It might have been back in January of this year as I was pulling my trash can to the curb when my neighbor shouted to me, “Erik, congratulations on winning those Artist Foundation awards!” I was a bit taken aback because I hadn’t applied that year. But my neighbor was on the board of the Artist Foundation and should know best. I was fairly sure that one of the awards she was speaking of had been given to Amber Ortega-Perez. Amber had mentioned that she was placing my name on her application as a collaborator. But, what else? I eventually learned that Julia Langenberg, the aerialist, had also attached me to her application.

The project with Amber (“Taken in Arms”) began several months back. It’s a series of modularly devised inter-connected dance pieces. My contribution changes, depending on the location. I’m either filming the movements, or I’m providing the projection of live camera work as well as pre-recorded material. Amber has one last iteration of Taken in Arms to be staged in five locations throughout the day this Friday (yikes! that’s tomorrow!) around downtown San Antonio.

I’ve worked with Amber in one way or another for at least five years (I shot her 2009 performance of The Willing), and so we had already formed a working relationship and a sense of one another’s aesthetics. And, really, I don’t do work-for-hire (which is one of the reasons I’m always poor). I prefer working with people whom I’ve built a mutual mesh of trust and respect. However, I’d seen Julia’s work at Luminaria, the W-I-P, and the Guadalupe, so I had some idea of what I was getting into. The real sticking point was the venue in which the work would be staged. Julia’s studio was inside an event facility which used to be Jump-Start Performance Co., before the entire Blue Star “arts” complex went to shit, and Jump-Start was forced out. I mentioned my general sour attitude to Julia, but told her I’d rise above my petty animus and commit to the project.

Echo evolved into a fairly large production of six aerialists, six musicians, a lighting designer / board operator, and a video projection crew of two.

Putting aside the (very considerable) artistry of all involved, one of the best things about the experience was to see the solid work-ethic demonstrated by Julia and her aerialists. Also, Jaime and his musicians. I must confess that I’ve become terribly discouraged by the flaky nature of so many of the people I’ve meet in the film and theater scene in town. But, for the most part, Echo was a smoothly run production with some wonderful people. It was also beautiful.

My part in this managed to escalate each time I opened my mouth. Usually saying something like, “Yeah, we can do that.”

There’s a reason most of these visually sumptuous A/V presentations in town are staged by professional companies with scads of cutting-edge equipment and a brace of well-trained crew members. It can get fairly complicated. True, you can do amazing things with a laptop and a few consumer devices, but just about every new device you need will also need several other devices to make it play nice with all the other tech. (“What’s that you say? You wanna run a GoPro video signal into your MacBook? You’ll need this Blackmagic box. It’s a steal at only $150. Oh, and it doesn’t come with the ThunderBolt cable. You’ll need one of those. Only $50.”)

This is one of the reasons I pulled in Trey Cunningham. He has much more experience in doing this. He also had projectors to rent. But, mostly, I wanted an opportunity to work with him.

We ended up using: four short-throw video projectors, one DVD player, two MacBook Pros, a Matrox TripleHead2Go, an HDMI wireless transmitter/receiver, a GoPro, a Panasonic DVX, a Blackmagic UltraStudio recorder, a Korg Nano Kontrol, and a Belkin thunderbolt dock; the data was sent over various cables such as SVGA, ethernet, coaxial, and of course that HDMI wireless transmitter; the software used was Modul8, Resolume, and SIGMASIX Syphoner. And because of the nature of the venue (the less said about that the better), I was breaking down everything except the projectors and the data cables every night after rehearsals and performances. The upside to this, is you develop a deeper understanding of the tech and (at least for me) an increased level of confidence if anything starts to go awry.

It was the most involved and kludged-together setup I’ve yet had to devise. And because of that, I learned quite a bit.

Here are some stills taken from the video documentation shot by Destiny Mata.

I had fun shooting some of the textures which I ran through Resolume. I used my motorized Kessler slider to shoot closeup tracking footage of brown rice, lentils, split peas, and various dried beans. I also clamped a GoPro to one of the aerial apparatuses (the double halo) to get some dynamic footage of Teddy spinning above ground. I employed After Effects for some of the animation. And I used Motion’s optic flow for the poor man’s morphing effects.

Now, off to the next series of projects….

I’m presently in a state of low level anxiety because of all the projects I have initiated, and others which I have committed to. This is all compounded by the fact that none are, as yet, terribly pressing, so I just keep letting much of these things slide, trying not to think about the wave which will crash sooner or later.

One of the bigger projects is Echo, a performance work being created by a San Antonio-based aerialist. I was somewhat taken aback when I learned some months ago that I had been attached to her Artist Foundation grant proposal. I am expected to provide video design and such.

With these sorts of presentations, I find myself spending dozens of hours just trying to figure out the best manner to set up the tech. We’re talking about live media manipulation, live camera feeds (probably two), multiple projectors (perhaps as many as four), and a fair amount of projected pre-recorded material. I’ve been trying to find the best way to get a camera signal to my laptop which I’d prefer to have set up at the back of the venue. A wireless HDMI transmitter sounds nice. My hope is to place a GoPro up on a rigging in the high ceiling and down to my computer. I’ll have to compress the signal with a BlackMagic encoder. But now another problem. My Mac Book Pro has only one Thunderbolt port. I need this to bring in the wireless signal. But the port is already being used for my output to the projectors. Now I could buy a new computer (those new MBPs have two ports), but I’m already pissing away tons of money into wireless transmitters, encoder dongles, and cables. So, I’m experimenting with networking two MBPs together and use a Syphon program to import the camera images into my VJ software. What an ordeal. So, once I get the whole workflow figured out, I can start shooting and editing the imagery.

@@@@@@

I had hoped that by now I would have wrapped work on the San Antonio segment of Gustavo Stebner’s newest Wappo project (a short web series to help promote a feature film). The other week we shot a couple days of scenes on downtown streets, a makeup studio, a River Walk restaurant, at a magician’s sideshow act, and at a cabin on some zombie-infested ranch outside of Kerrville. At some point in the weeks ahead we’ll pick up the scene with the San Antonio Film Commissioner. Drew had been unavailable earlier because he was in China, which is, of course, a great excuse.

Below are a few screen captures:

@@@@@@

Back in March just before the opening of my play, Tales of Lost Southtown, one of my co-stars, Pamela, gave me a little present. It was a Mexican version of Snakes and Ladders (or, properly, Serpientes y Escaleras) which she had picked up at Papa Jim’s Pet Shop and Botanica over on S. Flores. I loved the pastel illustrations of the game board, they had a style very reminiscent of those iconic Lotería cards.

I decided to create a play around the game. So, with Pam as a co-lead artist on this, we will produce it with Jump-Start Performance Co. in March of 2015. Laurie Dietrich will direct. She will also be helping in the writing of the script. It will be a devised work, created collaboratively by the cast. We’ve already begun to build the work. Expect to hear more about Jump-Start’s Serpiente’s y Escaleras in the weeks ahead. It will be fun, somewhat dark, and very strange.