 What's up everybody? Paul Garrett, filmforfood.tv here to show you how I single-handedly did the projection for a community theater production of In the Heights, a play by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Using Adobe's Premiere Pro, After Effects, an Element 3D to create the content and Resolume during the live performance. First step as in any multimedia project is pre-production. I picked up the In the Heights Libertto and read it front to back three times. Once to enjoy it, twice to see how projection would fit into it creatively, and a third time to see it in a technical light. Then I listened to the music to really get a feel for the audio side of the production. I would have liked to have seen the play live, but since it wasn't being performed anywhere near my area, I went online and found a high school production of the play, which was an ideal but still gave me some insight into the overall look and movement of the production. I went to the venue to look at the space. The venue has a 3,000 person capacity and a giant stage for them to create the barrio set. It was my main objective to create the Washington Bridge that appears in the background between the buildings. Now that I had the stage plans, I was able to do the math for my projector placement and for my cable runs from control to those projectors. When my preliminary research was done, I sat down with the director and went over his ideas and how I could help him bring them to life. Projection mapping in a live play setting is magical in a real cool new way to bring a stage design to life, but you've got to be careful not to turn your play into a movie. My main objective was to not steal the show, but to be a complementary element to the overall production. With a list of ideas in hand, it's time to animate. The first thing I needed to do was get a 3D model of the Washington Bridge and then make sure its size and angle was in tune with the overall stage design. I got stock images of the skyline and I threw those in the background and then animated 3D model cars driving across the bridge. I used 15 different cars in a whole bunch of different colors so that you couldn't tell it was the same cars driving across the bridge over and over. In the Heights takes place during the day, the night, and during golden hour. So I had to make three different versions of the Washington Bridge background, one for each coinciding part of the day. The final touch was to add moving clouds in the background and voila! The Washington Bridge background was complete. I put together some samples for the rest of the animations and then finished up around the same time that the set construction was ready for me to bring in my screens and projectors. We built a frame for a 200 inch screen using 45 feet of triangle truss and then placed it 12 feet from the back of the stage to allow my short throw projector enough room to create an image that size. We assembled our hardware and then climbed up onto the truss above the stage to hang the two projectors that were going to be mapped onto the buildings specifically for the club scene. My computer is a Windows based with a Rampage V-Extreme motherboard, 64 gigs of DDR4 RAM, an Intel i7-6 core chip, a GTX 970 graphics card, and a 1TB solid state hard drive. For my work monitor I used the display port and plugged that into a 4K monitor for the Resolume interface. I used my HDMI port and converted that to SDI. Then ran a 300 foot 3G SDI cord from my workstation to the backstage and converted that back into HDMI. Plugged that in to an Optima 1080 short throw projector which threw 3000 lumens onto the 200 inch screen at the back of the stage. For the DVI ports on the back of my computer I converted those to VGA and then from VGA into CAT 6 and ran two 400 foot CAT 6 cables to the projectors that were placed in the truss above the stage. I converted that back into VGA and plugged that into two 2400 mp projectors by Dell that were shooting 3000 lumens each at the buildings on the stage that were sitting about 17 feet away. Here's a tip. Make sure you work closely with the place lighting designer in pre-production. You've got to ensure that their lights don't flood out your projections. This defeats the entire purpose of having a projector set up in the first place. Now with the AV setup complete and your animation's done it's time to load everything into Resolume and see what it looks like on stage. In Resolume I created three decks. One for Act 1. Two specifically for the club scene. And three for Act 2. I created three layers inside each of the decks. One layer was dedicated to the projector at the back of the stage. The other two were going to the projectors hanging from the truss that were pointed at the buildings on the stage. In the advanced output settings I had three screens. One for each projector with one slice inside of each screen assigned to the coinciding deck layer. I added a vignette to each animation inside of Resolume and it seemed to help with their projections on stage by getting rid of that boxy squared off projector look. I labeled each individual clip inside of all three decks according to my projector cues and then I midi mapped my faders onto an Akai midi mix controller. My first cue was for pre-show. Something to put on the screen while everybody found their seats. This was just a still image of the bridge on the 200 inch screen with the in the heights logo over it. My second cue was triggered right when the play started. I faded out the logo and let the cars start driving across the bridge. Cue 3 was in scene 4. During the song it won't be long Vanessa is singing about a plane that flies through the sky. I created the animations in such a way to where I can trigger it in sync with the musical performance. Starting with the animation of the cars driving across the bridge then going up into the sky with the airplane flying through and then back to the bridge loop. We also had an audio person cue the sound of an airplane flying by all at the same time. All of this choreographed together made for a great little moment on stage. Cue 4. In the heights also has scenes that take place in doors. So for those scenes the lighting design would only light a few things on stage and my screen would go black. Cue 5 was at the beginning of scene 7. Now we're outdoors again. We bring back the bridge this time with moving clouds in it. During the song we decided to put twinkling stars in the background and have them slowly get brighter during the musical performance. Cue 7. For the song we see the golden hour backdrop appear on stage for the first time. Cue 8 again we go black for an indoor part of the play for the song the following scene and then we go up from black as we move into the club scene. For this scene we use all three projectors so that we could transform the barrio into a club. This scene has its own deck inside a resolute with 32 different visuals. I practiced this part over and over at home before we went live so that I could learn the musical cues and put the proper visuals in the right part of the song that coincided with both the actors and the musical performances. Coming out of the club the city is blacked out and then we transition from that to intermission with the logo fading back over the blacked out bridge. Coming out of the break I fade out the logo leaving just the blacked out bridge with the cars driving over it. For the song Sunrise I created an eight-minute long animation that goes from the blacked out bridge up through golden hour because there's a sunrise and then into daytime with moving clouds and made sure that it moves in sync with the lighting design and with the actor's performances. It also plays long enough to take me into my next cube which is going black for another indoor scene. For the song Alabanza we bring back the twinkling stars which pay homage to Abuela who has just passed away and we wanted to show the same visual that we showed during her performance earlier in the play. For the song Everything I Know we used actual pictures of our actors as kids and created an animated slideshow that went along in sync with the actor's lyrics as they were sung. The scene ends and we go back to the daytime backdrop with moving clouds. We bring back the golden hour backdrop for the song Piragua and then let that play through the performance of when the sun goes down. The final cue is the same eight-minute animation that I played at the beginning of act two and let that roll through the end of the play. After the play the stage goes dark and I fade up the logo for the curtain call and that's it. Remember to take your time in pre-production with the creative side. Dry run all of your equipment at home and make sure to work out any bugs that it has before you put it up on stage. Make sure you're up and running for at least three rehearsals so you can time out your cues and work out any technical or animation issues you have before opening night. Once everything is set all you have to do is make sure you hit all of your cues in the play have fun and watch the crowd react as you create technical magic on stage with projection during a live play. Thank you very much for watching. I'm Paul Geerit and if you have any questions or if you'd like to hire me for your next video production you can find my contact information on my website filmforfood.tv