Hedda Gabler - November 2020 - Pandemic Media Design for Live Broadcast

As the 2020 pandemic limited our abilities to do live in person theatre, the Theatre department at Arizona State University was searching for ways to present powerful drama virtually going beyond a zoom performance. Because of the media intensive nature involved, I was hired to work with director Heather Harper in developing Hedda Gabler for live virtual theatre. Excited for the opportunity to work in a new format, I dove right into my analysis of the script. I found that Hedda is a woman being stripped of power, and searching for ways to keep in control. Whether she is mocking her aunt-in-laws hat, playing coy with the Judge’s advances, or purposefully deceiving her past admirer and leading him back to his bad habits, she is seeing the world slip from her grasp and her reality continues to fold in on itself. All the while, the other characters could live perfectly happy lives totally unknowing to her internal struggle.

I developed an initial concept board, full of imagery that evoked my internal vision of the show. Arranged and gathered to also complement the mediated nature as well. How would it all look and feel as one concept?

With this concept in place, I also had to manage the requirement of the university that no actors would be able to be in the same room as another.

We decided to place each actor in a separate dressing room within their Fine Arts Center. They had green screens, SDI cameras, hue lighting, and wireless microphones. The video feeds were carried into various computers, and then converted to NDI to travel up to the control room and media machine where I would composite and manipulate their videos into a single broadcast output.

Because the dressing rooms were not very big, movement was incredibly limited. This would mean that actors if composited all at once to simulate a stage would have been more like statues, planted in place. To counter this, I encouraged the director to consider presenting the show within mediated frame environments. These frames would echo victorian wall décor, with wall paper, and gilded frames. We could then shift around the wall, and zoom in on various frames and groups of frames for action.

Because our staging needed to also occur through media, I decided to use the Isadora system. It gave me the freedom I needed to create, shift, alter, and manipulate every element on the fly. I was able to place actors where we wanted and allowed the director and I to really evaluate the show visually.

But beyond just creating a working and visually appealing environment for actors, I also wanted to introduce cinematic moments that would allow for more direct interaction between actors. We were fortunate that some actors were roommates and could be next to one another, and could capture very beautiful footage that would be played during the show. I wanted the audience to have momentary breaks from the frame visual language of the show. Little tastes of filmed quality that would bridge major moments.

Key moments, the guns, notes, flowers; I wanted these filmed. I wanted the audience to see the shine of the light across the pistols, the fire burning the notes, the flowers in the breeze, the light through the windows. Knowing how this all felt was very important to envelope the audience as much as possible.

For the opening and the act breaks, I filmed close ups of scenery establishing a visual quality of the world we would inhabit. This would set a tone for audience members to feel the presence of the world, just as they would letting their eyes search across the set during preshow.

To capture this quality, I utilized my Black Magic Cinema Camera 4k, and color graded everything in DaVinci Resolve. Actors were filmed against a cyc with a few focused ellipsoidals and pars.

I also utilized a miniature set developed for the show to create background plates to composite live actors against, as well as a miniature zoom in and out at the opening and ending of the show. I wanted to establish this model a sort of doll house in which Hedda exists. We see it at the beginning and don’t quite get the connection, but at the end, when we zoom out over the last remaining lines, we see it as her existence. Confines in which to be controlled. At the end, and the beginning, I also made sure to include the view of the stage lights. As the credits roll, we see the model sitting, on a bare stage, with stage lights above and around. It is a controlled environment for Hedda. This is our ‘meta hedda’. I didn’t want to lie to the audience about our mediated world, we are creating an imagined space, and imagined world, but Hedda is connected through it all. Floating through this theatre within theatre world.