Doughnuts [TEAM Educational Theatre]

Written by Eoin Byrne, Directed by John Breen.

This was my first time to use dome projection. It was quite tricky. It looked great in the end but as always, I wish I had more time to tweak the video design. This production was for secondary schools and John wanted to create an immersive environment to stage it – in most schools, the only place big enough to stage something is the gym. Gyms are not suited to staging shows – very bright, painted white, nasty acoustics etc. So the idea of a blacked out dome was brilliant – quick to set up, potentially big enough for a decent audience and most importantly would create an intimate, controllable play space. Domes also have a lot of surface area to project onto ;)

John wanted me help convey a number of things – the sense of driving at speed, doing doughnuts in a car, an abstract dance sequence and dreamy out of body sequences. There was also a need for the projections to light the show with general washes and animated ambiance. I was originally going to shoot footage for this with a fisheye lens but decided that realism would have been too distracting, amongst other things, so I generated everything in 3D Studio and After Effects from stills that I shot. Most of the sequences are exterior-night and darkly atmospheric. I used heavy motion blur, depth of field and muted colour. Each sequence began as a circular frame, where, if you imagine, the outside ring would be the bottom of the image in the dome and the centre of the circle would be centre and tallest point of the dome – VERY tricky working like this.

These circular sequences then went though a bunch of processes to prepare them for dome projection. I used image sequences – distorted the image using a fisheye mesh (all the sequences were larger to allow for the distortion), then a piece of software called TGAWarp by Paul Bourke to pre-warp the images in a 4:3 ratio. Using 4:3 makes better use of the available resolution when using the projection technique I was using.

There are lots of ways to project onto a dome – from the outside with multiple projectors, from the inside with multiple projectors, from the inside – in the centre – with a single projector etc. but for all sorts of reasons – especially since the entire floor was needed either seating or stage – there was only one suitable method – using a spherical mirror. This method was also developed by Paul Bourke and everything you need to know about using this technique as well as developing content for dome projection is on his website.