Los Angeles Opera Uses Cinema 4D to Add Atmosphere and Spectacle to 2 Wagner Productions Hang a painting on a wall without a frame and the work of art easily loses its impact.
Put the right frame around it, however, and it comes to life, capturing your imagination. This is how it was with two recent Richard Wagner productions by the LA Opera: the four-part Ring des Nibelungen and Lohengrin.
In keeping with today's opera-house trend of embracing technology to attract audiences, LA Opera Technical Director Jeff Kleeman and his technical crew used Maxon's Cinema 4D to create meticulously designed video projections. While magnifying the spectacle of the Ring cycle in its entirety, the projections added grit and atmosphere to Lohengrin.
According to opera aficionados, an opera house only comes of age when it has successfully staged a production of Ring des Nibelungen. Comprised of four separate operas, the Ring cycle, as it is known, is not a production for the faint of heart. Most famous for the musical extract "Ride of the Valkyries," this magnum opus, an epic tale of man, gods, nature, power and how power corrupts, can easily reveal the limitations of any opera house.
Determined to make a mark upon the operatic world, Placido Domingo, the opera house's general director, hired the talented but controversial German artist and director Achim Freyer for the Ring cycle. In addition to directing the four-part, 18-hour opera, Freyer, who was then 74, was also set designer, co-lighting director and co-costume designer for the productions.
Freyer met with the LA Opera's technical production staff twice a week for three years to go over ideas for the projections he wanted to create for the Ring cycle. Complicating this old-school approach was the fact that Freyer is not fluent in English, so his direction was delivered via translator. He also used sketches to convey his visual ideas.
In all, 1,500 cues of projections were created to accompany 18 hours of music. Videos and stills were continuously projected onto a 70 x 40-foot translucent scrim stretched across the opening of the stage and the same sized vinyl rear projection screen at the back of the stage. "On a scale of 10 the Ring would be an 11 for degree of difficulty," says Kleeman "It couldn't have been done without Cinema 4D."
Lohengrin
While Wagner's Lohengrin, a romantic German opera based on Arthurian medieval legends, had a far more subtle look than the Ring cycle, the challenges were just as great. This time, the projections were to be used to create atmosphere and to frame the opera in its own discreet way. With three screens covering the entire back of the stage, the effect was a synchronized panorama that included bomb blasts, flashes of lightning and a "miracle effect" whereby the slate grey sky would shimmer and ripple at pivotal points in the opera; representing subtle, supernatural moments in the story.
The greatest challenge Alisa Lapidus, projection designer for the opera house, faced when creating the projections for Lohengrin was making them look seamless as they appeared on three separate screens from four different projectors. Disheartened by what she saw in rehearsals after hours of work, Lapidus and animator Eli Kleeman used Cinema 4D to rework certain movements that didn't look right in large-scale video format. "One thing I absolutely love about Cinema 4D is that I can mainly use it for graphics because I can get a really interesting graphic moving and animated and I can tweak it really easily," Eli says.
Cinema 4D has changed the look of productions at the 25-year-old LA Opera, which historically used 7 x 7-inch slides to project images on screens, Kleeman says. "We feel at this point our abilities visually are unlimited and it's just a matter of how you get there, what you use to get there and how long it takes to get there."
Opera Los Angeles
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