DPI:

What is your role? There can be a lot of overlap among design elements,particularly media and the interaction between set, lighting, and sound designers

Hal Eagar:

What I'm better at than I wish I were is the stage install effects, and control systems. Very hardware and software. And not totally in the heart of the media. I'm not much into linear editing and don't know the newest editing software in and out, and I really like atomic media assets over linked footage. I mean I like having hundreds of short files to play with as apposed to a 60minute video.  At least until the end of rehearsal and development, then when things are set you start to want a nice long video.

Anyway I was saying that to explain how I'm not a video editor, but what I am is a media manipulator.  Effects, timing, and placement.  But on stage, not on the final cut timeline.

I think I'm a decent animator, but with a narrow style set maybe that limits when that is applicable.  And it's very time consuming, so I don't take on that role in the majority of the work I do, but it's some of the most fun work.

DPI:

How many people / roles / time does it take to add media to a live performance work?

Hal Eagar:

A whole lot. Maybe one person can be them all, but it sucks to be that person. It's like shooting a film and building a interactive video installation.
DP, editor, CG, computer specialist, video specialist, rigger, ... I 'd really have to stop abd think for a while.

But I like there to be 2-3 people on the video team at least. With overlap in skills of course but maybe broken down in these areas of expertise and responsibility.
Shooting and editing, install cuing, and stage effects.
And if possible tack on an operator/SM.

DPI:

When do you join the creative process? When would you like to join?

Hal Eagar:

Well I 'say' early. But it depends on the project and my schedule. Certainly well before rehearsal starts. It can be fun to bomb in on day one of rehearsal and just build as they work. In fact I love that, but it probably does not make for the best work, and it's hard on the body to work as long and hard as that demands.

But I do feel you have to start mixing the media into rehearsal really early if not on day one. There is so much volubility to how it will work. You want to know what works and what does not before you spent too much time on it. And you need time to discover the stuff you never expected. If you don't start doing that until tech week. Or even the week or two before that then there may not be time to do anything about it. Also stuff (video images) looks so different on your screen and on stage. I know that but I still get caught by it all the time. It's can be so cool and clear to me on the computer, but then it turns out to be just noise on stage.

One thing I've noticed about puppetry is that because it's hard work, and rehearsal is harder than performance even it's good to build rehearsal periods with breaks, two weeks on two off. It gives you a chance to rest sore muscles and rebuild problem puppets as well. Well that sort of on and off schedule is great for video as well because it can take a lot of hours to build animations or shoot mini films. And the iterative process is also good for discovery and play. For me personally a break of more than a month is to much and I'll loose focus and momentum.

DPI:

Why use media on stage?

Hal Eagar:

It just seems like an obvious extension to stage spectacle to me, it always has. Now maybe I should be doing something less obvious but I seem to be good at theatre and media which makes it hard to switch gears; besides after 13 years it's finally caught on; so no stopping now. But really it's satisfing because I'm good at improvising and doing things for which there are no maps or standard techniques. If a technique becomes established then someone with more patience will probably learn to do it better and with more finesse than I do it fairly quickly. But I hope I have moved on to figuring out some new problem by then. Also art, particularly where art and technology meet is one of the sweet spots to do that kind of playful work. I would not want to be take risks or allowed to take the kind of chances and experimental approaches if I was writing code for medical devices, or even contact databases. I do engage in that type of more staid as a day job and it can have some enjoyable challenges, but it's not as playful and the results are not so visceral.

So I said nothing about why the audience should be interested yet. Well, the direct visceral results may be enough for some audience, but that's not my thought when working.

Sometimes do I think about wanting to compete with film and TV and video games but to get to caught up with your competitors may get in the way of fresh ideas so I'll leave that to the media experts, and try to approach media in theatre as a novice not an adept. And so the resasond I do is just to discover what can be done.

DPI:

Do you have a defined aesthetic prior to seeing a script? What is your aesthetic?

Hal Eagar:

Spectacle is defiantly my aesthetic, I said that maybe the work I do is not exactly the work I like to go see, but even so it's still about creating a bit more spectacle. That's the magic that makes it worth it to go to the theatre. Which brings me to the next thing I was going to say, which is that my aesthetic is not cinematic. On the one hand I hardly ever go to the movies, so I probably have one of the least developed senses of cinematic vocabulary of anyone in this country, let alone people working in video. But all the same it's not foreign to me it is the new language of images, an we use it everywhere. I think a lot of the urge to bring media on stage is to create a cinematic effect, because we think in that visual language, and maybe because the theatre is trying to compete with film. And though I probably do, do that a lot, it's really not my intent, there is no way for even a huge budget theatre to compete with a multi-million dollar film. So what theatre needs to give you is something else. Seeing someone you know on stage is one thing, which I love, but it's not something "media" can bring you.

Seeing someone create illusion in front of you, that you know is illusion and can see through, that is some of the magic of theatre that video can help create. It's important that the illusion is not perfect, and that you can see how it is done. Who would want to watch puppets that so perfectly represented people that you could replace them with actors? It's about knowing you are being fooled. Maybe it makes us feel better about this world where we can't tell reality from fiction; where we can't tell if that woman is really impossibly beautiful, or just well photoshoped. Maybe that clear suspention of disbelief make us feel safe; maybe it makes us feel like we are part of the action ourselves because we can see the artifice but we let it happen anyway and we feel what it would mean if it were true without believeing that it is.

I don't usually have time to think about that sort of thing while I'm working, but this engaged ilusion is what I want, and I think that partnership with a willing audience lies lurking under all theatrical special effects.

DPI:

What media effects have made you cringe as an audience member?

like fog on stage. Can be good but is dangerously cheesy.

Hal Eagar:

Projecting a picture of the "set", I admit It still sometimes happens in my designs, and actually the "All Wear Bowlers" example I list as a favorite was exactly that, so it's not that it's 100% bad, but it's defiantly a dangerous choice.

Another thing to watch out for is "one big screen", it's not necessarily bad, but it's got a lot of danger to it. There is a high chance of it either being dull, or drawing too much audience focus; or worse both. I like multiple screens, or heck no screens at all, just free floating media.

DPI:

What is your favorite tool(s)?

Hal Eagar:

Well the easy answer is the Computer, or maybe the Nvidia or ATI 3D card. Because maybe my favorite effect is trilinear filtering, (which is an anti-aliasing filter on resized textures. I could blab about that more but it's a bit obscure and uninteresting.

Anyway it's the software that you interact with, so how about I change the question to my favorite software on that "computer"?

Flash, it works the way I think animation ought to, with free running nested time lines.

I really like the nested structures of everything from computer programs, to little drawers, to good play scripts. Anyway programming flash has gotten more complex as they add more and more features, but it's still manages to stay in that sweet spot for me of being easy to just bang out something quick, while letting you get deep and solid and complex when you need to.

Tack a shell like SwfStudio or Zink onto flash and it's a great fast prototype development platform. And that's what theatre is, fast development.

(and hey I think the new flash beta may finally use some of that 3D trilinear scaling)

I still love PERL for the same reasons, easy to hack or get deep and powerful. Though it's way out of style now days, I should be hacking Python instead, but I still prefer PERL.

But for Video, I love Isadora. Again it's the kind of tool that hits that sweet spot. It's powerful and fast to build things with. It does not go infinitely deep but I generally find a way to hack out what I need. And it has user actors, which are your nice nested structure. I guess it's not really that nested, video is pretty linear.

I try and do all my designs with Isadora as the backbone now. I still haven't found "the" way to cue a show with it. Isadora is totally non linear in it's approach, which is perfect in my opinion, it's a really unique position to take in a video tool, and it makes it very flexible. But how to layer on a bit of next, next, next cuing on top has always seems tricky.

As for more hardware stuff.

The Matrox triple head to go. I searched for so long to find a good solution for getting multiple streams out of a laptop. And before the Matrox the pretty much all sucked.

I really like to use the BCF2000 too, it's never crucial but it's convenient, and who can't love something you can call a robot.

DPI:

What was your favorite show/moment/effect? Why?

Hal Eagar:

I love spectacle really, and stuff that either just barely makes sense, or is just so spectacular that you don't give a dam if it makes sense. I don't think that's the kind of theater that I tend to make myself, but that's what I like to go see. Sxip Shirey is all that in a totally non-video way, spectacular and surprising, and maybe for me the no video thing is a bonus too. His show "Blood is the Only Good Adhesive in Heaven" may be my favorite theatrical experience.

The first Richard Foreman piece I saw probably triggered some similar moments of wow spectacle being in audience, but that's burned off after a few of his shows.

The start of "All Wear Bowlers" were possibly my favorite 'video' moments, when the two silent film clowns walk in and out of the film. It really brings the video actors into one cohesive place. And even though you might say it's an old trick, it's still great spectacle, and clowning is all old tricks, it's just about doing them well.

As far as effects, well in Troika Ranches' 16 [R]evolutions the vision tracking of the dancers, and the use of the projection as the light source was great. There is a lot of stuff done with the tracking in the show, the most impressive is the drawing 3d calligraphy with the dancers motions, but the effect I liked the most was just the white lines or white box tracking on the dancers body as they moved on stage. This is one of those things I mean about spectacle over sense; I'm not good at interpreting dance, and I don't expect I understood 16 [R]evolutions (if I was meant to?) but I did feel that in those moments it got right to the core of what projection is, it's a "living" light source, that has a meaning itself. It hit the key points that I think make for the best use of media on stage, it was not video, and it was not on a screen, and it would not work by itself, it did not distract from the action on stage. I don't know, maybe it was not even Media, but it was a really good effect.

DPI:

What were you doing before that and how did you get lead into using media or live performances?

Hal Eagar:

I seem to have always fallen into the theatre tech even in elementary and middle school, it's a bit freaky because it's not like there was any opportunity to do it, I just somehow did. But anyway by the time I was in High school there was opportunity, and I did a lot of design and crew work. So when I went to school at Purchase being a stage hand was what I was doing to pay my way through school. (though not in their theatre design-tech program). Video and Computers were always pretty easy for me, I worked for a AV rental house doing conventions in Hawaii where I went to High School, doing low and high end video for corporate meetings. And I also worked for the Community College on Maui for a while, in their pretty decent video studio doing satellite video teleconferencing classes.

Somehow I got into a Multi-Media class in the Art School at Purchase my first year because there was no other video going on, it was all really early hacks with Video Disk players, and cutting edge "sound cards" on 286 and 386 computers that were all "tricked out". There was one system in the room, that had 3D Studio and Autodesk Animator which I loved, and all the interactivity was done in Authorware which I was just good at. Anyway the video was barely working, but I think I was good at "multi-media" because of my theatre background, and making a CD-ROM type thing was about working with a design team, not doing it all in your studio on your own like the real Art School students were being taught to do. At any rate it kept my interest so I helped TA the class for the next four years as all the computers and software got better. And I was using gopher and lynx on the school terminals, but when Mosaic came along and I got a look at that, I was right on that, like "WOW, this is both neat and still kind of sucks, but with so much potential" it's going to be like the Multi-Media stuff, (which it took it's time getting to, but it sure did get there)

Anyway I decided right there in my little epiphany moment that I wanted to explore this new medium with a theatre piece, and that's how I ended up doing a show in the planetarium full of computers and video projectors.

Actually I thought it sucked, but everyone was impressed. I guess they saw what this might be in a few years the same way I saw the web. So I just sort of started trying to head off in the direction of New Media theatre, and it sort of worked out.

DPI:

There are a lot of titles for using media on stage, and a lot of titles for those who design or produce it.

What terms do you use/like/hate?

Hal Eagar:

I really like the European term 'Beamer' instead of 'Projector', it sounds better, and is more evocative and descriptive to me of the way a 'projector' is used.

"New Media on Stage" is one term I tried to use, but it does not really seem to strike a chord with anyone, and it's a little long an awkward to slip into conversation.

I also struggle for a good term for Live / Real-time / dynamic. Because all those words have to many other meanings. And what is real and now vs. canned / recorded or planed is a spectrum not a dividing line. For instance the actors are 'really' live, but what they say, and even where they go on stage is all pre planed.

So what is more live about a 'live' camera feed then a movie clip? Or VR 3D vs. animations as QuickTime files vs. DVD's. But there is a difference, and I am always struggling to get to the more 'live' send of the spectrum.

But the term is a problem. The media is not living in traditional terms. Though to get it to live in artistic terms is the objective. And TV news has totally eroded the meaning of live anyway; they do all these 'live' feeds where nothing is happening live. And the whole thing is pre scripted.

In general we have a cultural and linguistic problem with what is real. The definition of Virtual is really "Actual" but we use it to mean simulated. The definition of Literally is also "Actually" but we have started to use it to mean it's opposite "Figuratively", which is wrong but possibly a reasonable use since literary usage is often fabricated. But really my point is that it's not only our words for what is real that is getting confused, our whole concept of what is real and live VS caned and fake is in flux. Are the MP3 files on my I-Pod in any way "Real", and at what point does talking on my Cell phone constitute "Live" communication.

In the end it's really this change that makes putting video on stage viable and interesting. And of course it becomes part of the ongoing confusion itself.

Anyway I have problems with all the terms from "digital" to "interactive" to "video" itself. I mean "Video Design" is clearly not what I do, that's what Cinematographers and Editors do, they are "Designing Video", but those two titles along with "Animator" are all better and more clear than "Video Designer". I mean "video" it's not video, TV and DVD's are video. Nam June Paik was a "Video Designer" he was doing things with what video really is, but "Video Artist" still describes that better. "Projectionist" might work but it's already used for a fairly wrote technical job, and besides the "projectors" are no more the point to me than the TV's and LCD screens, it's nothing without the media, if it's blank. But on the other hand, if it's on your TV or computer it's not the same thing as what I'm trying to do on stage; and again Cinema is something else again in a theater but not on stage.

I do kind of like the tem "dynamic media", and "media", and "mediated" and "remediated".

And even "mediality". I even call myself a "Media Effects Artist". Media, which I like. Artist, which is hard to pin down but describes how one creatively interacts with and makes the media. And Effects, which is maybe a little too vague, but gets away from "video" and points back to theatrical Stage Effects, and cinematic Visual Effects, which is more where I would look for inspiration myself.