Local on the Eights: The Live, Improvised Broadcast

Or, an Exercise in Insanity

When directors Peter Rogers and J.R. Zambrano approached me about having the second half of their show be the “broadcast” for a news-themed show, honestly, I thought they were crazy.

We’ve never attempted anything like a true persistent live camera feed of the actors on stage, much less THREE live cameras with full graphics that are all improvised along with the story. I mean, a live news broadcast comes with anchor names, reporter names, stories with headlines, lower third graphics, “live” bugs (those little things in the upper right hand corner that say “LIVE” on the broadcast)… none of which we could really know in advance, what with it being improvised and all… I mean, it just couldn’t be done! This is madness!

But… what if it COULD BE done? QLab is a neat program and can do lots of stuff as seen in Fiasco, Start Trekkin' and How I Saved the World Over Summer Vacation; it is the industry standard for video projection, after all. Could it do three live camera cues simultaneously? (Yes.) Could it compile graphics on graphics? (Yes.) Could it be edited live during the performance? (Yes.) And once it became conceivable, it became inevitable.

Reader, we have three live, wireless cameras in the control of two exceptional camera operators (Brad Geiger and Kay Krasin). We have reporter and anchor names visible on screen that they were endowed with in Act 1. We have over-the-shoulder graphics, just like you see in a real news broadcast, specific to the reporter’s stories. We have intro and outro music. We have intro and outro CREDITS. We have commercial breaks. We have on location reporting. And all of this displayed on the monitor in the theater for the audience to see, under the deft control of Daniel Ellsworth.

And if that wasn't enough, on top of all of this, we have traditional theater tech too. Lights shift between scenes and locations under the watchful eye of Caroline Dinges. Scoring between scenes AND sound effects in scenes are expertly handled by Greg Blank.

The tech on this show is truly insane and amazing.

I am so proud of this team, and so happy the directors asked for the stars so we could push improvised design to a whole new level. We may in fact be the only show in the WORLD leveraging video in improv at this degree of difficulty.

I’m not gonna lie, this is not a show you can livestream and get the full impact. You have to be in the room where it happens. So be there. Local on the Eights, Saturdays in December at 6pm at the Hideout Theatre.

Your local news, for real, improvised.