A Novice Idea
by Michael Boso
Venue, Theatre Company Team
Up with SFX - and it proves to be quite a combo.
(Part 1 of 2)
New Technical Director, Sound Designer Work Together to Bring
'Discovered' System to Life
When an historic retail
space in downtown Lexington, KY reopened in 2002 as the community's new
Downtown Arts Center, one of the building's primary new tenants,
Actors Guild of Lexington, couldn't wait to take the stage. The first
floor, 250-seat contemporary "Black Box" style theater with flexible seating,
two dressing rooms, a green room, a backstage area, and loading dock was a
major improvement from the converted and limiting upstairs warehouse space they
had gladly abandoned.
As so often occurs, however, the new Performance Theatre's sound installation
had taken a back seat to other priorities and needed some help. During his
brief tenure Thomas Taylor, the facility's first Technical Director, sought and
received approval for purchase of
SFX ProAudio/ Show Control.
And there it sat, a computer in the corner, forgotten and unused by AGL or anybody else.
Taylor soon thereafter left Lexington for a new job in Florida and the only system anyone remaining knew anything about was the marginal-quality small-format digital mixer (also located of course in the booth- behind thick glass windows) and the usual ubiquitous hodge-podge pile o' "pro-sumer" grade CD, mini-disc, and cassette players.
Enter Michael Sanders, new DAC TD in his first job out of college, and Michael Boso, rookie Sound Designer for Actors Guild.
Scene from the Actors Guild of Lexington production of a.m Sunday
Scene from the Actors Guild of Lexington production of a.m Sunday
Boso remembers, "I said to myself, 'Next time I design, it'll be on that application.' All I had to do was convince the theatre company's Artistic Director, Richard St. Peter, and its Managing Director, Steven Koehler, what I believed: that with SFX, which I had never used before, I could advance the art of sound design for their productions, and that it was a solid and reliable platform. Oh, and I had to learn how to, you know, do that."
"I basically banked all my new credibility from my first show on it. With Mike Sanders at the helm at the venue, it was easy."
Boso and Sanders met and agreed to tackle the project together. Sanders contacted Carlton at Stage Research Tech Support, who immediately found the DAC's complete sales record, updated Sanders' contact information, and supplied the most recent upgrades to SFX and the Echo Layla sound card.
Boso made a call of his own. "I called Brad at the Sales Desk. I purchased my own Evaluation Key and installed it on my home project studio PC. Honestly, I think I opened it once. The instructions were so simple; I thought I was missing something. Good file management is the secret. Loading files and building cues was just intuitive. And once Mike got the Layla patched into the theatre's speakers, I just needed a little tech support with some settings, and I had a show."
Sanders adds, "Michael and I took the computer out of mothballs and configured the Layla outputs to the speaker inputs on the patch panel in the booth rack, bypassing the mixer entirely. He wanted three zones of left-right for each audience seating area, plus two specials for specific effects underneath the audience risers. I wanted to learn the system too, so I just jumped in as his Engineer. It was fun!"
Scene from the Actors Guild of Lexington production of a.m Sunday
It's
Showtime.
The first production of the season was
Jerome Hairston's a.m. Sunday, a stark new drama about a destructive
but craftily unrevealed family secret. As Boso recalls, "The director,
Benny Sato Ambush, didn't want any music during preshow, so that was
easy enough. However, a series of lighting cues in the show became a series of
sound cues two weeks before opening." Originally conceived as gobo lighting
effects projected onto the stage floor, various date and time stamps ("Tuesday,
4:30 p.m." etc.) needed to be communicated to the audience to convey the
passage of time.
Ambush ultimately felt that seeing lights all over the floor spelling out words
like a screen caption on TV would be too intrusive to the tense physical space
captured by the scenic design. So he asked the Sound Designer if they could be
voiceovers.
"I sent Benny and the talent to my mentor,
Kevin Johnson, at Beacon
Street Studios," explains Boso. "Sometimes the simplest projects can
be the most demanding. Like in music: it's harder to play something slow
and soft than loud and fast. These voiceovers were dangerously simple. I wanted
to be sure the recordings would be exactly what the director wanted since they
would be so exposed and in the audience's ears; it had to be pristine; it had
to be perfect. A home project studio job wouldn't do here."
Scene from the Actors Guild of Lexington production of a.m Sunday
To establish the voiceovers, Ambush and Boso introduced the "aural timestamps" to the audience during the otherwise silent preshow. An intermittently ringing telephone effect also interrupted the silence of preshow, as it would throughout the play. The audience was left to interpret the meaning on their own.
SFX truly carried the day in tech week. Ambush told Boso to be ready to present an "aural montage" of all the play's sound effects (the phone, a dog barking, a train in the distance, thunder) as one top-of-show cue. To build such a cue using multiple playback devices, a mixer, and a mix-down recorder, and to make changes to the cue on the fly at the director's discretion, simply would not have been possible. The time, and the equipment, didn't exist. With SFX, it was simply a matter of a series of Autofollows and Waits.
"I think I was the only
one who recognized what a moment that was for AGL. To the director, it was as
it should be: he asked for something, and he got it," Boso says. "He and I
collaborated artistically- in the space, in rehearsal- to create the perfect
sequence of sounds. The gear didn't dictate what we could do; instead, SFX
allowed us to create what we wanted. It was right."
A Season Evolves
Next month , we'll reveal how SFX
became the standard Sound Design platform for main stage productions throughout
the rest of the season at Actors Guild, including "Stop Kiss" by
Diana Son, David Sedaris' "Santaland Diaries", and the World
Premiere production of "Checking In" by Brian Hampton.