Secondary Materials
Henry V - Assistant Editor
Radio Play at UNC School of the Arts
Director: Sara Becker
Sound Design and Composition: Ian Vespermann
Assistant Sound Designer: Weston Felker
Recording and Editing Engineer: Lance Perl
In response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts produced a radio play production of Shakespeare's Henry V. We gave actors microphones to record individually at home, while all acting with each other over Zoom. I was the assistant recording and editing engineer, helping to assemble the dialogue, then cutting sound effects and mixing down the entire show. This is an excerpt from the show, and more information can be found here.
UNCSA Soundscape -
L-ISA Installation
Sound Designer: Nora Cuthbertson
Assistant Sound Designer: Abi Senthil
While at UNCSA, I had the opportunity to set up and program an L'Acoustics L-ISA system that a fellow student, Nora Cuthbertson, was able to design a soundscape on. We had received some guidance from L'Acoustics about how to configure the system, but then it was up to me to figure out how it would all wire together, and then program the processor in such a way that it could receive timecode from QLab so Nora could take advantage of the dynamic processing it afforded. I was also in charge of creating the public-facing interface that members of the community could interact with
Production Sound Engineer
to experience the soundscape. I used TouchOSC to send start and stop commands to QLab, as well as control various parameters of the L-ISA processor itself. I coordinated with a few graduate film composition students on campus to load up some of their multitrack compositions into QLab, and then let audience members mix them on the system to experience what these new immersive technologies are capable of.
System Paperwork Package
L-ISA Controller/TouchOSC
This is the main screen that an audience member would see when they approached an iPad in the center of the installation.
If the audience member chose to, they could mix a composition created by students in the composition program on campus. When they chose to start someone's piece, it would update the channel labels to match the instrument it was controlling.
This is the main screen that an audience member would see when they approached an iPad in the center of the installation.
The iPad was running Q-SYS control, that let me run a UCI on my iPad to monitor the Q-SYS core (which is on the bottom right of the photo).The Tascam recorder is in the rack with the core, that received it's Telnet commands from a QLab session on the left.
This was the DSP and signal routing involved for the show, and where we managed the Mid/Side processing
This is what I used to monitor the show during performances.
The iPad was running Q-SYS control, that let me run a UCI on my iPad to monitor the Q-SYS core (which is on the bottom right of the photo).The Tascam recorder is in the rack with the core, that received it's Telnet commands from a QLab session on the left.
UNCSA Emerging Choreographers - Production Sound Engineer
Q-SYS and Tascam Backup Playback
Sound Designer: Gray Moreno
Assistant Sound Designer: Kai Machuca
For most dance shows, everything stops when you lose playback, so it has become standard practice at UNCSA to incorporate a playback system separate from the standard QLab computer to make sure that the show can continue. This is typically achieved with a playback device, such as a Tascam SS-CDR250N, where you physically press a play button at the same time you hit go in QLab. To make things interesting, I utilized the Telnet protocols built into the Tascam to automate this process by running an applescript
that would send the Telnet command through a terminal session to play or cue up (or in an emergency, stop) the next track on the Tascam.
And because if something is worth doing, it's worth overdoing, I used the Q-SYS 110f core that was handling the mid-side processing on our system as a second backup. I wrote a LUA script that would receive a UDP string from QLab, and then parse it out for track information (to load the proper file), control playback, or mute/unmute speakers in an automated pre-show soundcheck.
The paperwork is an excerpt from the whole package, showing how everything was networked together (as well as the block diagram for the system).
Block Diagram
