Back to Start PageTen Ways Technology Will Change in Theatre
PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT
STAGE DIRECTIONS
COPYRIGHT 1998
AUTHOR: Patrick Finelli
TITLE: Computer Technology for Theatre: The Next Ten Years
SUBJECT: Future Directions
Theatre is an ancient craft with a set of time-honored traditions. The art and practice of theatre is rooted in performances that we can trace back over two thousand years to classical Greece. The proscenium theatre dates back more than four centuries; the production hierarchy was established almost a hundred years ago and methods of rehearsing and preparing actors are decades old. The personal computer has been around for less than 20 years, but computers have had an astonishing impact in virtually every aspect of theatre.
Computers are as commonplace in the theatre office as the telephone or photocopier, which in their time represented major breakthroughs to previous generations of theatre practitioners. We don’t have to look much farther than the control booth to find computer-based products in the form of lighting consoles, digital recorders and signal processors. We are sure to find computers and related equipment (e.g. printers, scanners, modems) in the scene or costume designer’s studio and most playwrights use word processors on a regular basis. The director, stage manager and crew often tote notebook computers backstage and more than a few audience members have entered theatre with their own testimony to the advancement of digital technology – annoying beepers and cell phones.
Recent efforts indicate that the stage itself and the actors on it are not beyond the influence of computer technology, but I’m not sure that the theatre of the future will be filled with laser holograms of synthesized actors on a virtual set that never needs paint. As early as 1929 the legendary scene designer Robert Edmond Jones anticipated how technological developments would shape the theatre of the future. He envisioned a new theatre which would use "talking pictures" to reveal the outer and inner life of the characters. As the millenium approaches we are also reminded of Brecht’s words describing a theatre "fit for the scientific age." Our computers and networks are capable of many previously unimaginable things and it gives us a sense of awe and wonder to speculate on future innovations. Jones did not live to see how the term "multimedia" has changed. In an earlier day it meant the use of carousel projectors and sound, now it means computerized audio, video and animation and can be found everywhere from CD-ROMs to live performance.
During the past few years we’ve reviewed a wide range of computer-related products for lighting and scene design, sound control, playwriting, production and box office in the pages of Stage Directions. We have speculated on the future of computer technology for theatre practitioners and come up with some possible scenarios based upon current practice and projections for future technological advancement in ten general categories.
1. Scenic and Costume Design
The toolbox of today’s designer may contain more software products than pencils and paint. Graduate theatre design programs at UCLA, University of Georgia and the University of Kansas have almost entirely converted over to CAD (computer assisted design) systems. If these programs are models for the future, then most university theatres’ computer labs will contain workstations running CAD software such as AutoCAD or TurboCAD) along with the requisite scanners, digital cameras and plotters instead of drafting boards, t-squares and scale rules.
In the old days, designers spent hours learning how to do perspective grid drawing, a technique that was originally developed in the Renaissance. Perspective drawing and ways to model or preview viewpoints have changed more in the past ten years than in the previous 500 years. With the computer, we can visualize the setting from numerous perspectives and change the elements at will. The scenographer can preview each scene with the ability to juxtapose visual elements for any moment in the play, accommodating the changing mind much faster than paper and pencil. (see "The ABC’s CAD," Stage Directions, October 1997 pp. 57-59; "Symmetry Costume Design Software," Stage Directions, Oct. 1996).
Drafting used to be two-dimensional, but now the availability of PC-based 3-D rendering and animation software has opened up new possibilities for the scenographer in creating the stage picture. The computer enables the designer to think and visualize in three dimensions, performing a variety of "parametric transformations" (e.g. change the viewpoint, color, size, texture, geometry of the setting). Technological achievements challenge the scene designer’s capacity to organize shapes, colors and other features in ways that reveal new meanings. The effect of the computer is not merely in perfecting the practical means of drawing, like sharpening a pencil, but in providing the possibility for extending and enhancing the nature of the process. Although the computer can accommodate the traditional needs of the scenographer, the unprecedented control over the compositional elements of line, shape, color, texture, relationships between objects and the representation of space provides the designer with a complex set of new capabilities.
"Smart" systems in the future may assist the designer in the search for solutions, especially in the initial stages of the design process. Unlike the completed rendering, a computer image doesn’t freeze the visual idea, but keeps it dynamic, in a continual state of flux. In the future, we may see expert systems where the drawing device itself has an animating capacity, providing access to further levels of decision. If trends continue, the high-end Hollywood graphics seen in Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump will be on every desktop.
One of the drawbacks to computer sketching was that you couldn’t use varying line weights as you can with brush or pencil by pressing hard when you were sure of yourself and pressing lightly when you were unsure about formulating a visual idea. We can look forward to more intuitive products like pressure sensitive drawing tablets and enhancement of software such as Adobe Photoshop with Kai Power Tools to enable "liquid impressions" in the thinking sketch.
Virtual scenery was used by ABC News for the first time during the 1996 presidential election. A recent set for "Discovery News" was built for an estimated one-tenth the cost of building, painting and loading in a "real" set. Wireframe models on the computer often serve as reference points for foamcore models and eventually may offer the designer the possibility to print fabrications directly from the computer for model building. Other object-oriented programs using "fractals" (scale-free geometry for basic forms) and the advantages of cross-platform "dxf" file format (a file type that is recognized by different software programs). The toolbox for designers in the 21st century will offer exciting potential for creating stage pictures.
2. Lighting Design and Control Consoles
Last year we reviewed three software and hardware products for stage lighting (see "Two Products, Two Purposes," Stage Directions, August 1997 pp. 4-6; "Stage Lighting: The CD-ROM," Stage Directions, May 1997 pp. 29-30; "A Light Board in Your PC," Stage Directions, March 1997. ). One permits you use a cordless telephone to control dimmers. Another transforms your computer into a control board. Hardware products such as these and the proliferation of lighting paperwork software programs indicates that computer technology in stage lighting will continue to advance at a rapid rate.
Lighting design was the first area to benefit from computing when memory consoles were developed in the 1970s. Once a microchip was used as the "brains" of a lighting console, it became clear that it wouldn’t be long before your own computer could serve as a lighting console provided you had the right interface and display capabilities. This trend should continue, much to the chagrin of major console manufacturers, who might have to turn their attention to software development for your "light control" notebook PC.
Graphics accelerators, rendering and animation software products for the PC will allow designers to try out lighting schemes in advance. Lighting simulations facilitate two difficult mental pictures for the scenographer–atmosphere and color. Successful lighting designs are dependent upon a visualization of the script, establishing the appropriate mood, breaking the scenes into patterns according to the focus of attention and character relationships, selecting color and directional qualities of motivating and ambient light and correlating them with types of equipment that will produce the effects required.. The computer’s tremendous capability in lighting suggests a myriad of possibilities for establishing dramatic emphasis and the rhythmic structure of the play. In the future, the lighting designer may explore textural qualities of light, shadow and plasticity freely in computer simulations prior to their composition on the living stage. The designer will preview not only static views, but dynamic changes as well. Prior to the development of computer visualization tools, the designer had to wait until technical rehearsals to decide the appropriate transitions. From now on, decisions can be made earlier in the production process and with the interaction of the computer’s virtual representation of the lighting stage.
I’m predicting that light designers will not only be able to preview the lighting effects scene by scene on the computer, but actually tie in to the control console so that changes in the direction of the source in hypothetical view will be translated into dimmer and level settings on stage. Imagine three "windows" on your laptop - one with your rendering of the lighting effect, another with the channel settings for the actual dimmers and a third with a video view of the live stage picture to show the changes as you make them. If you really want to use your imagination, picture this being done on a stage in New York by a designer living in London, in real time, over the Internet.
3. Sound
Audiences accustomed to "surround sound" installations at home come to a show with high expectations for live sound reproduction. MIDI, SMPTE and other timecode schemes allow the linkage of light control and sound with other MIDI devices, so that music could initiate light cues or motion sensors could trigger sound and light effects. This is not as far-fetched as it seems since we have done such things on stage for at least ten years. However, the miniaturization of circuits has resulted in the design of sound cards containing all the signal processing functions you can imagine. In the past, we’d have an assortment of components for reverb, delay, pitch change, flanging, gating, EQ and noise reduction. Then we saw the development of the "digital effects processor", which was a box containing stock effects with changeable parameters (e.g. you could adjust the time of a delay or the frequency of a pitch change). Now and in the future, all of these can be housed on a PC card with a DSP chip (digital signal processing).
Look for the development of "smart" components, such as loudspeakers, microphones, mixers and amplifiers. This trend has already begun with automated faders and memory for mixing consoles, but imagine if you had a smart microphone that could automatically EQ a performer’s voice or intelligent wireless systems that monitor the signal and filter out annoying buzzes, pops and clicks that are still too common on our stages. How about an amplifier that has a self-diagnosis chip to determine impedance overloads or component failure?
Keyboards are everywhere in the theatre and many are compatible with your computer and lightboard via a MIDI connection. Pre-packaged sounds, drums and special effects are common features of the new generation of keyboards. Many have built in "samplers" for recording sound effects. DAT (digital audio tape), CD-Audio and Mini-Disk technologies enable the recording of extremely high quality, low noise sound effects and music. Instruments and recording devices will work together with computer software products such as Cakewalk, one of the first and best programs for multitrack digital audio recording and/or MIDI sequencing. The latest Pro-Audio software will let you record 24 simultaneous tracks with reverb, flange, chorus EQ, delay echo, time compression and expansion as well as pitch shifting. Look also for higher sampling rates as the cost of memory continues to drop. The computer is in the sound booth and studio from now on and we expect to hear the difference in our theatres. (see "Computerized Sound Cues," Stage Directions, May 1996, pp. 7-8.)
4. Production collaboration
Many designers and directors already exchange e-mail as part of the collaborative process of production. It is a fairly simple task for the sender to attach any type of file to an e-mail and then the recipient can download the file and view it. We have done this with light plots, renderings, inventory lists and shop drawings. This trend should continue, but perhaps with the expansion of Internet software tools such as Java (a programming language for dynamic elements on the Web) we will be able to download little "applets" that contain much more information than static files. With this type of software, a director could "walk-through" a designer’s rendering or wireframe.
Other products such as digital cameras, removable memory cards and digital video recorders and capture devices will add a further dimension to the quality of information exchanged among the designers, technicians and directors of our productions.
Script collaboration will also be enhanced through the new tools of the future. Playwrights will be able to share their work with mentors and colleagues for comment, review and revision. We could establish a network of virtual teachers for playwriting programs when it would be impossible to assemble the same group in any one location. Imagine a playwright in Europe, a screenwriter in Hollywood and a Professor in Michigan critiquing student work through the Internet.
The wildest scenario I can imagine would give the playwright the ability to model scenes as they are written using virtual actors and sets from a digital archive. It is very important for playwrights to have their work read by actors in a laboratory workshop before the work is staged. With the click of a button, a playwright in a studio loft in Soho could see and hear newly written scenes without venturing far from the word processors. I’ll leave it to others to speculate on how this might affect the art of playwriting.
5. Box Office Operations
Is there anyone who hasn’t purchased a ticket through one of the automated services such as Ticketron? Software packages allow the smaller theatre to computerize box office operations and marketing strategies (see "That’s the Ticket," Stage Directions, March, 1998). Take this one step further and imagine how easy it would be if you could buy a ticket without leaving home at your own computer. You can do this already over the Internet through services such as Playbill. There is also a trend for cities to set up web sites with links to local events. For instance, suppose you are headed on a trip to Seattle and you want to see a show while you are there. You could go to the Seattle website, see what’s playing and order a ticket. I think that the behemoths in the industry may try to corner this market, but the freedom and flexibility of the World Wide Web means that it is possible for a smaller operation to set up a site and place a hyperlink on a given city’s site as a "point-of-sale" for tickets. The potential is enormous to expand the audience base and attract not only visitors, but new subscribers.
6. Portfolio
I can’t imagine why multi-media portfolios haven’t become more popular already. It makes so much sense to show more than a headshot and list of credits. Using hypermedia you can include multiple pictures, text, sound and video clips of your work on CD-ROM or website. Many university students now designing web pages as part of their curriculum. Why not start by designing a portfolio page? Directors and casting agents will be able to visit your website or peruse your CD-ROM to see if they want to bring you in for a live callback. Managers could maintain searchable databases for character types. I’ve seen very few of these so far, but I’m expecting this trend to increas in the future.
7. The Internet
Theatre is a collaborative art and technology has enabled designers, directors and producers to share images and text in unprecedented ways via the Internet and World Wide Web. E-mail has replaced letter writing as a quick, direct mode of communication. Presently most of us connect to the Internet through relatively slow telephone modem connections. New technologies such as cable modems, ISDN and the super-fast DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) will be about five times faster and permit simultaneous voice transmission. Think of the possibilities for inter-regional and International collaborations, or just having a production meeting with a designer who happens to be momentarily out of town on another project. Fast internet connections in the future will permit rapid file transfers of images, designs and schedules. The web has changed the way we interact with each other and it is in the process of revolutionizing the way our computers work. The files on your computer will all be "web" compatible in the future. The operating system that controls your computer operations will also be a browser once the government and Microsoft work out their anti-trust agreement. The old paradigm of the past held that data would be stored in centralized "mainframes" with enormous databases. The way the computer future is shaping up, it appears that "distributed computing" will be the paradigm for the 21st century. Our local PCs will be connected and linked to all of the other local PCs in the world and file sharing will be routine. Total network connectivity will spawn new procedures for software companies. You will be able to authorize they’re entrance into your system over the Internet and give you software upgrades and enhancements while you are sleeping. Lighting and sound companies can come through the network, access your hard drive, get customer and user data, upgrade the software, send you an e-mail that it’s done. The designer might take advantage of this feature by updating sketches sent out to shops without leaving the studio.
There are also new experiments in the creation of virtual theatre over the Internet, such as the ATHE MOOS (Association for Theatre in Higher Education - Multiple Object- Oriented game). These are theatre environments based upon the old adventure game format (i.e. you are in a virtual world and encounter others, making decisions about properties and behaviours).
Other possibilities are that you could save designs to a website and access archives of images and designs to integrate into your projects. We are already able to view most of the famous paintings in the world on our computers over the World Wide Web (copyright law). Look for technology to out pace copyright law in this regard. (see "Caught in the Web," Stage Directions, January 1996, pp. 15-16; "A Listserv in Your Future?," Stage Directions, March 1996, pp. 9-10; "Building a Great Website," Stage Directions, February, 1998.)
8. Virtual Sets and Blue Screen Acting
Currently, there are experiments in designing virtual sets in theatre departments at UCLA, Kansas, Georgia and other schools. These efforts often utilize techniques used in film and television - the "chroma key." Chroma key allows you to superimpose an actor over a background. You can shoot a video of an actor against a blue or green screen and then place the actor on a virtual set. The actor may work in an environment that is made up of blue cloth marked where props and sets will be in the rendered background. If the background is seamless and evenly lit, the color will "key" easily. Then you can use software to replace the keyed background with your own 3D rendering. The result combines your live actor with a 3-D virtual scene. The stage actor is placed into an imaginary world displayed on a video screen.
Real-time video may be keyed into virtual sets, artificial environments limited only by your imagination. The actor could interact with objects, and your set can display multiple reflections, refraction and light sources. You can create animating graphics interacting with actors, build image libraries, create an illusion of exotic locations and make dramatic imaginary sets that would be impossible to actually construct. You could do virtual camera pans or see the actor’s image reflected through glass. Shadows will mix seamlessly with the synthetic background.
Along with the chroma key technique, we will see products that replace the expensive equipment in a broadcast studio with one box. This will affect live theatre production as well as graphics creation. The greatest potential comes with combining live actors with 3-D shapes. Blue screen acting and virtual sets are still in the experimental stage for theatre, but their potential holds much promise for directors and scenographers of the future.
9. Virtual actors
Many of us are familiar with the use of "virtual actors" in television and film. Recent commercials have featured digital representations of Fred Astaire and John Wayne, but the Terminator 3-D attraction at Universal Studios shows the true potential of integrating digitally processed virtual worlds and actors in a live stage environment. The concept is not new, but the implementation is. The great American scenographer R.E. Jones first speculated upon the interplay of film and live action in a " New Theatre." Scenic projections were key elements in Erwin Piscator’s epic theatre and scenographer Josef Svoboda’s Laterna Magika combined projections, film and live actors.
Softimage® 3-D was used by a team of 10 digital artists at Digital Domain in Los Angeles for all the modeling, animation and rendering in the "Terminator 3-D" production. The software enabled the artists to create a "T-meg" monster that morphs (transforms shape) while walking. There are environmental reflections and other photorealistic effects like "liquid metal" skin that tears when the stage actor shoots it. George Lucas used a similar technique to add scenes and character enhancement in the re-issue of Star Wars. The industry is striving for the same level of realism in character creation. Imagine making a working model of an actor, a 3-D character animated by a human being, perhaps for the "Boyg"(got to check this spelling) in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. This raises interesting legal questions since once the digital character is created, you could rent him or her out. The human actor might be concerned about job security, but there is no substitute for the living actor and we should remember that drummers were not eliminated once the drum machine was created. But synthesis of human forms and images is within reach and we’re on the verge of "cutting and pasting" on a grand scale.
10. Importance of theatre as a discipline
You may not be surprised to note that one of the most popular multimedia software authoring packages, Macromedia®, uses a familiar vocabulary taken largely from theatre and film. Each Macromedia piece is called a movie. The "stage" is the window where your project is created and played. Elements such as images, sound effects, text, video and control buttons are called "cast members." Macromedia’s "cast window" stores artwork, graphics, text sound, color, buttons and your digital video. The "score" keeps track of the position of each cast member on the stage in each frame of a movie. This is just one example of how theatre terminology and theatrical ideas permeate even the highest of technologies. Theatre is a living art that has been reborn many times in our history. "All the world is a stage" and the stage is also a special world. Theatre practices such as collaboration, personal journals and performance have been adopted in education and business. There will always be a demand for theatre and theatre-trained people. Students who know AutoCAD are eminently employable in a wide variety of arts and industries. Theatre is a place where technology and art come together. The computer has certainly found a place in our theatres, but more importantly, theatre will always be a place for innovation and advancement of technology in support of our wonderfully human theatrical art.
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