DHA was called upon last summer to work with Hersey and set designer Bill Dudley on Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia, nominated for four Olivier awards, including best set design and best lighting design. With Anything Goes, expertise in pre-distorting slides called for the talents of DHA's Wyatt Enever. He was presented with a curved cyclorama on which images of a transatlantic journey from a New York skyline to the Isle of Wight Needles would be projected, and it looked like a straightforward task. Working closely with David Hersey, Enever planned to use three Pani BP4 large-format projectors back projecting a seamless image on to the curved cyc which formed the backdrop of John Gunter's striking set. "As is so often the case, it wasn't that simple," says Enever. He recalls: "The architecture of the theatre meant that we couldn't put the projectors in the ideal positions as there were pillars in the way. The projectors also had to be positioned under an overhang, so couldn't be at the optimum height - and the screen wasn't really a true curve."
The set of Anything Goes was a further test of Enever's skills. He and colleague Steve Larkins, along with the National’s staff, carried out trials, projecting grid slides from the projectors located in their show positions on to the cyc and, from these slides, calculating the distortions required to match the ‘real world’ parameters of projector and screen or the ‘FizzyWyg’ method, as Rachael McCutcheon, assistant lighting designer on the show, described the process.
From this work, accurate pre-distorted grid slides were produced. Enever and Larkins then took the show’s images, supplied by artist Richard Kenyon, and split them into images for the three projectors, predistorted as required. Soft-edged masks were also created for each projector, allowing the images to blend seamlessly. The pair also produced film for a fourth Pani, this one a 4kW Compact fitted with a PIGI film scroller positioned in the centre of the cyclorama. It provided a scrolling image as the ship leaves dock. The resulting images "look great", says Enever. "Given the problems we had, I was delighted. The artwork was excellent and the set looked stunning." The sell-out show was also nominated for an Olivier Award, in the Outstanding Musical Production category.
DHA's work on this production paid dividends a few months later on Love's Labour's Lost, which uses the same projectors and projection screens. The show was again designed by John Gunter with lighting by David Hersey, and on this occasion the duo intended to use projection to create what Wyatt Enever describes as "highly detailed gobos." The original artwork for these images came from Enever's own photographs of beech trees near his Surrey home. However, the white sky filtering through these images were too light to blend with the tree and painted gauzes Gunter designed for the production. "We spent quite a lot of time in Photoshop, taking suitable greens and dropping them into the sky areas," says Enever."We’ve ended up with some quite lovely colours which work very well with the set and the show." The images were carefully masked to give a soft edge, then split into two for projection from two of the Pani projectors.
(Lee Baldock)
