Richard Maxwell of the New York City Players produced the show Ads in Performance Space 122 in New York City early 2010. We watch videotaped images of men and women who step up onto a soapbox — or rather appear to — to offer their musings on the state of culture, the state of their minds and any number of other subjects circling loosely around the notion of beliefs.
Maxwell removed the live actor from the theatrical recipe and replaced it with a "ghost" of a performer. Using an age-old theatre trick called Pepper's ghost illusion where an unseen actor or object is lit offstage and their reflection is caught in a pane of glass, invisible to the audience. Disney uses this effect in their Haunted Mansion attractions at their theme parks world wide.
Audience members would look through the red rectangle and see a ghost "appear" standing next to a table as the actor is lit.Richard Maxwell describes the effect for his show Ads, saying "The [images of the people] are being projected onto a screen - an RP screen - a weird projection screen, and the reflection of that image is picked up on the glass...so it has this feeling of depth.
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ReplyDeletethanks for this James
ReplyDeleteI have posted the video trailer for the show so that the reader understands what the effect looked like.
a helpful comment: thank-you for linking through to other sites. we also want to collect the important information here. for example, the way this posting reads I have to go to Huffington Post to read the article where he talks about the effect. The objective of this blog is also to synthesize the important information to this blog, so that the reader can learn what is specific to our production by reading it here, not by reading it somewhere else. This is particularly important for research as the web is inherently unstable - a link you post today could be gone tomorrow. We want to capture the important information to a venue that is relatively stable and that we control. cheers.