The Wrap

It's all over. My film director and photographer Richard Enriquez put together a timelapse photography video of the tear down and load-out... a fitting wrap to the process. Recently, I heard an interview about copywrite law. Issues of what is public domain and private/commercial domain are fascinating to me, but I was also drawn to the idea of what is permanent and what is ephemeral. Movies, music recordings, and books are all (essentially) permanent; theatre is ephemeral. And as much as I will miss this show and everyone in it, there's something beautiful in the fact that it has a lifespan, that it will persist only as feeling and memory. I decided that this blog, which was designed as a rough and tumble, unpolished diary, should also have a limited life. So come March, I'll be taking it down. Should Second Wind decide to blog another project, it may reappear. So, as au revoir:

Multi Media

The show is done and in a day or so I'll post our time-lapse photography of the tear down and load-out. But for now I promised my brother that I'd post a segment on the mult-media/performance art aspects of the show. It's somewhat theory based (how the media interacts with the themes and dramatic action). And I've been plagued with technical difficulties: the auto exposure meter on the camera didn't lock and it jumps in a very irritating fashion. Also, the video wouldn't upload to my blog yesterday, so for the time being I'm posting it at vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/3188442 .

This, of course, is a fine lesson in multimedia. Multimedia technology yearns to screw up. Two days before opening I reached the conclusion that my laptop wasn't powerful enough to run the video smoothly. We bought another (an expense not accounted for in the budget), loaded it with the programs and files, tweaked, and programmed. That night-- our final dress-- we discovered it had a bad power board and it died before the run. I took it in the following day thinking that it was the power cord. By the time we worked it out, it was too late to contact the software distributed (who had placed a limited number of downloads per purchase), and we had to gerry-rig the show another way. Finally on Opening, without ever testing the computer/software/programming in a full run, we opened the show to a full house. The lesson? Always have back-up. Though we never had a significant tech malfunction after that, we always had a spare computer and a spare projector in the theatre.

So this video entry goes out to the Performance Art class at UCD.

http://www.vimeo.com/3188442