Features Reporter
CMU students of different disciplines find themselves in front of and behind the camera:
Photos by Jordan Hoyle
(Rachel Boyce, as a stone for the upcoming play "Eurydice," waits patiently Video Production III students adjust their equipment.)
The actors are ready, lines memorized and in full makeup weeks before the show even begins.
This is not a rehearsal per se of the upcoming CMU production of “Eurydice,” but rather the capturing of live performances on video, which will then be broadcast during each night of the play. The actors’ faces and voices are to be projected onto the stage to interact with one another, the live cast members and the audience.
This odd, yet interesting, endeavor comes from the technical director and sound designer for “Eurydice,” Jerry R. Ditter.
Ditter has been working on digital-projected scenery and characters for the past five years, but this is the first time he has planned for the videos of three separate actors to be broadcast simultaneously, interacting not only with one another, but with the live cast as well.
“Sound design and digital projections have become the new norm, and CMU is jumping on the bandwagon,” he said.
Ditter sought out the help of mass communication instructor Greg Mikolai and his Video Production III class to make his idea a reality.
As each actor being filmed will have his or her own screen during the play, each was recorded individually, yet all still had to have their lines synced as if they were saying them at the same time. Understandably, it was not the easiest of feats to accomplish.
('Eurydice' technical director and sound designer Jerry R. Ditter feeds a microphone into the mask of Curtis Worrel, who contributed live action and voice acting to a recent collaboration between the Theatre and Mass Communication departments.)
“It is always a challenge to have live actors interacting with recorded images,” Ditter said. “The timing must be exact at all times.”
Not only did limited space and equipment allow for only one actor to be recorded at once, but the actors themselves also had to reconfigure their own styles to the new medium. Junior Rachel Boyce and senior Samantha Wittig, both music theater majors, were two of the three actors involved in the process, and neither had ever taken on a performance quite like this.
“At first we were disappointed because we wouldn’t be on stage, but we are the first in the department to do something like this,” Boyce said. Both are excited to see the play live from the audience rather than having to be on stage and behind the scenes as they normally would be.
Nearly every aspect, including sound syncing, recording, makeup, directing, and acting, was similar to watching a theater performance from behind the scenes. But for each miscue, sound error or messed-up line, the final product came together in the end. And it was something different from anything that either the video production team or the Theatre Department had experienced before.
The live recording was “a little bit more annoying to deal with, but simple,” according to Paul Richie, one of Mikolai’s video production students.
Even before the editing that will take place later, the overall view of recordings sparked the interest of all involved and who want to see their hard work in final form when the play opens April 16. “Eurydice” will run until April 19, showing each night at 7:30 p.m. in the Robinson Theatre in the Moss Performing Arts Center.
sruffley@mavs.coloradomesa.edu
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