The Who’s Tommy

Projections Engineer

This musical was the big season finale for the DCPA in 2018. High-budget, high-profile, high complexity.

The projection system consisted of three projectors, two Panasonic 20k conventional projectors with 0.7 lenses and one 15k laser projector with an extreme wide angle 0.36 lens.

The 20ks were handling floor projections on a large rug covering the 3/4 thrust stage. The only had a blend of ~1’ given the available lensing and throw.

The goal was to project back the rug texture to use as additional lighting and to animate the rug pattern during certain songs. You can see the effect here, that dark square in the middle was a mask for the rug texture being projected down onto the floor.

That 1’ of overlap was only around 5% over the overall raster which is rough. Usually I shoot for ~15% to feel comfortable in a solid blend. We ended up having to do regular re-focus calls to maintain the system. Not the worst thing in the world but it definitely made the budget tighter.

The 15k handled our main screen, here’s the drafting of the throw:

We went through multiple other iterations of projector setups to cover this same need (the rental of the 0.36 lens and projector were expensive, you can see these options below:

All of these options had other problems, predominately limiting flying elements and severely restricting potential lighting positions.

This is an example of the final effect, a cyc would fly in just behind our fake proscenium picture frame during certain sequences.

Additionally (it’s impossible to see in these photos) the windows in the dollhouse are TVs so we could turn their lights on and have shadow figures moving about.

In addition to the projectors we had a live camera for a couple moments:

The ELM Mapping Machine was something we experimented with for this show, controlling LEDs via a video feed, essentially making our own LED screen.

Frankly it was a pain, the tech we were using wasn’t quite designed for this application and it took quite a lot of ramming our heads into the problem to get it to work. The final result was gorgeous though.

Directed by Sam Buntrock
Musical direction by Gregg Coffin
Scenic design by Jason Sherwood
Costume design by Kevin Copenhaver
Lighting design by David Weiner
Sound design by Ken Travis
Projection design by Alex Basco Koch