Jeremy Knight
theatrical projection design and videography
 
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The Ballad of Baby Doe

By Douglas Moore. Directed by Jonathan Khuner. Set and projection design by Jeremy Knight, lighting design by Alexander Kort. Produced by Berkeley Opera at Julia Morgan Theater, July 2009.


This is a show where I also got to design the set.

There were four projectors (with four separate video feeds from DVD players) on three screens. There was a stage right screen (mildly trapezoidal, for a forced perspective effect) which could be taken offstage for scenes where there were a lot of performers on stage. Two projectors were focused on a screen made of white butcher paper stapled to the back wall of the Julia Morgan stage. That screen was divided into four trapezoidal panels, again for a forced perspective look.

The stage left screen was oval and back-projected. Back projection with a projector lacking a wide-angle lens meant the screen had to be fairly far downstage, closer to the audience, but also meant that the singers could play close to it without casting a shadow on the screen. (A considerable challenge to the lighting designer, of course, to keep light off the screen.) An effective moment came in a scene in Augusta's office when she asks the maid to dust the bookcase, and the maid was able to use her feather duster on the projected bookcase image, to the amusement of the audience.

This was the first opera in which I used Moscow (Russia) State University's msu cartoonizer to prepare the projection images. It analyzes an images and redraws it using user-selected parameters. I used it again later for the projections for The Turn of the Screw and Middle­march in Spring.

The video at the bottom of this page shows the stage picture, including the animated 'curtains' that introduced and ended each scene. Do take a look. This is a wonderful scene—with terrific performances by Lisa Houston and the ensemble—that's part of a remarkable opera.


The economy production's most notable element were the excellent projections by Jeremy Knight in a quasi-19th-century style of photography setting the many varied scenes.
     —D. Rane Danubian, artssf.com

[Jeremy Knight's] projection of the dance hall view of the street from inside, the Clarendon Hotel, Horace Tabor's office, the elegant wedding in Washington DC with the towering cake and candles; the Tabor Opera House . . . worked wonderfully.
     —Cindy Warner, SF Opera Examiner

Berkeley Opera’s ambitious “Ballad of Baby Doe” has a lot going for it: three strong principals and inventive sets and projections by Jeremy Knight that take you from the depths of a silver mine in Colorado to the heights of society in Washington, DC in an instant . . . Knight's projection concept had curtains rise on each scene and a round billboard that set the time and locale, much like the cards in a vaudeville show. Behind the curtains you saw mountains, mines, cities and interiors of houses and hotels, depending on what was going on. It was a brilliant way to open up the small Julia Morgan Theater stage to the world of Horace Tabor and his beloved, indomitable Baby Doe.
     —Suzanne Weiss, culturevulture.net

The most impressive, jaw-dropping examples of ingenuity were the breath-taking scenic projections created by Jeremy Knight, abetted by Alexander Kort's lighting wizardry. I marveled at the Knight-Kort set-up: one huge rectangular screen forming the wall at the left side of the stage; four smaller rectangles aligned to suggest a receding perspective of windows veering off on the back of the stage. A large oval-shaped screen was set up on the right front of the stage to alternately accommodate a series of interiors, such as a saloon wall with a "naughty" Victorian painting of Leda and the Swan hanging above the projected rack of bar bottles; a prim parlor wall hung with striped wallpaper and family portraits; a festively decorated room in Washington, D.C.'s Willard Hotel; or a forest of languid-looking willow trees lit by moonlight . . . Who really needs a stage full of lumbering sets and heavy, sometimes awkwardly painted backdrops, when you can have such things as a realistic illusion of boom-town Denver backed by its magnificent ring of sky-high mountains via the ingenious use of artfully lighted scenic projections. High tech to the rescue!
     —Cheryl North, Contra Costa Times







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