Immer Ärger mit Bartleby: a flying viewport at Theater Basel

A 180° screen and a rotating stage

For Rocko Schamoni's staging at Theater Basel, the set had two things that needed to talk to each other: a 180-degree screen wrapping around the back of the stage, and a rotating stage element in the centre. The goal was to make the video and the rotation move together so the audience would read the picture as a flying viewport. When the central stage turns, the video moves in the same direction at the same speed.

The frame

Before anything else I built a simple "frame" inside the picture. Two reasons:

It gave me a reference for the skyscraper view the show needed.
It defined a dark area at the back where I couldn't project, both because of where the projectors sat and because I didn't want to throw light on the actors standing in the centre.

The frame solved both problems at once. The dark area reads as a wall, not a missing pixel.

Basel in 2032

The base image is a photograph of two well-known towers in Basel. In Photoshop, with the help of AI, I added more skyscrapers around them to push the city into a futuristic 2032 silhouette. The result is a looping cityscape that fits the show's framing without losing the place it belongs to.

Resolution math

In the end I had a looping picture of 7280 × 1080 px for a projection surface of 3640 × 1080 px, including a 200 px overlap for the two projectors. Some resolution was lost to the warping each projector needs.

In After Effects I built a sequence at 3640 × 1080. The 7280 × 1080 image gets placed several times along the x axis so the loop never visibly seams. A null object drives the movement.

I recorded the actual stage rotation during rehearsals and translated that timing into After Effects keyframes, then exported the video.

Two cameras

In the video playback software I set up two cameras at 1920 × 1080 with the right x offset, then warped each output to match the projection surface. That's the whole projection chain.

The grandfather

In the show, a grandfather character appears via a call on the screen. He needed to look like Rocko, the director, but older, holographic, with a clean alpha channel and the ability to react to the actors on stage. I generated him like this:

Filmed Rocko in front of a neutral background.
Exported the footage as a PNG sequence.
Took one frame and ran it through a mobile app that does the aging effect.
Used the aged frame as a reference in EbSynth, which propagated the aging across every other frame of the sequence.
Imported the result back into After Effects, removed the background, added a hologram effect.

That gave me the base loop. The same process was repeated for every text part the grandfather speaks, with a still video blended between them so the character can pause and react instead of cutting hard.