TARGET AT THE STANDARD

Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular from Standard Hotels on Vimeo.

I did the lighting animation for the Target Fashion show at the Standard Hotel in NYC. I need to list a few credits here because it really took a village to pull everything off. This was another one of my collaborations with the infinitely talented Bionic League team - Martin Phillips and John McGuire. Amalia showed up in a pinch! Georgie and Geremy from the directing team LEGS helmed the show; Sam Spiegel of N.A.S.A. fame served as composer; Titanic-scale choreography was done by Sir Ryan Heffington and his talented colleagues Kristin Campbell-Taylor and Hunter Hamilton. I'm frightened to list out any other credits for fear of leaving people out, but I definitely need to acknowledge Baptiste, Marsi, Heidi Tannenbaum, Heather Huestis, Jocelyn Schaltenbrand, Geoff Sherr, Craig Robillard, and of course, Piers North. I'm sure I've left people out, and I apologize in advance. This list will grow the second I hear any complaints. There were also AMAZING (in caps because this is a genuine superlative) dancers involved in the show. Special shouts to the people I'd ride with from Eventi... Marlon, Denna, Kandis, Nathan, KCT, Ryan, Hunter, and everyone else who absolutely killed it on August 18th, 2010.

With that out of the way, I'd like to share a few details about how the show was done. From a technical standpoint it was fairly straight forward, but the show had many moving parts that needed to work in sync. Ultimately one of the most complicated shows I've ever worked on. There were many gags between choreography and lighting, and the timing was so tight that we needed my animations to be in sync with Ryan's choreography down to the half-second. So let's get technical for a sec...

PIXEL MAPPING. Traditional console programming was out of the picture on this show's schedule. Instead, we opted for pixelmapping through Catalyst's PixelMAD.

This is the document I handed out to the tech/creative lighting team that explained exactly how everything was being built. Each room had a Colorblaze72 fixture and a StarPar. The Colorblazes have 12 banks of pixels (which means, 12 pixels of my quicktime was going to each room) and the StarPar was mapped to pixel number 6 on the colorblaze to give the room an extra kick on big moments. All of the Colorblazes were DMX controlled over Artnet boxes. Essentially, the quicktime I ended up making was 156x16 pixels. Each room has 12 pixels (the color blaze) so 12 x 13 rooms = 156pixels and the building had 13 floors = 13 rows of pixels. A minimum height for a quicktime is 16 pixels which means my final raster was 156x16 pixels with 3 empty rows.

If you made it past that technical mess, you'll realize that I made a quicktime that was 156x16 and then we blew it up to a size bigger than an IMAX screen. The aesthetic comes out very... 8-bit.

Then there was the matter of keeping my lighting in sync with choreography. I recorded the dancers' performances on my fancy iphone and then synced that as a video reference to my quicktimes. Since the iphone has a fixed focal length, I had to record the dancers twice each time to fit everyone in frame. What's amazing is that if you look at the dancers that are captured simultaneously in the overlapping video, they're often in sync with themselves even though it's two separate takes. Here's the video reference I used up until a day before the show:

TARGET STANDARD SHOW REF from Michael Figge on Vimeo.

"Dancers would frequently change rooms, sometimes running up four flights of stairs while changing costumes and picking up props. One male dancer had an elevator waiting to whisk him from the fifth to the 16th floor — in 45 seconds. Other dancers had anywhere between 10 to 30 seconds to change floors." - wsj