Disguise, which helps drive visuals for Broadway and West End hits including Redwood, Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Disney’s Frozen, is now powering the LED backdrop and stage projections for Disney’s Hercules, the new West End musical.
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“Hercules is a fun film to adapt to the stage as it’s all based on ancient Greek mythology”, explained video designer George C. Reeve, who had previously collaborated with Disney Theatrical Groups on their production of Tarzan in Germany.
“That meant we needed to convincingly create a theatrical and mythological world for our characters to exist within," he continued. "Ultimately, after many ideas and concept artworks, we decided to create this world by using mosaics. This style of art was used heavily by the ancient Greeks to reflect and depict stories of the gods and other heroic figures many years ago. We created a workflow that meant we could quickly and efficiently create a piece of mosaic content and deliver it to the stage in real time. This allowed us the flexibility to bring the mosaics to life and have them effortlessly shapeshift on stage, transporting the audience to locations like Mount Olympus, the Underworld, and Earth within seconds.”
To achieve this, Reeve collaborated with a team that included video system designer Mogzi, associate video designer Kevin Buysse, and animator Gustaf Lindström. Together, they used Disguise’s Designer software, six OmniCal cameras, and five Disguise EX 3+ media servers to create and display the show’s visuals. The audience is then able to see these visuals on a 928-tile ROE LED backdrop, floor projections, and projections on an intricate set of rotating pillars in the foreground. Together, these LED and projected visuals extended the physical set, inviting audiences into Mount Olympus and the mystical worlds of the show.
Bringing a Classic to the Stage
Reeve spent the next three months working on the Hercules visuals, collaborating with the show’s animators to create the base content for the show. “A big challenge we faced was how to create the world of mosaics, being able to manipulate them and create them quickly in tech, whilst delivering the final looks which were desired,” Reeve says. “Using a workflow in Unreal Engine and Substance, we were able to create assets made from the mosaics, light them in the 3D world, and then pass these assets back through the After Effects pipeline and render for Disguise playback.”
Next came the production period, where the final look was composited directly in Designer. Designer’s new Colored Layers feature was used to help the team easily differentiate between 24 different composite layers involved in the show visuals, enabling them to easily identify what would be projected and what would be displayed on the LED screen.
Once all the show visuals were ready, they were then exported to five EX 3+ media servers set up in a director/actor/understudy configuration, which would allow the understudy to completely take over from the director or actor in case of failure. The servers then connected directly to a Lightware MX2 Matrix, and then onward to Brompton Tessera for processing and Lightware OPTJ fibre kits for video transmission. Finally, the output was sent to two Panasonic PT-RQ35K projectors, four Epson PQ2220b projectors and the ROE BP3 LED stage for the backdrop.
As a result, the audience is able to seamlessly travel from the Underworld to the Earth above with ease, following Hercules's journey with a true sense of magical possibility.