Musical Culture and Protest Through the Eras
This past week, our group took the feedback we received and combined the decades into Eras, finalized the songs, and generated the track that we will be using for our bridge show. It is hyperlinked here, Music Track.
Our new eras are the Early 20th Century (1920s-30s), Rock and Roll (1940s-50s), Counter Culture and Protest (1960s-70s), Late 20th Century (1980s-90s), Modern Day (2000- Early 2020s), and then concluding with two possibilities of what our future could hold depending on the choices we make today.
Our technical implementation plan is to proceed with Pharos for programming. Steven and Rong will be testing on Friday.
However, after discussion we decided that any project is incomplete without a backup plan, especially when it comes to technical implementations. For this project, we’d obviously like to focus on Pharos for programming our lighting, but we’ll make sure to learn Python and have minor backup coding on Python for each of our parts. This won’t take too long as we work on the project in the long-term but will prevent crunch work in case we need to switch last-minute.
Early 20th Century
The defining song we’re using for the starting decades is meant to evoke a sense of historical nostalgia. As “Happy Days Are Here Again” begins, a dull silver glow takes over the bridge, similar to how the glow of black-and-white TV screens bouncing off a room promises the friendly attraction of entertainment. Two “dancers” will appear, one silver and one blue, on opposite sides of the bridge, and they will work their way towards each other. Eventually, they will meet in the middle and weave around each other in a manner reminiscent of Jazz Age dancing.
Rock and Roll
Currently the plan is to use pharos for the lighting. The focus for the rock and roll era will be on swing dance and other rock and roll dance styles. For this the lights will imitate dancers. We will first fade in from a dark background with no lights on to having brighter yellow/golden lights fading in symbolizing dancers. These lights will be spread out throughout the bridge in pairs. As the song progresses, these lights will slowly intertwine to symbolize dancing. When we transition from swing to rock n roll, the lights will slowly fade from a yellow to more of a warmer orange color. Here the background may also come out as blue or some color that contrasts orange to really emphasize the dancing lights. The multiple pairs of lights will also slowly fade out to just one sole pair that is dancing up and down the bridge before fading to the next decade.
Counterculture
Our initial plan for this era is to use Pharos to program the lighting, although if we are not able to achieve the level of detail we want, then we will switch to using Python to program more specific pixels.
For The Times They Are A-Changin’, we will use dull hues like black, brown, gray, and white that will march in procession down the bridge. The lighting will hold on to static shots of these colors, but to transition between different shots as the march continues, we can alternate between slow fades in and out where the bridge momentarily turns off between shots, and hard cuts where the bridge remains on the whole time and the colors snap from one place to the next.
As the instrumental fades out on Bob Dylan and comes in for Come Together, we will have gray pixels representing the Saturn V and red/orange pixels representing the flames of pressure and change sweep from left to right across the bridge in a wipe transition. The dull hues will wipe away to show a psychedelic swirl of rainbow tie-dye, which will loosely move around pseudorandomly on the bridge.
Late 20th Century – 1980s/90s
We’ll be using Pharos for our representation of the Late 20th Century as well featuring two popular songs that everyone’s heard, Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles and We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel. These songs have garnered millions of listeners and have deep meanings that ‘protest’ against important concepts during the 1980s and 1990s. It is said that the lyrics “video killed the radio star” are meant to be taken as they are heard, the heightened popularity of TV ultimately “killed” the radio industry. In order to represent this, we will be using retro tv color bars(white, yellow, cyan, green, pink, red, blue, gray, and black) to show the increasing popularity of television. We’ll also want to incorporate “glitching” effects of the lighting to signify the color bars. Billy Joel has a realization in his 40s that led to the creation of his song. A meeting with some friends “made him realize how each subsequent generation feels things are getting worse and worse while ignoring the troubles of the past.” In order to represent this in Pharos, we’ll ensure to create a red-orange and black themed sweeping light show that shows the life of a fire and how it grows continuously until it rages fiercely.
Modern Day
As the plan is to use Pharos to program our show, the visuals are with the timing and color of the light and less in intricate details. The modern day section of the bridge show deals with two important issues of the 21st century. The first matter is the legalization of same-sex marriage. Although written before the 2015 legalization in all 50 states, Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” celebrates all people and the lighting on the bridge will reflect that. The bridge will be lit up in streams of rainbow colors, with a rainbow chase across the bridge. The lights will start on the bottom portion of the bridge and fan up to the top part of the bridge to give the illusion of the color rise like it would in a water fountain show. The second matter is the Black Lives Matter movement which is addressed in the song “Glory” by John Legend and Common. Splashes of color will go across the bridge in cool tones during the glory section of the songs. For the verse of the song, the bridge will go dark except for the creation of a protest sign that will move across the bridge. The cool tones return as the glory section of the song returns.
Future
The plan is currently to proceed with the existing Pharos timeline and not to use video or Python. As for the concept, I plan to use saturated orange and blue lighting and increasing intensity that match the dramatic shifts in the orchestral impending doom future. I then plan to have it black out and sit in the darkness and silence for a brief moment until we hear a call to action by the one and only, Morgan Freeman. A bright cyan will then come up in the center of the bridge, fading in and out like a breath, as a beacon of hope. As we hear the familiar tune of “Happy Days Are Here Again”, that light will spread out on both sides until it covers the entirety of the bridge by the line, “The skies above are clear again” to show that with the appropriate actions, we can stop climate change and make way for a better future.
Unresolved Questions
Does Pharos have the capability to create wipe transitions? Can the wipe be customized?
Thinking more specifically about the rocket wipe for the 1960s-1970s era
How many places on the bridge can achieve a swirl effect?
Thinking more specifically about the psychedelic tie-dye sequence
Are there presets we can use that might help with the project or a source to find “simple effects”
It may be better to work on the more complex parts of the project if there’s a way to use existing presets/effects