The result is a theater production for 12+. We made this thing with a rather small crew but the result is a show I am quite proud of.

Time and money concerns forced me to make maximum use of every fixture I had at my disposal. Learning from previous shows I made a sober light plot with lots of options. I ended up using my lanbox and I’m addicted to this little black box by now. Villanella used to have simple cues for light but I ended up with 4 cuelist to control chases and falling curtains. In addition to light I also supervised the audio used in the show. I created soundscapes and made sure everything blended in the end.

All sound and light is controlled by QLab. This nifty piece of software amazed me again. Rocksteady and a joy to use, even in rehearsal wartime.

I did not like the poster from the beginning :)
Did some old school redesign.

The installation was placed in Central Station Antwerp and Mechelen Station.

EGG is a project developed by Studio POK.
Kristof Timmerman commissioned Bricolage Sauvage to cover the electronics needed for the project.




Funny how EGG would have been the perfect example for my thesis about non-places.

Brother from another mother Jim and me have been working together on all sort of projects for some years now.
Bricolage Sauvage is the official name of our playground.

I started combining my work in theater and my computer/electronics skills some years ago. It turns out there are people in need for our skills :)

Costumes are the best I’ve seen in years. They are perfectly made for the actors/dancers and accentuate their movements across the stage.
Stage is mostly lit by 50 lightbulbs resulting in a warm and intimate effect.

And let us be honest, everybody likes to blow things to smithereens.
So I’m doing just that for about a month and a half.

The visuals tried to combine opera with current gaming culture. I filmed games and directed myself and others while playing. The most memorable shoot took place after I contacted the folks from a Tale of Tales and played the endless forest with the entire crew. While playing, the nice folks of Tale of Tales showed off everything the game has in store.

The most challenging part of the show was to control projections on one large projection screen in the back and on two smaller rolling cubes. I controled the one in the back with my old laptop and used my other one with the matrox to control the cubes. The cubes showed a chat and a live stream between a girl and a boy sitting inside the cubes. The stream was replaced by a recording later on because the wireless system turned out unstable. Switching between systems last minute because of new requirements didn’t help me either. I made a patch in pure data running on two netbooks in the cubes and received those messages in another patch on my laptop. The messages were routed to a quartz composer patch. I started of using vdmx, but in the end Qlab was much more reliable for automating everything (lots of long fades).

All source files can be found in this zip document. I tried to document the patches the best I could, but some experience will be needed to get things running.

We tried to simulate some of the daily habits of mineworkers. Coming back from the pit these pitch-black miners immediately washed themselves.

We made a black soap  resembling the black dirt, but only for a moment. Afterwards the soap works as intended.

Prototype (youtube):
Black soap prototype

User testing with Moske (youtube):
Black soap user testing

A while ago I was commissioned to redo the project. A bit difficult cause I made the soap manually and had only 5 left. This time I need about 500. At the moment I’m researching a faster way to produce black soap.

It uses one of the first controller/hardware boxes I made. In the play a couple of toddlers are invited to join a cruise. The boat is made of wood and metal and is surrounded by four projection screens. Stef Deneer did a wonderful job creating a wonderful world surrounding the boat. I made a rather crude box to connect buttons and other interactive toys with the computer. The visuals are made in Unity. A powerful and easy to use game-engine.

Kristof Timmerman directed and made the play and although this thing doesn’t look like a boat at all, magic happens when the kids take place and the show starts. Fun to watch.

For practicing I did their lichtshow a couple of times and my last day I ran the entire show (technical part of it anyway). Stress, but worth it.

The entire set of photos can be found on my flickr page.

Nevertheless I love fooling around with paint and try out new techniques. This small painting is the result of an experiment in which I’m using my old photographs to paint on. After using too much water the different layers of the paper become extremely fragile. The odd yellow dark grunge is the result of scratching the surface of the exposed (dark) area’s of the photo.