Moving Lights as Followspots

[SimonH]

Not as good as a real operator, but sufficient for panto purposes when you can get away with a bit of bouncing around

 

So you are saying that panto deserves a lower standard of lighting design and operational skill?

 

Total Boll*cks, and pretty insulting to the scores of professional people who spend a long time and a lot of money making panto (many kids first exposure to theatre) as perfect as we can.

 

Woah there! Hang on a sec, paulears. I should have said "when I could get away with...". It was in a very specific section of a show (regardless that it was a panto), in which smooth movement of the spot wasn't required, and actually contributed to the (comic) way in which it was used. I've edited the post to reflect this.

 

I certainly didn't intend to suggest that panto requires a lower standard of work. As it happens, I am in complete agreement with you, which is why for that particular charity show, I donated my time in order to give them the best lighting they could possibly have. The comment from the director was that it was the best they'd seen in the 28 years of their company's existence. Hopefully, it might contribute, even if in a small way, to raising the audience numbers and giving local kids a decent show next year.

 

I apologise that my post was badly worded, but there's no need to swe*r at me, or make assumptions about my attitutude. :blink:

 

Back on topic, did anyone see the booth at PLASA in which a camera was used to track where you walked, allowing people to interact with a projection on the floor? Presumably that kind of technology could be adapted to track individual position (and beam spread) without relying on triangulation. Just a thought.

 

S.

[paulears]

yep - I did get my 'digusted of suffolk' hat on - sorry about that. Just something that always pulls my chain. Back to normal now. paul

[Modge]

Back on topic, did anyone see the booth at PLASA in which a camera was used to track where you walked, allowing people to interact with a projection on the floor? Presumably that kind of technology could be adapted to track individual position (and beam spread) without relying on triangulation. Just a thought.

 

S.

 

I did a final year project at uni which involved taking video footage and counting people moving in it, which is in infact a fairly similar task i.e. taking an image and looking for person shaped blobs in it. At the current state of play this software isn't great and I'd be very dubious about using it on a professional show where people moved around to much. The way most such software works (as far as my research went any way) is by looking for blobs which have 2 long thin bits at the bottum (legs) a big bit taller than it is wide (body), arms (treating lower and upper arm as seperate IIRC) and a head shaped blob. There are however however about 100million things that can go wrong with this: noise on the image (espessally colour) can confuse the hell out of things (spent ages on that one!) as can shadows and reflexions. If your cloths are not as expected and thus arms \ legs aren't destint this also causes errors. What I'm trying to say is whilst is possible I'd say the technogoly was a bit in it's infancy right now for live use, I reckon theres a fair chance that it would loose the person \ swap people every now and then. Also I realise that better software exists (and software not writtern JAVA come to that!) but certainly my project was nothing like real time even on decent hardware it was a fair bit behind real time and I reckon no matter what you did you'd need an absolute beast of a machine to get it to real time. Sorry for epic reply, I'm quite interested in this one.