Screens
If you were to ask me about my proudest professional achievement, the wireless projection screen system I designed for Newsies would be it. The Broadway production had three, three-story towers that moved all over the stage. Projection screens moved in and out of the front face of each level of each tower. This wasn’t technology that could be bought off the shelf, and the motorized rollers that came close were way out of our small theatre’s budget.
So I built them from scratch.
I sourced projection fabric that could be backlit to see through when needed, servo motors with enough torque to lift the specified weight of the projection surfaces, batteries with capacities sufficient to run an entire weekend of shows, WiFi arduino boards, sensors, IR LEDs, and bearings (Oh My!), and I designed and 3D printed enclosures to hide all of this within the set pieces.
Screens
Most servo motors are limited to a specific range of motion - 180 degrees is common. Since I needed the roller mechanism to rotate 360 degrees multiple times, I had to modify all of the servos. These servos had both a mechanical and an electrical end stop. The mechanical stops were physical “nubs” on the side face of one of the internal gears that stopped the gear from rotating when it collided with the next gear. A Dremel was used to grind off this nub. Electrically, a potentiometer connected to the main drive shaft sensed precise position, stopping the servo once it reached its maximum range. The potentiometer was removed, and it was replaced with two identical resistors, which tricked the internal controller board into thinking the servo was always centered.
Screens
Shown here are the infrared LED break-beam sensors, located at the top of the set piece’s front opening. There is another pair at the bottom. Since the projection surface was semi-transparent, a strip of foil tape was added to the edge of the rear face to block the IR sensors when the screen was in their path. As the screen was moving up, when the top sensor saw the IR LED, it told the arduino board to stop moving the servo. Conversely, the bottom sensor would see the IR LED when the screen was moving down, and the point when it no longer saw the LED was the point the arduino knew to stop moving the servo.
Screens
SI needed a piece of software that could trigger both the position of the screens and the images/video that were projected to them. I discovered a program called TouchDesigner, by Derivative. It’s the most capable software I have ever seen for this purpose, but figuring out how to use it was WAY over my head at the time. I spent a couple weeks reading the TouchDesigner forums, watching training videos, and corresponding with the fine folks over at Derivative to learn how to be just dangerous enough to pull off what I needed for this show.
I learned how to send Serial data out of the USB port into my Arduino master board. I learned python programming language, on which TouchDesigner is based, to set up cues that sent a binary 1 or 0 to the arduino to trigger the up or down position of each screen. I learned how to projection map the screens, so the video and images always landed within the projection surfaces.
Katherine Plummer Animation
Later on in the show, Jack draws Katherine’s face on a newspaper with charcoal. The animation of this drawing is shown on one of the screen panels. I used an image of the cast member in our production to generate this animation.
Katherine Plummer Animation
The left image is the original picture taken in our theatre’s courtyard. The middle image has been masked out from the original. The final image is the result of passing the middle image through an effects filter in an app on my phone.
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Screens
If you were to ask me about my proudest professional achievement, the wireless projection screen system I designed for Newsies would be it. The Broadway production had three, three-story towers that moved all over the stage. Projection screens moved in and out of the front face of each level of each tower. This wasn’t technology that could be bought off the shelf, and the motorized rollers that came close were way out of our small theatre’s budget.
So I built them from scratch.
I sourced projection fabric that could be backlit to see through when needed, servo motors with enough torque to lift the specified weight of the projection surfaces, batteries with capacities sufficient to run an entire weekend of shows, WiFi arduino boards, sensors, IR LEDs, and bearings (Oh My!), and I designed and 3D printed enclosures to hide all of this within the set pieces.