Friday was my birthday! I spent the early hours taking another trip to Remainders, picking up some interesting free junk and also buying a lot of very bright fabric. I picked out three or four bundles of the most highlighter-y colors I could find. I was worried I was going overboard but it cost like five and a half dollars! I haven't even unrolled these yet to see how much I actually have but it seems like plenty for what I'll use them for: sewing extremely long tubes starting at 8" in diameter and tapering down, which I can then streeetch over some wooden/cardboard branches and add some more non-realistic and dimensional elements to the show. I haven't built those branches yet but I will in the coming weeks.
Friday night we went to an escape room! Specifically Wizard's Treasure at 60OUT Hollywood. It was Amy's first escape room ever and my first in maybe a decade. We had fun! It was an extremely easy one; for just the two of us we were finished in about thirty minutes. But the puzzles had some really impressive technology, there was only one literal lock-and-key puzzle in the whole thing and it made sense thematically, and the set was quite elaborate. Certainly and unfortunately not the most elaborately-designed room I've escaped, but I've set the bar very high over the years.
I had a scary thought after escaping Wizard's Treasure, and the thought was: there is nothing I just experienced that I couldn't have created myself. I unfortunately gotta think seriously about creating an escape room now.
Saturday we saw David Byrne at the Hollywood Bowl and he was excellent. This was, I think, the fourth time I've seen him before. The first time, at the one Roots Picnic that happened in New York, he exclusively performed acoustic songs from his work-in-progress musical about Joan of Arc. (Mixed reactions from the crowd.) The other three, including at Panorama Festival and on Broadway, have been roughly the same format, band members entering and exiting with marching band-style instrument apparati and unseen wireless mics, constantly moving and dancing and wiggling. It's a terrific experience and, to my knowledge, no one else does it quite like this. There was also an enormous series of video screens making up the backdrop, including the floor, which they used to great effect. During one song that introduced the band, they had fake circle shadows on the ground that included floating nametags, and as they moved around the stage their little markers followed them (or vice versa?) It was very video gamey and delightful. I would love to see the technical setup, but I would guess that it's really simple, and everything is pre-choreographed so the video and the band's movements synchronize naturally without any kind of tracking. Great show!
Sunday was the final class for my immersive production deep dive and I'm sad to see it go. I learned a whole lot and have a much better sense now of how I might fit into a larger team building a piece of themed entertainment or immersive theater, as well as relationships with a dozen or so possible future collaborators. (We all exchanged info so some of you might actually be reading this blog post. Hello!)
Finally, here's the latest on Halloween construction. I motorized the toucan!
I spent many days and hours diagramming and pondering how to create cam-based pan/tilt control, and I landed on a few plausible mechanisms, but ultimately I went with something much simpler and less sophisticated: there's a four-bar linkage attached by hinges to a bar, and an extension on the lower horizontal piece serves as a control arm that can pivot left/right and up/down. That's then attached with some loose connections to a lever that is attached to a motor, and the motor periodically rotates clockwise or counterclockwise in a repeating program. (I'll take some photos of this mechanism when the prop is complete.) This leads to some unpredictable, natural-ish movements. I can't use this setup to make the toucan look in a specific direction at a specific time, for example, but this particular figure never needed to do anything like that, so I'm keeping it simple! The whole thing will be painted purple and yellow, sort of in keeping with last year's lemurs (who will return this year), and the big gap in the neck will be covered with some loose fringed felt. It'll also get some tail feathers and feet grasping a big long branch. Maybe one of the bright branches I make with that new fabric.
But none of that happens this week, because in a couple hours we head to the airport en route for London! Bon voyage to me!