Founded in 1996, the multi-awarding-winning WaterTower Theatre is a not-for-profit professional theatre company that produces six main stage shows each season alongside award-winning educational and community outreach programmes.
Earlier this year Fred Mikeska and Darrell Barnes of A.C. Lighting (ArKaos' US distributor) took Arkaos MediaMaster Pro to The Addison Theatre Centre where they presented a full demonstration of its capabilities to technical director, Scott Guenther, and lighting designers, Dan Schoedel and Jason Foster. "The team at Addison Theatre Centre was evaluating different media server options that would meet the venue's diverse requirements," says Mikeska.
"After seeing the presentation by A.C. Lighting, Inc. and downloading the demo version of MediaMaster Pro, the Addison Theatre Centre purchased a full licence of MediaMaster Pro 4.0 which has quickly become an important part of the Centre's inventory."
Scott Guenther had first investigating media servers at the LDI 2013 show and proceeded to research his options thoroughly over the following months. "We needed something with which to create theatrical environments for the wide variety of productions at ATC," he says. "Two main criteria determined our choice: firstly we wanted media server software - within our budget - that was capable of handling multiple screens and outputs.
"Secondly we wanted to invest in devices that could control the ArKaos Kling-Net protocol. Adopting MediaMaster enabled us to purchase a number of LED fixtures which have integrated Kling-Net and can be controlled very successfully using MediaMaster. We are very happy with the result."
Directed by Rene Moreno and with set designed by Sarah Brown, WTT's production of Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first productions to take advantage of the new MediaMaster Pro. Working in conjunction with Brown, Guenther and Schoedel chose to project onto the set to create the atmospheric locations and deliver topical images of the day.
All cropping, scaling and positioning of the images was done by Schoedel using a Jands Vista L5 console sending commands to MediaMaster Pro. Guenther and his colleagues prefer this method as it creates a better workflow, does not require the use of multiple devices and can then be used to run/trigger the show.
A Panasonic TP-DW830 8500 lumen projector was used for the centre cloth and a BenQ SH960 5500 lumen projector for the rigid side projection surface.
(Jim Evans)
