White Christmas

Director: Rachel Hutchins
Assistant Director: Laura Williams-French
Tech Director: Mark French

Our second show at LCHS, we hoped to make a bigger spectacle of White Christmas. Our set designer, Mark Kuntz, put together a series of flats suspended from the rigging and anchored to the floor for a projected set.

I set out to figure out how to do it. I hadn’t had much experience using projectors in a show but I was eager to give it a shot. We purchased four laser projectors and QLab. I designed a series of artboards in photoshop matching the panels on the stage and created sets for each scene. Three of the scenes we had extra motion in the projection.

The first spectacle scene was during “Best Things”. As the two began to dance we pulled off all the carts in the bar, brought in the scrim, projection scrolled from Jimmy’s dive bar up into the clouds, and fog rolled in. This happened simultaneously as a quintet entered behind the scrim and sang along as the two performed a ballroom dance. Halfway through the dance two of the quintet began to mirror the dance in front of the scrim. At the end of the dance all the carts returned, scrim left, projections slid back up, and fog cleared. It was a great effect that garnered a gasp from the audience. *Video Below

On the train we used a long scrolling image to show movement and the progression from day to night and mirrored that transition with the backlighting of the scene.

The final scene was in the barn. I animated the doors opening and zooming out to cover the entire stage with snowfall projections for the finale of the show.