Stage and scenic design: what decides how a live picture can look

The four pages in this section cover the half of the craft that happens before anyone runs anything. They are ordered the way a production actually has to take them, which is not the order most people find intuitive.

Stage architecture is first because it is the only one with hard physical limits, what the venue will carry, how far steel reaches, where a projector can stand. Everything else negotiates within that. Previs is second because it converts those limits into geometry other people can work against, which is what unblocks the parallel work. The two surface disciplines, projection mapping and LED, then divide the job of actually carrying the image. Art direction sits above all four and decides what they are all aiming at.

Why the order matters more than the disciplines

Where each discipline hands over

Stage architecture gives everyone else their budget: weight, hang points, span, and the positions from which anything can be aimed. It takes almost nothing back, which is exactly why it has to be settled first. A video department that treats rigging as somebody else’s problem discovers it as a veto, usually late.

Previs is the enabling step. It produces geometry before the geometry physically exists, which is the only way six disciplines work in parallel rather than queueing behind each other. It also settles sightline arguments with evidence instead of opinion, a camera placed at a seat in the model is not a matter of taste.

Projection mapping takes the surface model and works out what image to send so that light lands where it should. It is squeezed from both sides: it needs the build frozen, and it hands a defined canvas to whoever authors content. On a surface that moves, it also needs the motion to be repeatable, which is a production decision rather than a video one.

The LED specification is decided early and constrains everything visible. Pixel pitch, physical size and weight fix the resolution and the aspect the content team draws for, and they fix what the rigging has to carry. Specify it two steps finer than the room requires and the wall looks identical from every seat while costing considerably more to buy, fly and power.

Art direction is the one most often left vacant, and it does not go away when nobody holds it; it gets decided by default, late, by whoever is loudest during load-in. Six specialists optimising independently converge on the same safe moves, and the result is competent and generic.

The three arguments that happen on every production

Projection or LED. They solve different problems and most large shows carry both. An LED wall makes its own light, survives stage lighting and reads in daylight at a festival. Projection is dark-dependent but lands on curved, irregular and moving surfaces that no panel will cover. The argument is really about which surfaces get which treatment, and it is cheap to settle in previs and expensive to settle in a room.

How much haze. Haze is what makes a beam visible, and it is also what lifts the black level of every projected surface in the building. Lighting wants more of it; video wants less. There is no correct answer, only a negotiated one, and it is arrived at by standing in the venue and looking, which is why it needs to be on the schedule rather than discovered at the end of it.

Where the desk stops. Both the lighting console and the media server can drive pixels, and both departments have an opinion about which of them owns a given moment. The arrangement that causes least trouble is an explicit written split agreed during previs. Productions that leave it implicit find out during load-in, with the clock running.

What good looks like from outside

A well-sequenced design is invisible as a sequence. What the audience sees is a picture that belongs to the object it is on, a wall bright enough for the room it is in, and lighting and video that appear to have been made by the same person. None of that is achievable at showtime; all of it is decided months earlier by people arguing about weight and geometry.

The running half of the craft (content, live operation and lighting) is covered under real-time and VJ craft, the software involved under the toolchain, and the vocabulary used throughout in the glossary. The productions that came out of this process are documented in the archive.