 Hi. Hi, everyone. Welcome. My name is Tara Ahmadinejad and I'm here with the creative team of Disclaimer. Disclaimer is a piehole show that we created for the Under the Radar Festival at the Public in January 2021. I am the writer, co-director of the piece and we're so excited you can be here for this event. We are here so we're here to talk to you about exactly how we made Disclaimer on Zoom and they have a lot to say about this show but that's what we're going to be focusing on today and we welcome any questions you have along the way. You can just feel free to drop them in the chat bar and we're going to answer them at the end of the session but you can drop the questions in at any time. The show originally was an in-person show and it was lightly participatory and it's your run-of-the-mill anti-war with Iran propaganda piece that turns into an Agatha Christie murder mystery and we decided to do it on Zoom. We had the option not to. We had the option to wait, see it through and do it in person anyway and forget about the digital version. So in the fall Piehole got together and we did some many tests and we decided that this show was a good contender to translate into a digital theater piece. A couple of the things that made us decide to do that is one, there aren't that many characters in the show. There aren't that many people who do much talking. It's really mostly one person doing all the talking and we knew that that helped kind of limit some of the variables and the scope of the show and the other thing that we thought would make it a really good contender is that it was an interactive piece and one of the real challenges with digital theater is that often you know people have multiple tabs on they're in their homes it's just so there's so much to compete with to maintain audience's attention with a piece and so we thought well this already lens is already lightly interactive we can just sort of see that interactivity through into this digital and digital medium and really enhance that aspect of it in this form. So originally the show that my alter ego Nagas promises to feed everyone Persian food which she does not but in the digital version we decided to translate that and make it an online cooking class where she promises to divulge the divine secrets of Persian cuisine which she does not and so there's another thing we realized when we decided to do this piece and we did some many testing is that we were going to need to do this partially remotely and have several of the collaborators working on the project be in a shared space together. So we just knew that I am the computing power and operators and camera operators all would need to be in a shared space so we had to sort of navigate how to do that in a COVID friendly way. COVID friendly, COVID safe let's say so we're going to get into mostly today the technical side and the design side of this translation of the show to a digital medium but and you're going to meet the designers who worked on the show but I want to just shout out to Ryan Gedrick and Violet Tafari who are our producer and production manager on this project who not only coordinated all of the technology and procuring everything and all the communication that had to happen to make this piece exist but they also made sure that you know all of the COVID protocols and PPE and all of that were taken care of so that it could happen safely without any cases of COVID so that was great and we really appreciate them. The other people who are new won't be seeing today are Heidi Davis who is our champion dramaturg and who very early on was like oh yeah definitely do this digital this is such a good show for that and Leila Khoshnudi who is a key collaborator on this for the in-person version as well as the digital version and Hassan Nazari Robati who is an actor who was not on site with us he was in Colorado so you're going to be seeing him in some of the clips today but you won't be hearing from him on this panel and of course everyone at the public and the AV team who helped us navigate and they were just such a great sounding board as we were developing the system for this project so that's really all I'm going to say I'm just going to turn it on over to the designers and I mentioned that we had to find a space where we could work so I'm going to turn it over to pi-home member and production designer Alexandra Panzer who's going to tell us about that process of finding a space. Thanks Tara. Hi everyone okay so as Tara said our first major sort of creative technical hurdle was figuring out where we would do the show after we decided that we would in fact do it and the two challenges that we faced there were one for this show we had to be rehearsing and performing in the same space which for us it's very unusual for probably a lot of theater makers is very unusually you're usually bopping around from rehearsal space to rehearsal space but there was no like getting the show on its feet and then teching it every rehearsal had to be a tech rehearsal because the show only existed with video zoom and audio so we needed to to solve that problem very quickly the problem was not the problem the fun challenge was that we we had decided to translate the show into from as Tara mentioned from this dinner party into this cooking show in order to justify it being on a small screen and to do but but we had really only gotten that far so the whole second portion of the show which is the murder mystery aspect we really had like no idea how that was going to work what that would look like like truly we just it was a blank at that point and same with audience participation which was such an important part of the show so so all we had was this image of the cooking show and we bounced around a couple of ideas for spaces we considered doing it at one of our apartments which thank goodness we didn't do but we eventually one night like in a meeting we all just got on airbnb and started looking at random listings and we were looking for this set in our minds of this cooking show space so i'm just going to share my screen here mm okay sharing oops okay so this this kind of classic like you know um kitchen island in front of the presenter kitchen cabinets behind the presenter sort of very flat perpendicular to the camera angle and that's basically what we were looking for and so there were spaces like this and this which also came with a washer dryer which we were interested in um then we thought maybe oh we could put like a kitchen island in front of this cabinet and this is really us just like clicking around the map on airbnb and neighborhoods that were relatively accessible to us um and then we just happened to stumble on this space which at first we thought like oh this doesn't actually work for us but um because it's not like this image of a cooking show um but we but it had a lot of the components that we get excited about in a theatrical space specifically like the depth we look one of our favorite jokes is things being really far away on stage or really close and so this this would potentially allow us to play with that and it had this like mysterious door that could sort of charge the space with this weird energy like what's behind that door we could play with the lighting coming through that door and anyway um all this to say I mentioned this because this is a this is a how we did it not why we did it um but it was really ultimately important that we followed the instinct to go with this space that felt most playful to us that felt most related to the the instincts we use in our the medium our our home medium so to speak um as opposed to we were we were kind of working backwards from this idea of what a cooking show looks like and instead it felt like a real gamble at the time to go with this space instead um but it was ultimately so important that we went with a space that brought its own kind of character and its own constraints and um its own sort of playfulness to the table because that's that's how we like to work that's how we usually like to work those are that's what's important to us um so but moving a lot wait so yes we went with this space um we needed it for about two months I think rehearsals and shows included maybe a little less um and just so folks know like uh if you don't already there are some good deals on long-term rentals on airbnb so um especially during the pandemic so that where that might not have been an option before it's potentially an option now um and and and yeah and once we got there too like if if you look around in these other pictures of this space there's this random thing like what what is this I don't know but maybe we can use it for something which ended up being like our lab space and yeah it just had sort of like a lot of it was bringing a lot to the table um which was really helpful especially because we didn't know what we wanted from the the murder mystery section of the show so anyway this became the container also this great big open space here where we could maybe set up all the tech which again we didn't know what that would be but we assumed it needed a lot of space um and then uh the coup de gras it had a fireplace so it was really it was undeniable but anyway this was the container we knew we wanted to fill and um uh actually I can show just real quick what what it looked like here in the kitchen you can see we got to play with these sort of distances and um you know it just like gave us a lot to to work with um but anyway this was the container of the show but in order to make this into anything we needed uh movie magic basically uh and tech magic and a and a magic combination of the two uh which is where Stefania and Ali came come in who um did video and and all this design work for us there that really like made this space come to life so I'm gonna throw it at you guys hi everyone um so I'm Stefania Oluarela and I was the video designer projection video designer and Ali do you want to present yourself yes yes uh I'm Ali Cronin or Alessandra and I was an assistant to Stefania as well as programmer for uh disclaimer yeah so um let me share with you a video uh this is a video we call the snack moment and yes as Alexandra said it was a whole combination about the space we were at but then the virtual world and how we showed this this this show through zoom right so let me share this first do we oh do you see it pixelated great so it doesn't have sound so we can talk over it but uh mainly we have three cameras in the room two 1080p large attacks and one lumix um DSLR and here you can see some of our special effects which is the smoke so and the border and the pistachio flying and the snack rig um so this is quite uh this is a moment where we combine both more of the visual and graphics of this cooking show and include it with the real world right um in the yeah so in the performance we had three cameras one that we used for the Sheila come that was this specific character then we had the DSLR which was static for most of the show and then Alexandra was our operator and towards half of the show this was a camera that was constantly moving um and then um the other one was more of the zoom camera at first so every time Tara was addressing the zoom world and talking to the zoom audience that was the camera we would use let me stop share over here and go back to our network a share screen network network here so this is a little bit of our beautiful um network map created by Jeff um so to kind of explain to you how we created this we had the two webcams and the DSLR uh connected to our main computer the DSLR was connected through HDMI into a black magic video capture card into through thunderbolts into our main computer in our main computer we had uh a qlab where we had programmed all the different uh camera shot camera shots all the different cameras we were command through qlab we would command which camera we would be using um as well as all the the like special effects like all the smoke all the graphics of the world of the cooking show uh once we went into the murder mystery the black and white um and there in that same computer we had the qlab and we had obs obs was our streaming platform and at the moment we were connecting that computer into another computer which was sorry this main zoom where we had the this computer where we had to zoom and we sent through virtual obs camera through ndi uh we connected into our main computer that was tara on zoom um and yeah and then we had a lot of monitors around the room so when they went into like the murder mystery part and it was the other room in the space in the apartment uh there were monitors so they could look at zoom and respond and interact with the audience live at the moment um ali i don't know if i'm missing anything do you want to add something i don't know um no i think the only thing other thing we're missing then uh as part of like a puzzle piece uh here is elie um then controlling the different aspects of zoom via zoom osc which will get into later um totally and zoom osc was in a separate computer at elie's house right we decided that we would have that separate to command and spotlight and pin and show the video of different participants audience during the zoom um so yeah that's a little bit about our network um and then i don't know um ben if you want to talk about great yes i will talk about the other the other part of this um this little chart that we're looking at um i'm ben by guess i was the sound designer on this um and yeah so for so for this version um there were a few things that we knew that we wanted to be able to do we knew that we needed um tara to be able to move around the space freely and sound good everywhere um sound as good in the cooking show portion as in the murder mystery portion um so we knew that we needed a wireless mic for her um we were able to borrow a couple wireless transmitters um that are normally used on like film um we bought a countryman b6 was the law of mic that she used um and then we knew that we needed to be able to play fun music cues um for the murder mystery section and um you know little little things in the cooking show portion also um we also needed to keep the sound system relatively simple because as you can tell from looking at this chart the video was pretty um complicated and demanding in terms of like computing power and number of computers and just like equipment um so we kept the sound we joined the sound qlab with the video qlab just so that that would live in one place uh so that we wouldn't need as many computers um and to just decrease the number of things that could go wrong um and then uh finally we needed tara to be able to hear sound cues um in order to be able to perform alongside them so we needed an in-ear monitor so that we could play the music cues um and make that especially in the murder mystery section make that sort of as live and reactive as possible um so in order to do that um actually stefania could you are you still sharing your screen yeah great i'm going to share that same thing but just have my mouse be able to move around um okay great so yeah so the the real hub of the sound system here was um this motu audio interface which um tara's mic was plugged into the interface was plugged into the show computer which was sending sound cues to the motu and then the motu was also a mixer so then the motu was sending the mixed sound cues and vocals back to the show computer um which then united with the video in obs and then was sent over ndi to the zoom computer here so motu show computer zoom computer um the motu was also sending sound cues um via this in-ear monitor transmitters to tara alexandra and jeff so that they could hear what was going on as they were moving around the space for the murder mystery portion um and then finally what's not represented here is that the audio from zoom itself was also sent to the motu so that uh which was then sent to tara's in-ear monitor so that she could hear conversation in the zoom room for the final conversation with the uncle at the end meanwhile during the show i was on my computer looking at this i was looking at so the the interface had this digital mixing interface so this is tara's mic this is the zoom audio this is the q-lab audio i was looking at this here remotely controlling that muting and unmuting her mic um i was looking at the q-lab up here it's hidden because i wasn't really doing much with it i was just making sure nothing went wrong um and then i was watching the show on zoom um listening to make sure everything sounded good um how are we doing on time oh my screen there we go uh yeah we had some troubles with um loud mic pops and um radio frequency interference so we had to at one point search around for a better frequency that was a new thing for me um and uh eventually we tried to keep me operating remotely for as long as possible um but then ultimately we sort of realized that the system was too complicated and it made sense to have someone in the space running sound so that they could keep an eye on levels and be there in case you know a cord got unplugged um as everybody was running around the space and that is about everything as far as the uh sound setup is concerned um so i'm going to pass it off to reza now to talk about lights hi everyone um so i think ben mentioned a couple of things that um applies to lighting as well one of them was um you know the film quality of this um production because i had done other zoom productions before and i ended up making a system that i was able to control lights via internet and smart balls and all of the thing that it was exciting but i think it would add additional unnecessary layers to to the complexity of this show that we i think we didn't want to do it and the other thing was because um tara the performer was moving around the space a lot so i i lighting should have you know the ability to to follow the performer wherever she was going so i abandoned that idea and we we ended up having um basically three different lighting vocabulary or instrument um system one for the stationary lighting setup for the main cooking area that i ended up using very cheap but very effective um lighting um instrument like the regular bulb and and um like paper lantern that's my favorite type of um making very soft light for actor space and um and then the other one was um using two different of lighting instrument that there are flexible there you can move them around without you know being worried about like um like uh destroying the bulb or or the other thing consuming a lot of electricity because that's another uh problem was we were actually doing this show in an apartment and the apartment doesn't have that much um um capacity to get to consume a lot of power and um if yeah i want to just share show you what i used for this production here this is one of our lighting um instrument this is we we had two sides of this led tube that we used one of them basically wherever tara was going i was following her from the top from the bottom or different angles and then the other one was a smaller one we put it in the the fire place and the nice thing about these instruments that you can actually had a uh have a fire effect on it so it was glowing and flickering like a fire coming through that fireplace and the other one is is another typical film tv lighting equipment that they are very tiny spotlight that we could you know hang them in a very tight spot or one of them it was coming from the from the table that tara playing around it and we were able to cast a shadow behind her in general all of the lighting that we use it was mostly i would say for film and tv production and we having this in mind that we wanted to have the mobility feature and color changing and energy efficiency um i think that's all i have to share about lighting thank you okay so next up we have elie and ali um if you too can talk about zoom osc this like revelation in the process um that yeah you guys can tell everybody what that's all about yeah um elie if you want to introduce yeah hi everyone i'm elie schleicher i was the stage manager in this process and inside that little bubble in that uh graphic you saw earlier i was the remote tech team uh me in my apartment so al you want to talk a little bit about this uh miracle program zoom osc yeah uh zoom osc which i will i'll share kind of a screenshot of what it looks like um is the software developed by liminal and it essentially allows us to create cues for spotlighting pinning chats all happening within zoom for this show we used qlab to program that and i thought i would just share kind of what these programs look like um it uses open sound control so osc controls obviously in the name um and we have all sorts of things going on there um but elie the lovely stage manager was the one who was controlling all of this and at the time zoom osc was still sort of in development it actually has changed a little bit uh since we used it for this show and this has been in you know the last two or three months or so um but at the time there were restrictions some features that weren't available so elie then had to do some hopping around between zoom osc and regular zoom to spotlight unspotlight whatever uh whatever the q called for um uh that was not available to do through zoom osc so shout out to elie for that because it was quite a uh a juggle i would say um elie if you want to share what that was like yeah sure so um allie if i can share something from my screen as well um stop sharing there we go so uh this is uh a real window behind the scenes of what my setup actually looked like so i was running two monitors here and i'll just sort of break down what you're seeing on them um so over here we have discord which was sort of our uh comm system um for this whole process we were uh anyone who was operating something during the show was in our discord channel mostly on mute because there were already too many audio things happening uh so that was always up for me then behind that sort of peeking out you can see a little q lab window which was sending commands into zoom osc as ali mentioned then over here on my laptop it looks like there's one zoom window open but in fact there are two um so uh the first zoom window you're seeing that is the actual call the zoom call that i was on um and it's very tiny but i was in there as elie um and then hidden behind that window is the zoom osc window which has a very similar interface to zoom uh but at the time as ali alluded to um zoom osc uh didn't quite have all the functionality that it um that we needed for this show so essentially um i'll stop sharing now um essentially what zoom osc could do at the time was spotlight individual people um and send chats to individual people or the whole um zoom call as a group um it can do more than that but those were the functions that we were particularly interested in uh the things that it couldn't do um was zoom had recently launched its ability to spotlight multiple people at one time uh and zoom osc had yet to update for this functionality and so um typically what the beginning of the show would look like is i would spotlight one person using zoom osc and then if we wanted to add multiple guests for instance there's a moment where um three members of the of a family of doctors are on screen and so to make that moment happen i would have to go into the chat um find those people that we had selected to participate in that way and spotlight them manually and so there was this constant interplay between the uh automated functions and then the uh manual functions that i was supplementing when zoom osc didn't have that functionality um i'm happy to report that zoom osc has recently launched an update um zoom osc 4.0 so this specific function of multiple spotlights um now exists where you can add people and it's sort of it knows how to understand that information in zoom but i uh the one other thing i mentioned is that um to make this spotlighting happen to automate it it draws information from what everyone is named in the zoom call and so this is another sort of manual switch that became a design feature that we had to integrate um was uh naming everyone very specifically so that zoom osc could essentially find them quickly in the zoom call um so this is where we ended up you know uh having to put uh change everyone's name to a character name and then also put that character name in quotations um this did two things one it alphabetized them to the top of the list so that they were easy to find for manual cues and two um it allowed us um to have them be a very specific name so that we could pre-program all of our cues rather than having to go find uh someone named uh stiffania in the call we could just find quote ma money and uh run the cues in that way um so this renaming functionality is still something that is manual um within zoom as far as i know it's not something that can be automated just yet but those were the sort of two things that were working in tandem um to make this zoom osc uh happen uh i think that's just about everything that we did there's one other like tidbit which is that um in fact we couldn't because of zoom osc's uh syntax um it uses quotation marks to demarcate people's names and so while it looked like we had put everyone's names in quotation marks in fact we put them inside of four apostrophes um because zoom osc uh knew what that was uh and it got very confused when we put started people putting people's names in quotation marks so um that is a little window into how we made zoom osc run um and how zoom osc also you know didn't serve quite all of our needs and so we had to supplement it with this manual zoom function as well um but by now you know i've started talking about all these things were happening i like i said i was uh far away um in my own apartment during this running this all remotely which is kind of extraordinary in its own right um but there were you know you know 13,000 other puzzle pieces happening inside the apartment um so i will uh pass it off now to uh alexandra and reza and jeff to talk about like what the inside performance looks like and just before you do that i i just love hearing you talk about zoom osc because it is also the other thing about it is that it's just so new and and ali was like on the zoom osc slack so if there was ever any issue or whatever then ali would just go on to the zoom osc slack and like ask questions and there's like a mess essentially a message for it where you can just troubleshoot all of this stuff so all of those little problem-solving things of like oh instead of quotation marks use apostrophe it's just like an ongoing uh discovery that was happening for people using zoom osc and the zoom osc people who are like the people the creators of zoom osc themselves it's a very like you know a lot of communication going around very scrappy diy community anyway sorry yeah so that's that covers i believe all of our setup um and gets us a little bit into the operating of the show and alexandra i will yeah send it back to you and i interrupted no no i'm so glad you said i was going to actually ask tara for them to talk about where where you guys were going for all these problem-solving things because i think that's so interesting too um but okay so we have our technical setup we're in our space okay yes so one of the we we i showed you guys a look at the the cooking show setup and then in order to create the sort of like heightened slightly surreal kind of magical like how is this live is this prerecorded feeling of the murder mystery part of the show we wanted to create all these like discrete little sets and i am going to share my screen again real quick um and so here is like just here's like a handful of these these little sets that we made um and uh real quick again because this is uh how we did it uh most of the set dressing here for the tablescapes all came from big reuse um some craigslist thrift shops and junk shops around brooklyn some of it sourced from our own homes and some of the stuff we we bought new and there's some ebay on here also for anyone who wants to know how to make this like weird chemical reaction that tara is looking at in the little lab setup the bottom is just water and food coloring then vegetable oil and you just pop an alka seltzer in there and it turns into a little lava lamp it's very fun um uh and the pool of blood in the lower right is uh hershey's zero classic um but anyway so we had all these tiny little sets and they're all much closer to each other than you might think in watching the show um for example if we look at the middle image here of tara kneeling by the fireplace so the whole table setup that you see in the top uh row there is just outside the frame uh on the left of tara in that center picture and uh and so we did we did a lot of like careful camera work to try and mask things in the space to help give you that feeling of like suddenly being in a new totally new space and feeling like a little disoriented like how did we how are we now suddenly in a new space and that took a lot of trial and error of like figuring out how to um uh create that illusion uh also because that um we're going to show you guys a time lapse but there's there are like monitors hidden around the space that tara is using for visual cues and that the camera operators and reza on lights were also using um for visual cues so those are often like just outside the frame here and we obviously had a few mistakes where they actually showed up in the show but um and then real quick this is the the one of the final moments of the show here when we finally see what's behind this door and we see tara in the bathroom and um on the left you see the floor of the kitchen that we've been we spent so much of the show in uh is covered in all this stuff and and the sort of detritus of the show and that happened by uh reza and jeff like hauling ass over there to to uh spread out all these props and everything and then i'm filming the floor in part to mask reza running into the bathroom to turn on the practical light in the bathroom which was not automated um and which is all just to say that there's a funny combination of like uh like tech like very sophisticated tech and very um practical uh tech and uh like i think the combination is where a lot of that fun texture comes from i want to share my screen one more time here to show you guys this time lapse and um um let me turn off the sound okay and uh yeah reza and jeff if you want to uh weigh in a little bit about how how this all worked so on your left is us in the space um that's uh alexandra operating the main camera me operating the webcam on a tripod um and that's reza with the lightsaber light um moving around in this tiny little dining room space making those different little little jewel box um scenes happen um kind of scrambling into just these little compositions and then moving um and you know uh right like i might have to scramble away to go clean something up or go make a new mess somewhere to set it up for the next scene while they kept filming um and reza's turning on and off lights you can see it go dark and then get it right again and yeah we were just sort of scrambling around this this little apartment it's like a sports commentary yeah yeah i think the first thing after um we had the the skeleton of the piece i think when i joined the the rehearsal before actually starting like we were taking but actually starting taking and putting together everything when i joined um like in the movement i was trying to find how to light the piece um i asked for a very specific cable choreography because it was everything was connected um you know with cables and a lot of wires around the space especially with the cameras so i really needed that to find my path and how to move without tripping to the cameras or or destroying the entire system so that took us a while to to figure out like what is my movement when i'm like where i'm putting my step all of the thing and um the other thing was as you see in the left video in the time lapse video is just changing the light as we are going into different different location and honestly i think part of me i could just let the light be on on the um the cooking area for for a while but i feel like even as like i'm coming from theatrical background and i feel like that lighting shift is helping us not only to tell the story but to act or to be in the mood of the you know the show as we are moving forward and the moment that it goes dark is the moment that tara is actually is in the in the bathroom so we didn't want to have anything in the space when camera is tracking back and tara is coming back to to her kitchen island so i think it's all about just figuring out that the timing the timing was the most important thing for me um as i was like lighting the live show yeah yeah like resa said there was so many um uh things getting knocked over um you know choreographing moments and then realizing they completely don't work because of something else coming up re-choreographing um and just until we kind of tweaked it until everything was just making allowance for for everything else to happen and it we achieved a kind of a balance and it became a kind of a dance um after a while um lots of trial and error um and then i just want to jump in on sound just very quickly it also even when it became its most elegant dance it still was sometimes very loud uh with just cable legs cables being dragged across the floor and footsteps on a creaky green point floor um so for some moments there were like some some strategic muting and unmuting of char's mic to try and mask that as much as possible and one thing yeah so one thing one more thing i i learned from those moments that it was in black and white you know because the contrast was higher than the you know i had something in mind for lighting and i when i was looking at look at the monitor i realized oh this is just in black and white so i don't need to be or i need to do this you know it's just something that we learned in tech as we were moving forward how to differentiate the lighting quality for black and white section and the regular color section all right so that is oh i just love this i love i love seeing Reza running around with his lightsaber it's my favorite and it really just felt so crazy like such a crazy secret that this was there were four bodies flying around this room and the audience was mostly really only seeing just one one little window into that um so this was a secret we're very happy excited to share yes um i am now going to turn it over to Beth is sitting right next to me to talk about another little magic secret revealed which is the the second time pihole has used a live printer in a show uh not the first but still he'll talk to you too that's about the live printout moment yes um yeah i'm gonna kind of introduce both moments that uh or both both of the main ways that we used um images of audience members um who were who were live attendees who were brought into the the show um first i'll say i i my role on this was that i was uh the co-director with Tara um and you think that would mean that i was sitting back and watching the zoom the whole time and you know trying to crafted with you know from a uh objective standpoint but no in our um you know in our skeleton crew of kind of covid save a small of numbers as we could get it in the space um i became a very important member of the of the run crew so i um so whenever there was something that needed to be done for some ambitious magic trick that we were trying to accomplish um i was the kind of person who was left over um to do that um so i was also helping um you like um cast audience members in the very beginning of the show as they entered the zoom um which is i think a fun thing to reveal that that was happening and one thing i forgot to say about that is that the audience was anywhere between like 70 to like 150 people in the zoom room with us and so we then there are 10 characters that we cast audience members as and we reveal that at different points through the show so so what jeff is referring to is that in the pre-show Eli and jeff are secretly casting people they don't know it yet they won't know till we get to that moment in the show but they get started on that early sorry right right and that's based on discussions that we had as a creative team about what you know strategies for casting people and the cast would be very different from night to night but we would kind of have some some strategies going into it um and then my um my next job after that was that i would be at select moments when tara would instruct the audience members to strike certain poses or do certain things that would be my moment to take a screenshot of them um which would be employed in various ways later and um i'll kind of show one of the uh one of the first so let me bring up this clip and i'm gonna show um and this one has sound so we'll just stop and watch slash listen to this moment in the hall sheila reveals to me that she has reason to believe that dr dusti whose newly a widow was having secret dealings with the nuclear program in iran and she also suspects her own brother-in-law farhad was taking part in it somehow sheila suspects dr sohrabi and mamani had caught wind of this and were going to turn them in and therefore had to die but as sheila is telling me all of this okay there you go um so in in that moment the um the audience is uh astonished to see um some of their own faces um have been um printed out and affixed to a suspect slash victim board um on a piece of paper in the house of one of the performers who's unbeknownst to them it is in colorado um not that that matters but it matters to us it matters to us that it that it was in colorado so um in order to make that happen um basically i was taking these screenshots and i was sort of cropping them so that they would all fit net well next to each other on one page of a um i believe it was a word document that i used um and and in the right order so that um in a in a one spare moment um hasan who was extremely busy over there doing toy theater with cookies and other things um so that he could run to his printer so i would actually drop the file i would make it into a pdf drop it into the chat in zoom and um in a private message to hasan he would tell me like got it and then he would download it print it out do like i think he had it down to like you know like four cuts of a scissor and and he would like stick it on to his onto his map um so so that's that's how we created that moment very very janky very analog um but still magical in the context of zoom so um um i will um next i'll share um a moment that used audience images but in a in a little more of a high tech way and in a way that actually brought together kind of all the technology um that we were using in a pretty um um kind of holistic way this is another thing i forgot to say earlier that i think will also be helpful to keep in mind for this which is that all the design stuff you saw that staphania showed where it was an image of me during the snack time and it was the border and the smoke and all of these visual effects the black and white those all happened on my zoom square because with the setup where we're in zoom and our audience is in zoom the it's we haven't found a way i don't think it's possible to control the visual landscape of everybody's individual zoom squares when you see shows that do that they're often capturing from zoom and streaming elsewhere and that gives you more total control over various zoom squares but because we were committed to having the audience be in zoom with us we only had that control over my individual zoom square so then we had this conundrum where we had these audience participants and we wanted to figure out how can we integrate in some way integrate the audience participants into our design so one way is the printouts that that just just showed us and the other way is this is in the second clip okay this is another this is one example of um of a way that we did this um we there were several moments like this but this sort of incorporates the most elements all at once i would say each of us imprisoned by our labels we sought to break out that's money new by turning to drugs and intercontinental drug manufacturing and trading ring and i by volunteering at an animal shelter on weekends and offering free sat prep to low income households so before you judge minu to harshly ask yourselves this what role did her community play in her actions minu and i shared many things our secrets our isolation like the unusual occurrence of inosculation the process by which two trees grow together with their respective roots forming a shared foundation for their union minu and i have become one okay so there's a lot going on there um during this this uh double death um monologue um and so let's just turn it over to ali so ali can talk a little bit about oh you had your side of that first yeah so so so it will go over to ali in one second um but uh so the first the first thing that had to happen was um that i had to get screenshots of those audience members holding their object in that certain pose that tara um tricked them into doing um and uh we one thing we ran into was you saw that their images were a certain dimensions because they were they were like they had a frame this like ragged paper frame around them so they always had to be the exact same dimensions and actually the exact same like pixels wide and high um so the way we solved this was in and unexpectedly once again janky way and this was uh actually ali's ingenious idea was that i um i actually put tape on my computer screen um around the zoom window and on the other screen that i was using so that every time i cropped those images um it would be exactly the same um dimensions you know maybe one or two pixels off and then when it later appeared which ali will tell you about it would correctly fit all the different maps and there was even some images that in a different clip that were ovals because they had to fit into these oval picture frames so i used like an oval mat that i had kind of mapped out with just tape on the screen of my computer um so i would take those images i would give them a file name of the character and i would drop them to a drop box a shared drop box that ali was also in um on the av computer so ali do you want to take take it away yeah um i think with many of the things that we've described tonight similarly this was a dance to achieve uh getting these images into the um qlab file um jeff would send them in the drop box and usually because i was running all the camera cues video and sound cues as well from this qlab i had somewhere between like 10 to 30 seconds to drag and drop the correct file into the correct q um in order to achieve uh these sequences um but i think it paid off because uh it's just awesome it just looks so good i'm sitting here so nostalgic of this time and like baffled by the amount of work that went into this and how insanely inventive all of this was um but yeah i mean the screenshots moments were probably the most that my heart has raced uh in the last the pretty docile sitting at home and me sitting there trying to get everything in the right place um for these shows was was really intense um but again big payoff uh in a lot of teamwork and to make that happen so as the person sitting next to you on the couch it was very gratifying uh when we would get to the end of one of these moments and i would hear you like sigh relief that it had been pulled off yeah yeah well great and um another aspect of that moment that you'll notice was the was the kind of like live animation um and graphics and staphonia do you want to say just a little something about that other added element sure um yes at the beginning was like we need to put like in order to create to make this pictures part of the world we were portraying it's like we need to put some frames and there was like almost i think it was like kind of one of the last days i'm like let's take them it'll be easy we can drop any images and ali was like no let's practice one more time we'll get it and i'm like okay we'll practice and eventually after doing it a few times it was like let's keep the frames yeah totally so yeah well thank you all i feel like for me i think the printer thing was the thing i got the most surprise surprise reacts from so um and questions about so i'm glad that we saved that one for the last so we're gonna there's some questions in the chat bar which i will read out and so um when i say chat bar i mean at the bottom so where this live stream is happening if you scroll down there's a chat section and that's where you can put in your questions um so um we have a question here uh oh there's a two-parter what did you discover from having an audience and somebody else wrote i was wondering the same thing did you ever have an audience member who didn't want to participate um so i think that there's so i'm just going to address the didn't want to participate part of that question um and then maybe there's other things that we've discovered from having an audience that people can jump in about so just as far as the audience participation goes whether you're doing it live in person or online it's always this question of navigating consent and um you know you always i'm sure we've all had this experience where you see someone chosen for an audience participation moment and they look like they just want to die and it makes you feel so bad for them and it's a horrible feeling which is a hundred percent a thing we want to avoid and uh or the opposite where you know there's so many ways in which audience participation can go awry and in the live in person version we made a kind of a joke about that like oh calling this minimally invasive participation i want to see how little i can get you to participate i don't want to i don't want you to have to say things out loud i really don't want to touch you like this is not what this is and then gradually bringing people out as we gain their trust little by little and we had to navigate that differently digitally um the circumstances were totally different so for one thing on the one hand it's less risky because you know an audience member could just turn off their cameras and say like bye like i'm not here or they can just leave the zoom room you can't as easily just leave a theater space um but on the on the other hand they're also more vulnerable in a way because you not only see them but you also see their space and they're not just one in a crowd as they are in a theater they're their spotlet and so they're big and so you know there's a close-up of them um and so we um we dealt with this in a couple of different ways sometimes we had um you know people would turn off their cameras so that was an easy way to just say like we'll recast sometimes we had audience members whose internet crapped out or something they had some technical issues so we would just deal with that by me vamping and Eli furiously finding someone else to replace them with which means finding a person renaming them so that the our cues can read that person and and still work um actually like got incredibly lightning fast like unbelievably yeah yeah yeah and invariably my vamping would just be like oh no i thought you were my uncle but you're not or like something like that um and i i don't think i can't think of any examples where anybody was eventually where they were selected and and were not um did not like consent to it i think if there was ever if i'm if anyone else remembers any of those circumstances there was one guy who like shook his head immediately when you selected him and you immediately picked up on it and we're like oh no that's not him yeah oh right right right right but we suspected it might be actually because he knew he had like really unstable internet he hadn't updated his zoom we needed our audience members to have updated zoom so that they could see multiple spot spotlighting um and that was something i had to repeat several times in the pre-show that they had to update their zoom be on a computer not an iphone etc um i i would i would say that the show tried to allow for people to participate in their own way so that you could you could be you could have just tons of fun just to have a party by yourself participating in this show um uh or you could you could keep it kind of like minimal just follow the instructions and pick up on um just what you needed to do and that was a that was a completely legitimate and um way of participating and it was actually nice to have a mix of audience members who were who were over participating and under participating and so anywhere in the middle it was really nice to have that mix because it it kind of gave a sense of different you know personas different personalities who were at this at this gathering um this is another thing that i forgot to mention is that in the in-person version we the silent assistant character who was Ali at the time would quietly give audience members instructions or guide them here or there in this digital version we had Hassan um going into breakout rooms with some of our selected participants and quickly giving them instructions in a breakout room that Eli would put them in and he would tell them things and and then everybody would get sent back in and so that's how at certain moments like Niloufar knew to put a knife in her chest or not in her chest but to make it look like there was a knife in her chest etc there were just a few more complicated things that we would have them do that nobody ever heard me say to do and so it just added another level of like surprise sort of up the ante on what you expected from the participation based on what you've seen so far um does anybody else have any other moments of discovery with an audience um that maybe aren't it doesn't need to be related to audience participation necessarily one little thing uh real quick that um you know when this show is about many things ultimately it's about preventing war with Iran but it's also about being far away from your family and which was something we wanted to tap into which was zoom allowed us to tap into in a way that was very specific to the time the being in the pandemic and everyone spending so much time on zoom and so uh we had initially we had this idea that it was best when we there are parts in the show where we spotlight audience members who aren't characters in the show but just like kind of like rotate through some audience members and we see them in their homes and it kind of gives you the sense of like people being spread out all over the world and alone you know um and we had this idea initially that it was better to spotlight people individuals in their in their little zoom squares but then we saw a couple of times that when you saw a family sitting together in their zoom square in their home like in their whole own little world it added a whole another layer to this the feeling of like of people being to the to themes and ideas around family around separation and all this stuff so that was just like a thing I don't think we could have predicted we didn't notice it until we started spotlighting some groups and then we're like oh whoa this is like a whole other kind of layer that was fun and that was that was like a fun discovery before we closed because I know we're a couple minutes over seven o'clock I also just wanted to say like um oh I love this question though oh I was just going to say that we had a technical difficulties card that we created in case we had any technical issues which we ended up not needing once we once we had our opening night um but we did have a day in tech where we lost like our power went out and so what did we get what was that thing called UPS battery backup okay we got a UPS I don't know what that is which we usually do in theater to protect our lighting console and other stuff in case of you know losing power but we didn't expect until it happened for us so our plan was that if we lost power which we'd know because some things would go out but not the important things we would you know we would have just so long for the UPS to power our stuff to run downstairs you know flip flip the breaker and then get back and up and running um so that was something we we actually thought was going to happen because it had happened I I just want to include this question because I think it's so funny there's a question that's in retrospect what elements did not feel worth the effort they took to make happen does anybody have any answers to that gotta ask the audience I guess did not feel worth it I assume that means like did not feel like oh we actually didn't need to do something we didn't need to do that in that complicated way we could have done that more simply I don't have a dumb a dumb one which is just the little cutaway where you see the bagel bites lying in a pool of blood the pool of blood is on top of a pile of rice but you can't really see in the video but which did take hours to clean out of the spaces between the floorboards so I'll be one for me yeah I mean I think that the reason like the setup got like the setup I think went down a couple of different paths that were like some of them were even more complicated so in some ways I feel like it was complicated to just figure out a system that can allow everything that needed to talk to each other to talk to each other to talk about a moment that was complicated that we ended up cutting originally we thought that there would need to be several additional zoom operators on hand to help with the spotlighting in a way that was fast and efficient like eventually we were able to get it so that the rhythm between how fast my fingers could click and the rhythm that Tara was speaking at matched up enough that we were satisfied with it but there was a good week I think a rehearsal where we were saying where Allie would step in and we would sort of alternate spotlighting people to try and get this rhythm between the different windows that we were trying to see into people's houses but that was a I think great gracefully something that we got rid of right and on the zoom OSC front it sounds like the updates in zoom OSC would at least create certain simplifications of Eli's work and Allie's work in terms of making a lot of those cues happen so on the point of technical difficulties I will remind us all that my internet did go out one day during a performance in which we were not yet fully or no we did have our technical difficulties card ready to go but just sort of emphasizing how much this was a dance not just between the people in the apartment but all of the different collaborators connected digitally that everything was fine in the apartment truly everything was working fine but the fact that this zoom OSC component was no longer present meant that we had to stop the show because all of these things work so delicately in tandem with each other and just one more one more element that was going on that I just want to kind of throw out there was that this was a cooking show or it was framed as a cooking show so there were there were a certain number of audience members who were cooking along with the show we had sent out ingredients beforehand and we really did set them up to be able to cook this dish eventually but but the cooking show itself didn't didn't bear out so I you know that was a little bit of a wild card I would say as to how and we sent people the recipe at the end of the show so that they would be able to finish it but we you know I think people reacted in very different ways to how seriously they took the promise that this class would take them through the whole recipe and how you know how they reacted to that kind of bait and switch or that kind of framing that turned into something else so that was another little bit of a wild card and of course there were a lot of people who weren't cooking at home they were just like I get it this is a theater show framed as a cooking show but both were completely again legitimate ways of participating as an audience member and it just added to the kind of experimental nature of it all yeah and at the end of the show we send them a link to the recipe and a recording of my mother giving me the recipe or like saying how it how it's done and so I think some people did not make it and were very disappointed that they didn't come out of the show with food and then other people like I got a bunch of um either texts or there were a lot of like instagrams of people like showing their sabzi polo the result and every time I was like good job good job I showed my mom she's like this is not the right color but anyway it was really cool to see how so many people actually did make it which I did not expect but of course there were definitely people I assume who were like oh I I wish I I wish the show resulted in dinner you know and which it didn't it wasn't like show's over now you have a meal it wasn't that kind of experience right but we made sure to give them the ability to make dinner out of it even if it was maybe a slightly later than they expected so all right well we are now 10 minutes past our time so I think we will wrap this up but um thank you to everybody this for tuning in and for asking questions and thanks to our wonderful design team here um for going into detail about exactly how we made this um and of course this is going to be up on howl round um if you want to revisit look at that little map and pause or screenshot it or whatever it's there for you um and uh and just so you know if you haven't seen this claimer we're making it available the recording of it available on youtube until April 5th and the link for that is on this howl round page um and uh thank you so much to howl round for making this possible so thank you so much howl round for hosting this event and for hosting all kinds of events like this um that are free and accessible to the community um we think it's awesome and thank you to Emily so for producing this event um for pihol yeah and if you if you have more questions or if you're like okay I just want to know way more about how the av set up worked you can email pihol I guess um pi pihol at gmail.com p i e h o l e d like a past tense verb at email.com and we'll pass it along to the appropriate designer try to answer your questions as best we can um yeah we want to help yep thank you and thank you so much everyone rest of your evening or afternoon bye bye everyone