Twenty some-odd years ago, I sat at a table daydreaming about what I’d do when I grew up.

This was well before I knew anything about computers. I did not have the slightest inkling what my adult life might hold, and I had no appreciable skills beyond daydreaming.

I didn’t have much to go on, other than I knew I wanted to have fun at my job. I didn’t know what the job would be, but I don’t remember spending much time worrying about that.

What I did spend time doing — rather a lot of time — was imagining how and where I would work.

In my head, and then on a piece of paper, I drew big white cubic rooms, layered in whiteboards, with a single light hanging from the exact center of the room.

I imagined the exterior wall full of different-sized doors in odd locations, Willy Wonka style, through which I would pick a different entry every morning. This was, I told myself, a great way to keep oneself from getting stuck in a mental rut. (You’d be trying a new approach every morning! Literally!)

I imagined a door full of doorknobs, only one of which would work. (It would not be the one in the normal spot.)

I gathered all these ideas together for the place I would one day work. What to call it? Adults worked in an office. This was not an office. An office was a place to go work on boring things.

Instead, I began to think of my imaginary building as a “doofus”.

I liked this name for two reasons:

1. You can’t take yourself too seriously in a doofus.
2. A doofus is where you DO things!

Meanwhile, back in 2012

Just a year ago, Figure 53 was three people in three different states. Now we have six people, and four of us are in Baltimore.

When the team in Baltimore grew, I scrambled to find a place for us to work. We nestled ourselves in with another company who graciously shared their building, but could only give us a month-to-month lease.

This, as they say, was a problem.

As the company continues to grow (stay tuned) a month-to-month lease is an increasingly tenuous arrangement.

In short, we needed our own home.

Welcome to Area 53

I am very proud to announce the new, permanent home of Figure 53.

This, friends, is our new doofus:

As of today, you’ll find us at 2443 Maryland Avenue, Baltimore Maryland, 21218. Right around the corner from the Autograph Playhouse, home of the Baltimore Rock Opera Society. Also around the corner from the best coffee shop in Charles Village: Charmington’s.

This is our new, permanent home. We own it. From today onward, it’s our creative laboratory, hacker space, hang-out, headquarters, home base, technology canvas, art project, flex venue, classroom, and whatever other role we can bend to the purpose of creative delight.

And?

Open-door hack days?

Co-working days?

Make our space available for classes and meetups?

We don’t know exactly what yet, but we’re interested in connecting with our neighbors and doing fun things.

A hall, a hall! give room!

And let us fill this space with people and projects and coffee and code and cork boards and sound and light and art and tools!

Photos by & copyright Shaw Jelveh Design.

A Site Specific Theater Piece in the brand new building of THOC, the National Theater of Cyprus.

Everywhere but in the theaters.

Directed by Athina Kasiou
Sound Design by Leon Rothenberg

Mission Control, with THOC’s 2 Sound Engineers (L to R) Stratos Stamatis and Giorgos Xristofi:

The parking Garage is an office:

The hallway becomes a train car, amongst other things.

Thanks for sending these photos Leon!

What exactly is going down in this venue from 217 A.D.?

Welp, it involves 102 members of the Rome Opera Orchestra and gargantuan video projections:

The dramatic video footage shown on the 50′x30′ PVC screen, shot with Phantom Gold and Red One cameras in studios in Spain and onsite in Rome, included high-impact effects and slow-motion sequences in which actors and animals were seamlessly transformed into the statues of the famous Roman Fountains in one part of the trilogy, as well as an animated sequence showing an army of pines marching down Rome’s Appian Way.

And projected using what?

“To play out the video content in sync with the music, we chose [QLab], based on a ‘go’ system,” Pascual continues. “After pre-programming all the sequences, effects, fade-outs, fade-ins, etc., during the show, the operator just clicks on ‘go’ to play out the various cues’ footage. In Rome, we used an Apple Mac Mini as a control system and an eight-core Mac Pro to store and manage the footage.” Video contractor TVI srl supplied the 30,000 ANSI-lumen projector installed 180′ from the stage — a Christie Digital Roadie HD+30K — with another identical unit as a spare.

Hey-o!

Just a quick note to say THANK YOU for your software. I do corporate —
2 hours before a conference awards gala dinner, the client runs up to
me and hands me a hard drive looking worried. Since I was looking
after the rest of the conference, I head over to ops and hand over the
drive. We were expecting a powerpoint presentation or something of the
sort — we had a windows PC on site ready for it. We open it up and
find a pile of media files (same files in WMV and MOV). Straight play
out — easy we can embed in powerpoint and away we go. We started
looking through the files and the client, over my shoulder says “Okay,
so we will need to pause here. Then resume once the winner is
announced.”. Still doable Not pretty, but doable — maybe we can just
cue up in VLC and do it that way. “Oh, and here is the holding
animation, that will need to loop between awards”. The list keeps
getting longer — lots of pause points, lots of looping, quite a few
“If he turns up we don’t play this file” etc. How would we do it? One
guy is suggesting we bring in our watchout rack — it gets quickly
veto’ed — it’s not on site, it will be at least half an hour, the we
won’t have the time to program, there is no space for the rack.
Another is suggesting that we put in a couple of DVD players, burn the
holding loop for one, split the media files at the pause points and
burn to DVD. Again, time is still a worry… but doable. I pull out my
laptop, open QLab. Within seconds, everything was imported. Seconds
later the loop is running at the bottom and clips are playing over the
top — perfect. Pause points were next, and then the conditions. Took
minutes. The vision op and client are quickly shown how to operate —
They understand it within seconds. The client — an event manager in
her own right — now thinks we are gods of AV, the end client loved the
seamlessness of the video and the best bit — from crisis to me being
at the pub having a cider with a friend was less than 45 minutes. The
company bought two macbooks before midday the next day.

Hi Figure 53 Team,

As responsible sound designer me and my partner Hendrik Maassen, we are using QLab currently on four of the eight AIDA ships. Triggered by the automation of a Cadac R-Type or a Digico SD7 we fire a lot of sound effects, 5.1 sound atmospheres, jingles, background musics, off-texts etc.

best regards from Hamburg
Malte Polli-Holstein

Curious what drives all that magic? I was too. Turns out sound designer Christopher Shutt (who won the award for Best Sound Design of a Play), shared some of the secrets in the May 2011 issue of Lighting & Sound America:

The effects are played back on a QLab system, using 36 channels. “It has to be that big, to get the right effect,” Shutt says. “In the particularly complex sections of battle, we decided to synchronize all systems through QLab — video, lights and sound — to get the best impact. Some of the explosions that carry the narrative are triggered in this way. They couldn’t be called by the stage manager, as the audible trajectory or some of the missiles before they land means timing the cue would have been impossible.”

That brings us to five confirmed Tony Award-winning shows that were powered by QLab:

EDITED TO ADD: Just found out The Book of Mormon uses QLab too! That makes SIX confirmed Tony Award-winning shows powered by QLab:

• War Horse (2011 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play)
• The Book of Mormon (2011 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Musical)
• Fela! (2010 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Musical)
• Billy Elliot, The Musical (2009 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Musical)
• Equus (2009 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play)
• South Pacific (2008 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Musical)

That means that there has never been a year that at least one of the Tony Awards for sound design did not go to a QLab-powered show. Not bad!

(Click to enlarge.)

(Click to enlarge.)

Editor’s note: Oops, we got confused about which tech table this is. Sam also works at PCS, but this one is from Third Rail Rep.

She’s a ship.

She’s a theatre ship.

She’s a 30 meter. Custom built. Theatre. Ship.

Here she is in the Croatian city of Vis:

Here she is in Hvar:

Here she is in Trogir:

By the end of her tour this summer, she visited 11 Croatian cities, 1 Slovenian, and 3 Italian.

Now you, being the smart cookie that you are, have already figured out that the audio and video on the Amara Zee are powered by QLab.

But wait…. what’s…. what’s that there?

No, not the giant heads… that thing in the back there…. here, look at it from this side:

Is that…. could that possibly be….

OOOHHH SNAP BITCHEZ

WE ON A BOAT

<sniff> Ah gee… that’s our little guy up there! Traveling the world! What a lucky little fella!

Working the sound cues on the Mac in a darkened theatre was making me a bit uneasy as there were far too many opportunities to hit the wrong key or touch the mouse pad.

Having to take your eyes off the script to double check that your finger was in the correct place ready to trigger the cue meant that you then had to scramble to find your place ready for the cue to come up.

I decided that it would be nice to have a simple “GO” button like there is on the lighting dek. The result of this is given here for anyone else that has a spare USB keyboard of any kind and is moderately competent with a soldering iron.

Very cool!