Hi there,
I have the pleasure and the pain of directing our forthcoming production of Return to the Forbidden Planet in April next year. I am busy working on the show and want to preempt any problems now.
Does anyone have any advice on how to do the video footage both the live (Prospero and Ariel) and the prerecorded? Any footage available (planets, galaxy etc)? Or any advice on where best to obtain this sort of material?
Hope to hear from someone soon.
Helen
Full Version: VIDEO FOOTAGE FOR FORBIDDEN PLANET
Prospero's is difficult and should be a live feed as it's done to music on stage...
Most people now have a video camera which can feed that to
the mixer/projector.
The other bits should be pre-recorded and mixed with the live feed,
you can get SCART switchers to swop from one feed to an other..
The only other stuff is the monster and Prospero's tale...
You could go for a cartoon look and have cardboard cut out
rockets and planets..... That would not look out of sorts
in this production...
As far as I know Pamela, Anne-Marie and I have done the production quite
recently and have a wealth of experience here...
I did the Prospero's Tale pre-production videoing so can help there,
I'll see if I've still got a copy of the AVI files.
Most people now have a video camera which can feed that to
the mixer/projector.
The other bits should be pre-recorded and mixed with the live feed,
you can get SCART switchers to swop from one feed to an other..
The only other stuff is the monster and Prospero's tale...
You could go for a cartoon look and have cardboard cut out
rockets and planets..... That would not look out of sorts
in this production...
As far as I know Pamela, Anne-Marie and I have done the production quite
recently and have a wealth of experience here...
I did the Prospero's Tale pre-production videoing so can help there,
I'll see if I've still got a copy of the AVI files.
I think we still have our monster's tentacles somewhere lol. I also have my costume for Ariel. Was good fun that show. The approaching monster we did tongue in cheek, cos he was tiny and cartoon like. Don't know if we still have it. We recorded prospero's speech and fed the news reader out live Such a great show. Will try and add my piccies of it to my site.
Di
xx
Di
xx
Just had our last night of RttFP last night, and I had ended up doing all the AV effects.
We didn't bother with the live video footage, as we were concerned with problems with audio delays, having seen a couple of other productions where this was an issue. We just put an amusing menacing-type photo of Prospero up on the screen when he is meant to appear, and then he walked in shortly afterwards.
Prospero's tale was pretty easy- we just used a camcorder to video a few scenes beforehand ("I had nearly cracked it" featuring two bottles marked "V" and "W" with a blank bottle next and Prospero thinking of what to write, etc) and editing was pretty simple. A lot of editing packages can work wonders at the touch of a button. (we used sepia, and a few other effects- have an experiment and see what happens). We were fortunate in having a computer geek at our disposal (not me!) "FinalCut" was the most useful software, on a Mac, although it's very expensive so you wouldn't want to buy it specially.
Many of the other effects can be done using Powerpoint. Have a space scene as background, and use words, which can be made to move, fade, change colour fairly simply. I really am no expert and worked most of it out a couple of days before.
Images are very easy to find- a google image search will give you loads. Moving images are a bit more difficult. You can try www.spacetelescope.org which has a number of useful downloads- asteroids, exploding stars, etc. I believe it is also technically possible to "borrow" from VHS- an exploding Aldoran in Star Wars comes to mind, but of course there would be copyright issues and I certainly wouldn't recommend it on this forum.
I hope this helps. What I would say is that you are absolutely right to start now. For various reasons, we only discovered that we had no A-V effects on the Sunday before the show was to run, and it needed a couple of all-nighters to get it sorted. Find a good computer geek who knows about video editing and has the software. If you can do that, then you can really work wonders with the screen and sound (FinalCut does that as well), very quickly and for no cost.
There's nothing quite like the whole cast looking up to the screen expecting the face of Prospero and seeing a baby photo of the sound technician. It very nearly happened.
We didn't bother with the live video footage, as we were concerned with problems with audio delays, having seen a couple of other productions where this was an issue. We just put an amusing menacing-type photo of Prospero up on the screen when he is meant to appear, and then he walked in shortly afterwards.
Prospero's tale was pretty easy- we just used a camcorder to video a few scenes beforehand ("I had nearly cracked it" featuring two bottles marked "V" and "W" with a blank bottle next and Prospero thinking of what to write, etc) and editing was pretty simple. A lot of editing packages can work wonders at the touch of a button. (we used sepia, and a few other effects- have an experiment and see what happens). We were fortunate in having a computer geek at our disposal (not me!) "FinalCut" was the most useful software, on a Mac, although it's very expensive so you wouldn't want to buy it specially.
Many of the other effects can be done using Powerpoint. Have a space scene as background, and use words, which can be made to move, fade, change colour fairly simply. I really am no expert and worked most of it out a couple of days before.
Images are very easy to find- a google image search will give you loads. Moving images are a bit more difficult. You can try www.spacetelescope.org which has a number of useful downloads- asteroids, exploding stars, etc. I believe it is also technically possible to "borrow" from VHS- an exploding Aldoran in Star Wars comes to mind, but of course there would be copyright issues and I certainly wouldn't recommend it on this forum.
I hope this helps. What I would say is that you are absolutely right to start now. For various reasons, we only discovered that we had no A-V effects on the Sunday before the show was to run, and it needed a couple of all-nighters to get it sorted. Find a good computer geek who knows about video editing and has the software. If you can do that, then you can really work wonders with the screen and sound (FinalCut does that as well), very quickly and for no cost.
There's nothing quite like the whole cast looking up to the screen expecting the face of Prospero and seeing a baby photo of the sound technician. It very nearly happened.
For planet vidoe wise we had:
All four narration bits prerecorded (these were actually done in denmark and emailed over, as you do . . . ) Ours were done in the style of Galadriel from LOTR (again, as you do) complete with bluey glowy mad eddect at the end of A1, and cheesey promo photos for the recap at the start of act two. A photo with our narrator projected in the background can be seen here: These were on vcd played on a dvd player and projected onto our viewscreen.
'Don't let me be misunderstood' For this We had 5 seperate prerecorded sections (prospero's labs, prospero + gloria talking (gloria's face hidden obviously) prospero and a young miranda hugging - in this case my brat, , the stick up, and prospero tied to a chair, the ship blasting off etc) we switched between these (all edited to b+w) and live video of prospero. (Done with him in fornt of a video camera) There was no sound to any of the video, he sang live with the band - we set the video up at the side of the stage. The prerecorded video was manually faded in and out of during the song.
It all worked a treat - thankfully. I'll try and upload the vidoes when i get a chance. Photos of the show can be seen
here - just click on the thumbnail to see the big pic
xx
All four narration bits prerecorded (these were actually done in denmark and emailed over, as you do . . . ) Ours were done in the style of Galadriel from LOTR (again, as you do) complete with bluey glowy mad eddect at the end of A1, and cheesey promo photos for the recap at the start of act two. A photo with our narrator projected in the background can be seen here: These were on vcd played on a dvd player and projected onto our viewscreen.
'Don't let me be misunderstood' For this We had 5 seperate prerecorded sections (prospero's labs, prospero + gloria talking (gloria's face hidden obviously) prospero and a young miranda hugging - in this case my brat, , the stick up, and prospero tied to a chair, the ship blasting off etc) we switched between these (all edited to b+w) and live video of prospero. (Done with him in fornt of a video camera) There was no sound to any of the video, he sang live with the band - we set the video up at the side of the stage. The prerecorded video was manually faded in and out of during the song.
It all worked a treat - thankfully. I'll try and upload the vidoes when i get a chance. Photos of the show can be seen
here - just click on the thumbnail to see the big pic
xx
A massive thanks to all of you who replied. It is fascinating and very useful to hear how other people tackled the technical stuff. Will pass all this on to my audio-visual man and see what we can come up with. Thanks again - what a great site this is.
Helen x
Helen x
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