math is fun

hihihi

I just taught a designer to calculate lumens if you have the candelas given. I learned the thing myself only this spring (see earlier post from march) but it still feels good to be the smart one for change. It doesn’t matter that I cannot do sums, mathematics is fun.

on the move again

I got the study confirmation from DAMU today.  DAMU is the theatre academy in Prague. I’m going to study there for a year. I’ve never yet lived a longer time in a country with a language totally strange to me. I’ve been living in Finland, Germany and Austria, but I’ve spoken finnish and german before going there.

The closer September comes, the less I’m afraid of it actually. Taavi got a great job there, we’ll have a temporary apartment for the first month, I got some funding from the school and have taken several czech language lessons with Dominika online.

I sent some applications to companies hoping for some extra work projects but didn’t get replies. Maybe they got lost, maybe my CV sucks. Maybe it’s even better that I concentrate on the studies only.

I’ve even managed to move half of my stuff to Berlin so there’s a slight possibility you can fit the life and luxury of two people into a tiny three-door Mitsubishi Colt. I’ll make a photo of it. And my relatives in Warsaw can offer us a garage for the night so we don’t have to drive the whole 1500 km straight through. Life is a flower.

Music videos

I looked up some of my favourite music videos for a project consept and decided to post them here also.

Tool: Prison Sex

The colouring of this video is great. It is an artistic sepia grayscale, but the materials are so realistic at the same time that it makes the atmosphere creepy but not morbid. Plus lively lighting, this touches me.

Olivia Ruiz: Non-dits

This is so simple and beautiful I want to watch it again and again. The whole thing happens in the one crooked-angle set with shadow back projections and that’s it. Often it is thought that only expensive video projections and LED screens do the job. In this case, the back-to-earth way of doing things is truly marvelous and respectable.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Can’t stop

It’s the sterile clearness and cleanliness that fascinates me. The arrogant colours of blue, green, yellow plastic in a basically shadowless space. And it has this weird determined feeling of surrealism that I like.

Franz Ferdinand: Walk away

Embedding disabled: click here

This dramatic look of history gives you extra information. The 1960-s print colouring and glossy Hollywood-style lighting and shadows that don’t follow their owner give a glamour drama feeling to this story. It’s sometimes good to have stuff look LIKE something and stay true to that. To make associations, to give a start point to an intelligent viewer. In a modern setting, I would attach a totally different story to the characters than I do now.

The Black Heart Gang: Tale of how

I’m not much of a detail pecker myself but the accuracy of this dreamy animation rises great respect in me. Not because of the time spent on elaborate drawings, but I can imagine the work process behind the editing of the images – how these people have cooperated and agreed on things so that it matches this well together into an integrity. And I very much love the amazing fairytale world this story has.

Winny Puhh: vanamutt

This is another great example how to create a superb music video with zero budget if you trust your single simple idea. This is a great punk rock video by an almost unknown group shouting obese lyrics. Their point is simple, a black and white one-camera shoot with a tampered frame rate of syrrealistic and apt objects – a band performing to sheep, old men chanting and chasing witches. Impressive.

Zemfira: Hochesch

This video is just plain cool. The black and white cinematography that gives depth, form and movement to the images, the clean and minimalistic frames plus hooded creatures walking on air.

Let’s make things better

On theatrical practice

I’ve been offline a while. I’ll write about it all some other day. Today, I started an essay on something else that turned out as a long sob about the painful backstage of theatre life.

It happened a couple of days before the premiere of a drama play. The stage designer hanged a cloth mid-stage and asked me to re-focus the lights because they were hitting the cloth. Why are you hanging it there in the first place, I asked him. The lights are focused the way they are for a reason. The audience can see the fixtures, he said. I dont want that, it’s possible to do a show in a way that no lighting fixture can be seen, he said. I didn’t have any words to reply. This had been our first conversation during the making of the show. No, I had done all the sketches and pictures and storyboards. He had put them in his pocket at said he’d look at them later.  I think I had a totally wrong approach. We should have had a beer too many some night and talked the thing through. No sketches, no calculations. But I was too young and he was too busy to bother with me. Of course I cried many times before the premiere. It turned out well. But it wasn’t great.

In theatre, there’s the paradoxal mystery of groupwork and cooperation. Everyone’s an individual and wishes to make their wild fantasies true, on the other hand, everyone is dependant of others and can never create the very thing they’re dreaming about. And yet they keep trying.

There’s two different compromises one makes in the theatre I want to talk about. One is on the expense of reality, the other is on the expense of theatre.

The compromise on reality (the intentional compromise) – If you count out serious realism (which I’m not very much into), theatre mostly plays with the human fantasy. It’s not the fiction of the text and content I’m talking about, the make-believe that allows the characters to speak their mind in a way they never did or would or could. It’s in the action, the rules we make up for the created visual world, allowing pigs to fly and dragons to exist, heads to roll and witches to melt. I’m saying that when one goes into a theatre and sits on the chair, the deal is made to go with the story. You don’t stand up yelling: hey, it’s not real, they’re just actors on stage! The audience is expected to “believe” what we show them. They are not supposed to think that here we have a man hanging from the ceiling. They’re supposed to think that now it’s a world where gravity functions upside down. If it’s done really good, maybe they’ll really believe it for the moment.

The compromise on the play (the accidental compromise) – This doesn’t exist in the mind of the director, it is born during the creation (in this case, it’s the opposite of creative) process of the piece. It’s mostly a week or two before the premiere, when the set is brought on stage and the actors already know the text by heart. Then the sound designer drags the speakers onstage and the lighting guy rigs some backlights in front of the backdrop and the stage designer drags something in the middle of the stage the actors keep stumbling upon and the stagehands set some substructions on the sides to keep the set from falling apart. Then they all yell a lot, asking each other to go to dark faraway places for good while trying to protect their own objects at the same time. The actors get angry at the whole discussion while they’re not the centre of attention anymore and try to take sides against someone. Eventually it’s agreed on that the speakers are hung high near the ceiling (producing ugly feedback and then lowered again for the premiere), the riggers risk their life to get rid of the backlights without moving the set (and later put them up again as the real backdrop did not get made on time and they decided to solve it with lighting), the set pieces that were most expensive to make are taken backstage and never used in the play and the substructions are wrapped in black canvas so that they “could not be seen”. Sounds bad? Sounds real. Of course, before the premiere arrives, also the actors have their beloved monologues cut out of the scenes and the last-minute-ready costumes look freakishly green under the lights, at the same time the advertising campaign is promoting the artsy tragedy as a show for the whole family… but I think you get the picture already.
These compromises remain visible also to the audience. Of course they see the speakers, the lighting fixtures, the substruction pieces and the unfinished backdrop. They’ve just learned to ignore that information, look past the theatrical equipment. In some cases, these compromises have even become symbolical. If we imagine the high-visual rock concerts with gigantic stage designs and video screens, it wouldn’t be “true” if you couldn’t see a couple of kilometres of truss and black blinking boxes hanging on top of it all. We have gotten used to it and our brains don’t register it as disturbing anymore. The designers take it into account and take the stuff into use in a decorative way.

The two compromises are related. The more of technical, accidental compromises you make, the less you can have believable intentional compromises on visual reality. If you need to have cardboard sun rising from behind a cardboard hill, it can be just that. The audience makes a compromise on reality – okay, it’s just a picture of the sun that symbolizes the star but yes, we get the point, the sun is rising. Whether it’s a compromise on the play, depends on the output. You can just keep it that simple – somebody bounces out the picture on a stick and that’s it. Or you can have a lovely clockwork sun with twirling rays, an early morning soundtrack and rays of light, the wind falls silent showing that the day really has begun and the kids in the audience go oooh!

The first plain option of introducing the cardboard sun is totally acceptable in certain theatre styles, commedia dell’arte for example. Unfortunately, it is more often used in a less considered way, having someone decide that hey, this scene is supposed do begin with morning, let’s have a sun here (there’s no sun so we’ll use your sweater on a stick until we get someone to work overtime for an extra sun) and then the guys in the technical booth are “why are they waving a sweater at us” and then somebody yells: can’t you see the sun has risen, turn on the lights, and the lights go on switch! At some point the stage designer arrives at the set and throws a fit about no time or visual approval to design a sun on a stick and eventually the sound guy goes into the studio in the evening and records some improvised rooster sounds of his drunken friends to symbolize the morning sunrise. And the audience wonders, aha, what’s that weird sound, do they mean it’s morning? They must mean it’s morning. All right, let’s say it’s morning.

I’m writing bad things about theatre again. This is not always the case, this is the worst case. And that is the reason why it gets so much attention. I’ve tried to think of reasons for this and also solutions, how to make highly creative, vulnerable and egotistic people cooperate in a way that compromises are agreed on, not stumbled upon.

The reasons I have thought of are the following:

- People lack trust in their abilities to do theatre. They cramp on their one idea, refusing to see the big picture and are ready to bite everyone’s head off who wants to interact with theim, being afraid they’ll lose the grip on their only blurry thought. This is a heavy case when the blurry thought involves scientific irreality and imaginary budgets.
- People lack interest in the piece under construction. They simply don’t bother to make an effort to make it anything special, just throwing in something already proven to work in some context and say that it’s not going to work when someone offers an idea to add something original.
- People lack cooperation skills. They know what they’re doing, but are totally ignorant of what anyone else could contribute to their creation. They want to play solo and are thus irritated when some other element of the piece gets in their way.
- People lack information. Nobody sees the big picture. It hasn’t been communicated. Some participants don’t even bother to clear their part of the picture, deciding to simply solve upcoming problems as they go (do the things others tell them to or deny any possibility of doing anything others ask them for).

I think these problems emerge both in strictly planned and scheduled projects as also in free improvisational workflows.

The solutions to prevent such horrors in theatre I have thought so far are:

- On one project, to have people with a willingness to contribute, very similar working habits and good background knowledge of others’ work requirements, tools and ways.
- To have an ingenious producer who is hep to all the elements of theatre, a great psychologist and highly organized at the same time.

This is why I go in search of people with similar working habits and my level of curiosity to work with. I hate fighting. I’d love to have people talk to me about their ideas and make me think with them. It’s also wonderful when someone, after hearing out your points, says it’s totally crap and can then clearly explain, why. And it’s amazing when people actually keep their aim until the end, making it real and happening.