DPI:

How do you hand off a show? What is that training process? How do you work with that? Do you also take on one of those? Or share work with a designer in another area? Or work as a team? Or do you run your own shows?

Hal Eagar:

Well really the operator has to be there for the final tech, and learn to feel the show in some way. I find that video is usually not called by the stage manager, at least not the way it's done in shows I work on. I suppose it's possible, but we're talking about many hundreds of cues, so the video operator needs to be as autonomous as possible.

Maybe that's asking too much but that's how it feels to me. Unfortunately I think I usually just end up dumping way too much information at the operator at once. I'm not sure there is any other way to do it, at least not on a theatre schedule.

Generally they will watch me working for a day, and I'll try and tell them what I am doing. And in the process I often think of several more things that I could be automating. Then they get dropped in the hot seat and figure things out, while I hang around over their shoulder filling in. And this hopefully gives me time to automate those last few things, and to write up the debugging sheet etc...

We are in the process of assembling points of view from as many digital performance practitioners as we can. We thought it only fair that DPI's Director, Hal Eagar, be the first answer the questions he drafted.

The questions:
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