| |
| |
|
Showcases
Evil Dead: The Musical
|
Evil
Dead : The Musical
By
Richard Ingraham
So your theatre chooses to do a musical
production of the movie Evil Dead? OK, no problem, you say?
But did they mention that in addition to needing mics for 8 cast members and
3 band members that there would also be video projections, blood being
sprayed right into the face of some of the actors (while they are signing a
song none the less), headless bodies, your In House Mix Position must fit
into the space of about one and a half seats at the end of an aisle, shotgun
blasts, plenty of spooky sound effects, chainsaws, heavy usage of live
vocal processing and large amounts of blood being sprayed into and dumped on
audience members that choose to sit in the splatter zone? |
|
This was the fun challenge
that I faced in working on Evil Dead, The Musical at Beck Center for
the Arts in Lakewood, OH this past May. Having never seen any of the
movies that created the cult following I wasn't really sure what to expect.
But just like the movies this play has a huge cult following and has turned
into the longest running production in the history of The Beck Center, with
several patrons coming back multiple times. (The production has been
extended two times from its original run of 6 weeks)
The small Studio Theatre at
Beck Center presents many challenges to the sound designer, especially when
trying to do reinforcement for musical theatre. While the space is
only about 80 seats, the seating layout is an L shaped arrangement which is
only 4 rows deep at the most but very wide. Of course since its a
studio theatre the seating is located very close to stage. Getting
enough gain before feedback on wireless hairline microphones can be a
challenge in this space. Put the speakers back far enough to cover the
wide spread of the audience area and you will never get enough gain before
feedback on the wireless microphones since the cast members will be mostly
in front of the speakers. So in order to reach acceptable volume
levels a more distributed system of speakers is needed. Using a larger
number of smaller speakers gave us not only the gain before feedback needed,
but also the ability to move spooky zombie sounds around the room.
The speakers are basically
broken up into 2 systems. Four 12 2-way speaker cabinets were used
primarily for vocal reinforcement, while six smaller speakers were used
primarily for sound effects playback and to pump the audio of the band into
the room. (The band is located backstage, in a separate room from the
audience and actors.) A subwoofer and a speaker for the band to hear
the sound effects playback round out the 12 speaker sound system.
The audio playback consists of
many shotgun blasts, several minutes of the iconic chainsaw, a fathers voice
on a small cassette recorder and plenty of evil voice-overs and other spooky
sounds. SFX 6 was used for all of the audio playback in the
show. The full output matrix in version 6 made routing sounds to the
12 different speakers a breeze. Although the four larger speakers in
the system were largely used for vocal reinforcement, in order to achieve
the volume levels needed, some of the sound effects were routed into them as
well. |
|
SFX 6 Screen Shot Main Cue List
that the Stage Manager triggers
|
|
Video projection playback turned out to be fairly simple with only a handful
of video cues. Most were just still images that needed to fade in and
fade out. Only one of the clips was actual video. (An animation
of the Book of the Dead at the top of the show) So for the playback of
the video I just made use of Stage Research's Video 101 extension.
Video 101 was handled by a separate computer from the computer running SFX
6, however all the cues to run the Video 101 system were contained in the
SFX 6 Cue List. Since most of the projections were still images, I
just used a video editor (Sonys' Vegas software) to covert the .jpg still
image into short .avi files. The top of the .avi file was the fade in
and the end of the .avi file was a fade out. So during the show,
SFX sends a Play command to Video 101 to start the .avi clip. It
fades in over a period of time (most fade times were 1 second but some were
longer), then SFX sends Video 101 a Stop command. So the .avi
file will stop playing but a still image is displayed via the projector.
When its time to fade a projection out, SFX will send a Play command
to Video 101 again, and that will play the end of the .avi file which is a
fade out. At first I was going to use PowerPoint for our projections
and trigger it using Stage Research's PowerPoint Manager, since most of them
were still images, however the theatre doesn't have Office 2007, so I
couldn't use PowerPoint 2007 which is required to use the PowerPoint Manger.
But after having used Video 101 in this manner, I think I actually like this
much better, since I have a lot more control over fade times and by using
Vegas for the video editing it gave me a lot more tools to tinker with and
correct problems.
|
|
SFX 6 Screen Shot Video 101
Cues, for simple still images |
|
SFX 6 Screen Shot
Video 101 Cues, for the Book of the Dead opening animation.
Timecode was used to start and stop the animation at key points so the
animation would match the speed of the opening voice over. |
|
Since space at the In House Mix Position was
at a premium I elected to put the SFX computer, the Video 101
computer and all the amplifiers in our control booth, where our Stage
Manager operates the SFX computer and the lighting console during the
run of the show. Which leads us to what was my biggest challenge
during this show; this venue only has room for a very tiny In House Mix
Position at the end of an aisle. This proves quite a challenge when
any sort of reinforcement is needed in this venue. In the past I was
able to fit in a Yamaha 01V digital mixer and the wireless rack was placed
under the seating risers. My first thought was to do something similar
for this show, however I really wanted some fairly sophisticated live
effects processing as well. While I like the 01V in general and I find
it has decent EQ and Dynamics and serviceable reverb effects, it simply
didn't have enough depth and variety of effects processing for what I wanted
on this production. So my first thought was to put a computer at the
In House Mix Position with my TC Electronics PowerCore card, and I
would let that computer provide the more advanced pitch shifting and chorus
effects I was looking for. So I started a search to find some software
that was simple and easy to use that could be a VST effects host for the
PowerCore plug-ins but also allowed me to automate the plug-ins and
control routing. In my search I ended up being side tracked and
found what ended up being a much more elegant solution to my space issues
and will likely change the way I want to mix musicals from this point on.
Enter SAC. |
|
The In House Mix Position: Studio
Theatre:Beck Center for the Arts |
The view from the board ops seat. |
|
SAC is an acronym for Software Audio Console.
It is a virtual software mixing console from RML Labs. My first reason
for taking a look at SAC was because it could host VST plug-ins and since it
was a full blown mixer in software, I figured it would give me plenty of
control for routing one plug-in to another or mixing multiple plug-ins
together. However I quickly realized that it would be much more useful
if I just mixed the entire show using SAC alone. I spent some time
working with the demo of the product to make sure it would be able to do
what I needed it to do. While there seemed to be plenty of happy
customers in the forums on the RML web site, I didn't see any theatre sound
designers in the forum. After some experimenting with the demo, I
purchased a copy of SAC and assembled a SAC system around an Echo Layla 24 I
had in my stock. SAC became the one missing link in my system for Evil
Dead. I was able to mix all the wireless and band mics with SAC.
SAC provided all the effects processing I needed for the show via a
combination of a some free VST plug-ins I found and the delay plug-in that
is included with SAC. I've worked
with many different digital consoles over the years, none of the really
expensive models mind you, but most of the Yamaha line and a few others as
well. While they have always provided great bang for the buck and are
far more compact than an equivalent sized analog mixing console, I have
always felt like I had to wrestle with them or jump through a bunch of hoops
in order to achieve the type of automation I really wanted for some
productions. With my use of SAC in this show, I didn't really feel
that way. SAC has some unique features that I did have to modify my
working methods to. But overall it was a very positive experience and
for the first time in my work with digital mixing I was able to write cues
for my board op that did exactly what I wanted to do, without having to
tinker around with various recall safes or using an external application to
do all the automation. For example I was easily able to write a cue
that fades up the aux sends on just 2 channels over 2 seconds. Or
another cue that fades them back down over 4 seconds. Not only did I
finally have the automation I always desired for a show, but SAC allows for
remote clients to log into the system. So you could place the SAC
computer anywhere in the venue and just set up a laptop and a control
surface at your In House Mix Position and run the show that way. I
didn't get that adventurous this time out; I put the SAC computer at the In
House Mix Position along with the wireless receivers. But I was able
to run the SAC remote software on my laptop at my tech table during
technical rehearsals and adjust any parameter I wanted on the fly. I
used an old Yamaha ProMix 01 as a control surface for my board op to run the
show. During technical rehearsals I used a CM Labs Motormix control
surface with my laptop at the tech table. So both my board op and I
had separate control surfaces and were able to address any part of the
mixing console simultaneously.
The SAC computer mixed all the live audio
and that was sent to the control booth via a Hear Technologies ADAT Extender
which converts ADAT Lightpipe to CAT5 cable and back. In the control
booth the Gina 24 sound card on the SFX computer mixed the live audio
and the playback from SFX together and routed it to the various
speakers. |
|
 |
This is the first production I've worked on
where the only hardware used for the sound system (other than the computers)
was the microphones, amplifiers and speakers. Every other task was
performed virtually in a computer via software. It was an experiment
to say the least and I did have a backup plan ready (at least in my head) in
case it simply didn't work out. But after having worked this way on
this production, I have to say that I don't really want to go back. I
am going to continue down this virtual sound system path in the future and
cannot wait to use this method again.
Richard B. Ingraham
RBI Computers and Audio
http://www.rbicompaudio.20m.com/
Stage Research Inc.
http://www.stageresearch.com/
RML Labs
http://www.softwareaudioconsole.com/ |
|
|
| |
|