Wintertime

Members of a gloriously eccentric family arrive at their summer house in the winter woods for a supposedly secret rendezvous – and soon bodies collide, doors slam, dishes fly and everyone’s perfect plans go fantastically awry. With a wink to René Magritte, a nod to William Shakespeare, and a toast to the Greeks, this hilariously poetic and hyper-kinetic voyage through the human heart never lets us forget that love, like life, is eternal, messy…and wondrous.

This show taught me the value of system design in addition to sound effects design. The script is very specific in the music and sound effects that it wants, and the directors of this production did not want much more than that. It was incredibly fun, however, to figure out how to program specific effects, and the value of having an airtight system to function in the best way possible. The coolest scene from the show, in my biased opinion, was at the end of act 1, a scene filled with the chaos of someone running into a tree eleven times and the rest of the cast going crazy and throwing all kinds of objects everywhere. Programming both of those things presented a fun challenge, and it taught me a lot about using QLab to a higher level than I had ever before.

It was designed on a Yamaha QL-1 console with EAW speakers and a Meyer sub. I used QLab 4 for sound effects playback, and the sound effects were created using Pro Tools.