Audio Visual

The title on my name badge says it: Audio Visual. In my vast amount of spare time I sing tenor in the San Luis Obispo Vocal Arts Ensemble, an adult community choir of some repute. We have traveled and participated in many international choral competitions, and have brought home some impressive awards and honors.

A view of the audience at last night’s California International Choral Festival and Competition in the Performing Arts Center at Cal Poly. Sell-out crowds are enjoying the festivities, and the music.
About ten years back our director said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to put on a choral festival at home?” and we all responded in the affirmative. With years of planning, endless hours of volunteer work, and countless headaches incurred and cured, that event is now in its second biennial manifestation. We are hosting three international choirs and two U.S. choirs in what we think is the only choral festival and competition of its kind in the United States.

The Prime Note Ensemble from Saudi Arabia present their folk music for the competition. The ensemble is made up of men from the Philippines who are resident workers in Saudi Arabia.
My role is webmaster, photographer, supertitle producer and projectionist, and sign maker. My wife is the graphic designer of the program, and she also designs the posters and signs. I print them on our wide-format Epson printer, then mount them on foam-core (I really like the Elmer’s brand permanent self-adhesive board!). We are joined by scores of other volunteers and professionals who work to put on this amazing event.

Last night, at the third competitive event of the festival, we had about 1400 people in the audience at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center, and about 200 singers from the choirs competing in the folk element of the festival. It was spectacular.

Members of the University of Santo Tomas Singers perform while interacting on stage. The group was presenting a traditional song of the Philippines.

My role while in the theater is to project the name of the choir and the flag of their country on a projection screen above the stage. The throw is 115 feet from the projection/sound booth area to the screen (through a sheet of thick glass). The university recently purchased an amazing Panasonic projector that can make a beautiful, crisp image on a screen that far away. It’s called the XGA 6000, and I am amazed.

The projector has two DLP chips in it, two lamps, and it projects with 6000 lumens of oomph, which is to say that it is an extraordinarily bright projector. To make my titles I use Adobe InDesign with a custom page size, and then I export as PDF. When projecting, I have the PDF open, and I switch between the titles with buttons I create in Acrobat Pro. I can see the buttons on the page, but the projector has electronic masks that prevent these buttons from being projected onto the screen.

I also added an interesting twist to the process by purchasing an iPhone app called Rowmote, which allows me to control my MacBook Pro from a distance with my iPhone. I can go about 100 feet away from the computer and control it with the iPhone, and it works wonderfully. That application requires a helper application to be installed on the MacBook, and a wireless connection. The Performing Arts Center (intentionally) does not have WiFi, so I used the MacBook’s ability to create its own network, then used that network to communicate with the iPhone.

All of this technology goes together to make a pretty interesting and successful graphic presentation.