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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
