The Philharmonia Orchestra's Head of Digital, Richard Slaney, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the re-rite project.
20 October
I'm not quite sure how it happened, but we're a week away from the start of our rig for re-rite, so it's an extremely busy time. Today has been all about measuring spaces, technical drawings and ordering cables and drapes. Fun fun fun. But I did get to go and have a look at a prototype of our Holo-screen for Esa-Pekka which looked nice, and also try out our programming on the touch table.
This project has always been about juggling lots of different strands at once, but it's still quite challenge for my brain to move from audio edits to greenscreen keying to how many chairs we need in simultaneous conversations.
7 October
Our brochure arrives today. It feels like it might be real now. You can see a digital version here.
5 October
Voiceover day 1. Today we're up at Floating Earth's Studios recording a voiceover with some of the players from the sessions - a kind of director's commentary as you'd get on a DVD. Fascinating to hear how Robin O'Neill prepares for the opening solo, how Andy Smith adds in a couple of notes on the timpani and more... I hope the audience will find it interesting, and it was nice to sit back and listen.
3 October
This evening we filmed the 'play along' film with percussionist David Corkhill - this film will play in the percussion room of the installation, and features David telling you what instrument you need to play next, with a few tips of how to get the best sound. Then the audience have a bass drum, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle and guiro to play along with!
The shoot seemed to go well - it was slightly surreal listening to the percussion part in complete isolation, although I feel like I know every individual line of the piece by now there are still bits that completely surprise me.
20 September
Just received a timelapse film from the shoot day in Watford. Gives a good indication of how complicated it was...
14 September
The photos have arrived. They look great... meanwhile we're trying to get to grip with the editing process. This involves pages and pages of timecode and trying to spot any bits where the audio gets out of sync with the video. my brain feels like it's about to crash, which might well be it's default position for the next month or two, but luckily the rest of the Philharmonia Digital Department are a lot more in control than me.
11 September
Shooting some stills for our re-rite brochure today - trying to combine music and technology by tying a violin up in network cable and hanging it from the ceiling in a warehouse space.... sounds daft I know, but Kate Peters who took the pics managed to get something really striking (we hope). The photos are on to film so we have to wait patiently for processing (seems odd these days).
2 September
After a extremely long day, today was meant to be calm. Unfortunately the job for today was to capture the footage from the memory cards in the cameras (we shot on Sony XDCAM cameras which take SxS cards). The slight worry in my mind was that a slip of the fingers could have lost everything we worked so hard to get... but the process (although long) went reasonably well.
It was also time to send all the various bits of equipment back to the many suppliers we'd hired from. Thanks to New Day Pictures for their help on this - it's a good job they're not daunted by slightly ridiculous projects.
1 September (2)
The sessions were a great success - somehow we managed to finish a couple of hours early, and amazingly the Orchestra managed to put in a brilliant performance, despite being in an awkward set-up with low lighting and in some cases not being able to see their colleagues.
1 September
The sessions for re-rite are upon us which means an extremely complex day - the shoot involves 29 cameras. In itself that's not so bad, but they all need batteries and cables and tripods, and a way of linking back to the control room. Meanwhile there's lighting going up everywhere, and black drapes so we can try and get isolation on different instruments. It's a bit like a never ending puzzle, as just when you think you're close to being right, you find that there's a camera in the back of a shot, and the whole process starts again.
