Footloose

Cortland Repertory Theatre 2017

     Footloose is a about a small town, Bomont in rural America where four teenagers have died and the town is now at a stand still.  Reverend Moore wields the most powerful influence in town through the church and his ability to influence the law.  The reverend has made I illegal to drink and more importantly to dance inside the town limits.  A young man moves into town and decides to change everything. 

     Since the scene of the accident, a bridge trestle outside of town, is so central to the story and the tragedy affecting the town, Mark S. Reynolds, the Director and I kept coming back to the bridge trestle as a main concept image.  We wanted to tell this story I a fluid and unencumbered manner.  The story has many locations within the town.  I wanted to experiment with projections and what I could do to visually tell the story.  I noticed the open spaces of the trestle were similar to a drive-in movie theater and similar to the windows of the diner, found in my research.  I decided to create a trestle that include 4 screens.  I had no idea how I would achieve this physically or what software I could use.  Also, the theater did not have the equipment to achieve this.  I spent the next two months learning about software, hardware and spending more than my design fee on projectors and the necessary cable extenders, cables and other gear to achieve this.  Once the engineering was figured out I set up test screens to try out my ideas.  With some trial and error I was able to control all four screens as one image and control them individually.  I then worked with the Director to find the appropriate images and videos to establish our locations and mood.

    It became the first how to sell out every performance.  There were some technological hiccups along the way.  Such as, projectors get hot under normal usage.  Combine that with a hot theater on a summer’s day and we found out the hard way that projectors will shut off automatically when overheated, even mid show.  I arrived at 8am the next morning to install fans on each projector.  During the second week I had to replace an after market video card that overheated.

    This technology caused some stress for the production crew and producers, but in the end gave us an exciting visual performance that freed the playing space form bulky scenery, left an open dance floor and helped the play move along smoothly.