Oldal 155 [155]
NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON, NEILL O’DWYER, AND ENDA BATES
Block C (before chorus, da capo): wide pan, “signal” lights to show camera focus,
sound
Block D (after chorus, da capo): pan and zoom, “signal” lights to show camera
focus, sound
The videography in “Block A” acknowledged the historical influence of works
like Marin Karmitz’s Comédie or the film versions of Was Wo/What Where
(1985/2013) and the fact that the audience would be looking at a large screen,
by enacting first the standard screened vocabulary of an exterior witness
watching faces light up on a field of blackness. From the first time the speakers
address the interrogator directly after the middle chorus, the technology of
the PTZ was activated and exploited, to become progressively more present
for the audience. A key tool for effecting this transition from an analogue
vocabulary to a digital one was the use of sound design.
SONIC INFLUENCES
The sound design for Intermedial Play was directly influenced by Anthony
Minghella’s 2001 Beckett on Film adaptation, most specifically in the use of
sound to portray the physicality of the camera that served as the “interrogator”
of Beckett’s script, in place of the light in the original theatrical productions.
However, the role of the camera (and its associated audibility) is fundamentally
different in this live-streamed production, when compared to the highly
cinematic interpretation of the play by Minghella. In many ways, the role and
the nature of the interrogator represent the fundamental research question
investigated by the Intermedial Play project, and this is equally true of the
approach to the sound design.
In traditional theatrical productions of Play, the presence of the interrogator
is physically embodied by the movement of the spotlight from one actor to
another. In Minghella’s film adaptation, the interrogator is instead embodied
by a camera, using both standard cinematic techniques of cuts and editing as
well as intermittent camera sounds. These camera sounds are frequently used
in medium shots when camera focus changes are used to shift between actors,
but they are also present when the camera zooms in or out on a single actor.
In general, however, changes between actors are achieved using a straight
cut, without any associated sound design. Our experiment investigated an
approach which falls somewhere between the original theatrical design and
the more cinematic language adopted by Minghella. Like the Beckett on Film
adaptation, Intermedial Play involves the mediation of camera technology,
but the form of a single PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) robotic teleconferencing
camera and the live performance and streaming of the play precludes the