Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2020 - 25

Screen captures from Mad Forest. | Images courtesy of the Fisher Center at Bard.

that the designers, director, and performers could reference outside of rehearsal.
The archive was especially important for Paul Pinto, the sound designer,
because Zoom makes it difficult to monitor sound from the machine generating
the sound. Pinto dove deep into exploring how best to design sound over Zoom
and eventually settled on having the
sound operator run the cues on her own
laptop in Qlab with audio routed to the
Zoom Audio Device. We discovered that
the "Share Computer Audio Only" feature in Zoom allowed the soundscape to
play under the Zoom conversation without the ducking that is a signature feature
of Zoom audio.
Afsoon Pajoufar, the set designer,
became a digital production designer
and created the hundreds of background
images that the performers were responsible for implementing themselves via
Zoom's "Virtual Backgrounds" feature.
In the remount, she made backgrounds

that became contiguous when the performers where shown in Gallery View;
the sequence of the tiles was dictated by
the order in which the performers turned
their videos on in Zoom. Pajoufar also coordinated with the Bard production staff
to have simple green screens fabricated
and sent out to each performer.
Abigail Hoke-Brady became a remote lighting designer and worked
meticulously with each performer to
explore the lighting possibilities in their
"home studios," including the availability of outlets, extension cords, and time
zone-specific natural light sources. She
then coordinated with the Bard production staff to have small, supplemental
lighting kits sent out to each performer.
Throughout the rehearsal process, she
shaped the look of scenes, monitored
how well the green screens were functioning, and helped the performers to
troubleshoot issues with their lighting
setups.

The costume designer, Ásta
Hostetter, had costume pieces sent to
performers and also inventoried their
closets (and even their parents' closets)
to supplement her design. She conducted remote fittings and worked with performers on their quick changes to allow
for seamless transitions between scenes.
Mad Forest is set in 1989 and broadcast television plays a significant role in
the historical events depicted in the play;
the overarching video design goal was to
use sophisticated digital processing to
achieve a feeling of vintage analog realness. One primary aesthetic concern was
to create a unified visual feel between
all the performers' different video feeds,
and design choices often solved practical
problems. Because most of the performers were working with their own laptops
or phones, filters were added to make the
cuts between webcams of various qualities less jarring.
The live video processing program,
Isadora, was used for adding live effects
and intercutting other video content into
the stream. Live filters (to create a 1980s
broadcast TV quality) were balanced
across all the performers' feeds by splitting differences.
Other aesthetic choices solved practical problems. For instance, an effective way to make green screening look
more natural is to desaturate the composite feed and then "re-colorize" the
feed with a desired hue or effect. This
technique also served well to mitigate
the differences in color spaces between
the performers' webcams. Some movement continuity between the feeds came
from adding video noise and simulated
cathode tube rolls to the output. Another
aesthetic choice was to pillar-box the image to something closer to a 4:3 aspect
ratio, which solved a practical framing
problem. The performers knew that they
could frame themselves with the left or
right edges of their green screens just
inside the frame without the edges showing in the program output.

Detailing the Streaming Set-up

The Mac-based workflow for the original
Mad Forest was very different from how
the remount was run on a PC, and neither
workflow would function with current
versions of Zoom. So rather than detail
how the team originally ran Mad Forest,
what follows is a current streaming setup

SUMMER 2020 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

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Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2020