Walking and Talking Bulls*** : AV, Yee-ha

Welcome back to Throwback Thursday, which just so happens to land on a Tuesday.

January. The population returns to normalcy after weeks of yuletide disruption. New Year resolutions form and break within days, hours, seconds - like the snowflakes that we’ll probably get later in the Spring. Alex Robins reflects on the Audio-Visual design of BULLS*** through this blog post. January.

Howdy y’all. The next 707 words will encompass the development and delivery of the multimedia created for BULLS***, from the initial talks to curtain up. So much to cover! During the two week R+D period, at TR2 and in the Lab, the cast and creatives employed a series of exercises and improvs to build the world of the show. For further info on that, Sophie Colthurst (Movement Director) has written a blog post which you'll find below this one. But you came here for tech - the other side of the coin - the hero's journey, and I'm here to deliver it.

The nature of R+D’s is that a lot of work is made to explore every avenue of form, theme and narrative, gradually narrowing our creative palette. Nicole Redfern (Director) and I met a few times before the R+D began to plan out the base video material, mostly in establishments that sold coffee by the jug. My role here was to bring videos and images to the rehearsal room that could be used to experiment with. As such, I would make these prototypes quite quickly to be ready for the next day, leading to such amusing anecdotes as when we used trial stock footage of bulls with the watermarks still overlaid. Oh, how we laughed! Another behind the scenes scoop is that initially, there was going to be sections of the piece where projection would have been delivered using a handheld mini-projector (the same one we were using to test the projection in rehearsals with. This was later changed as the mini projector is disproportionately loud for its size, has buttons the size of ants and refuses to not show an icon detailing its current battery level in the upper right hand corner. Other R+D ideas that didn't make it into the show include; projecting location names like 'Bar’ and 'Hospital’ on a floating barrel, projecting onto, into and around buckets and projecting a cowgirl’s body onto performer Reon's body.

Repeated bull riding video motif for the show

The audiovisual centrepiece of the show was the PBR intro sequence (which I imaginatively gave the filename PBRIntro.mp4). The brief for this part of the show was to create the feeling of being in a Bull Riding stadium, through audio and visuals, within the Lab - a small studio space. To do this I started by making the logo for our PBR, taking inspiration from the real world examples, using Wix logo maker to create a variety of options for Nicole to pick from.

Ladies and gentlemen, the winner is... Angry red bull #45.

The winning logo was then exported into my video editor (Vegas Pro 14 with Red Giant Universe Plugins) and chroma keyed to remove the white background. I then added a cool stock footage background of floating particle effects and used colour correction to make it look more like flames. I used UniEcto to create flaming text for the words ‘Prestige Tour Finals’, and gave them dolly fade transitions out before the logo dissolves in. To make the logo look a tad more epic I gave it a black edge glow and blurred the edges using chromatic aberration. For the chorus of the song which was accompanying this (Jungle by the X Ambassadors) I added a layer of Uni.HUDComponents to the background. Finally, to give it a 3D effect, I used Uni.LogoMotion to have it pan around a central point. If you didn’t see the show, please let me know in the comments what you think the video I just gave you the ingredients list to looks like. Or better yet, draw it in Paint and comment with an image. Using Q-Lab to make a surface much wider than any we had used previously, alongside boosting the volume, gave this moment real scale - even if it was on display for less than a minute.

Speaking of Q-Lab, I want to thank Jamie Smith and Chris Puxley for teaching me the fine print on how to build an effective and economic cue List. By the week of the show, I was weaving audio and visuals with real panache. My top tips here would be to group cues whenever you can, equalise audio as soon as possible and if you come up against a problem you can’t solve yourself - there’s usually an answer a few Googles away.