The Last Defender

Projections / Technology Engineer

Yup, technology engineer isn’t really a thing. It’s the closest to what I actually did for this production.

This was an escape room style experience installed in the basement of an apartment building by the DCPA as a co-production with the House Theater of Chicago. This was the second run, but we upped the resource allocation significantly and as a result large parts of the project were rebuilds / re-dos.

It was a 16-player experience where teams would four even teams would be formed. They would then go around solving various puzzles, first digital ones powered by Raspberry Pis in arcade cabinets, then more traditional escape room style challenges. The end goal was to call off a retaliatory nuclear strike in the height of the cold war.

Here you can see a shot from tech, the space was very cramped, even more so with all the people.

My responsibilities on this project were to manage the video and technological aspects.

Video

The video aspect of this project was comparatively simple: front projection blend over a tri-wing screen. Various video cues would be triggered by puzzles around the room (more on that later). The low ceiling in this space was rough, there were very few possible options to make the throw we were going for.

We ended up combining these options, putting the projectors downstage of the screen but blending two together. Very stable system for the entire run.

Technology

Technology was what we referred to planning and building the show control system as well as generating all the various boards for the Raspberry Pis to interact with the various systems. We had an outside software developer come in and write the code.

For example, here’s one of the diagrams I made for the team assembling these boards:

And a photo of the finished product (the internals of the Intelligence console):

We utilized solder-in breadboards and made modular replacements. If the board handling the various button inputs went down we’d have another we could just swap right in using the spade connectors.

Overall one of the larger and more complicated projects I’ve been involved in.