Last weekend was pretty intense as we had three “performances” with the Giants of the Hoods crew here in Helsinki. Thursday in Kallio, Friday in Kontula and Saturday in Tapiola, Espoo. We had some issues, but in the end it all worked out quite well. Here’s a quick recap of the events.
Kallio 26/8/2010
Image by Kirsi Tuura
We couldn’t do a rehearsal on Wednesday so I was a bit worried about how everything would go down on the first night. Everything had worked fine the week before in Tapiola, so I was still quite comfortable… At least I was until Mr. Murphy once again proved that you should really take his law seriously.
Problem #1
No signal to the projector with a long VGA cable, so I had to move all my gear to a different location in the last minute and setup everything again. That left me no time to properly test the motion tracking and everything else.
Problem #2
All of the dozens of WiFi networks on this particular street corner disturbed our wireless network we had set for sending data and pictures. This increased the delay between the tracking and animation to several seconds instead of the normal tenths of a second. It took me a while to figure out that this was the problem and of course no ethernet cables anywhere. Fortunately, Severi – our technical producer – somehow got a hold of a cable and we finally got the tracking working quite smoothly in the end.
We still had a problem with the communication between my computer and Markku’s laptop, so we couldn’t really update the character as it was planned. Somehow, we still managed to limp through the night and the last hour was actually quite enjoyable.
Emmi Vainio and Kalle Kuisma shot some documentation video.
Giants of the Hoods, Kallio 26/8/10 from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.
Kontula 27/8/2010
Kontula worked out a lot better technically as we had ironed out all the problems in Kallio. The mood was also quite different as we had a lot of children coming to dance and also because of the commitment of the people that took part in the workshop some weeks ago. It was also the “Night of the Arts” in Helsinki that day and I think it was nice that we did this in the suburbs of East Helsinki and not downtown where everything else happened.
Giants event in Kontula from Giants of the Hoods on Vimeo.
Tapiola 28/8/2010
Technically, Tapiola worked the best, but there weren’t that many people around. The cold and windy weather was against us, but we still had fun and it was nice to see some people who had been there the week before also when we did some testing.
No video yet, but i will add it here once it’s online.
Next
We are doing two more shows this week. On Wednesday, we are at the Aalto University Opening after-party in Otaniemi and on Saturday we have the event at the Lasipalatsi square. For more details: http://www.giantsofthehoods.com/
