representing the
virtual actor.
this means that, at each stage, there are n luminaires located in the
center of each stage, where n is the number of remote stages.
since the positions of the actor during the play is known, there is no need
for a sender: the position of the actor is pre-programmed into the console,
the console operator issues "go!" commands to move the light in real time
with the actor to the next position. as we know when the actor will speak,
there is no need to visualize the voice of the actor: the change of the
light (cone) is just another "Go".
for us, this means that quite a load is taken from the computer and put
into to lighting control system (the console). IMHO this obsoletes one of
the computers. on the one hand, this makes improvisation impossible, but,
since the whole show is pre-recorded in the console, we might be able to
continue with the performance in the case of breakdowns.
lukas will draw some sketches and write a short description which will be
available in the web in (hopefully) a few days.
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Rainer Fuegenstein rfu@iguwnext.tuwien.ac.at
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"I got some problems, too, three of 'em. I didn't have 'em, this morning. I
guess that's just the way life is, sometimes"
(William Gibson, from "Count Zero")
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