Projection design
Projection can be a hard sell in the performing arts. It’s often seen as a luxury, the first thing to be cut when budgets start to look tight. It doesn’t help that when projection design is done on the cheap it’ll also usually look cheap. Even if a designer has spent hundreds of hours on animation, if the cost of the equipment to adequately realise those designs and the cost of technicians to set that equipment up is too high, it can cripple a lot of beautiful and thoughtful work.
Photo Credit: Stephen A'Court, The Impossible Has Already Happened
Projectors aren’t really designed for the performing arts market. What really is, except perhaps gaffer tape? Projectors at the low end of the market are designed for home theatre and PowerPoint presentations. At the high end, they’re designed for corporate spectacles and “houses of worship” as the marketing says—churches are the world’s biggest market for AV equipment. Projectors are also delicate and sensitive, requiring regular and expensive maintenance, meaning that AV companies will often only use them for a couple of years, but will charge so much for them over that time that they’ll pay for themselves. Projectors in this business model quickly turn into big pieces of e-waste filled with circuit boards and heavy metals, which no one in New Zealand has the ability to recycle.
If you tour to a theatre that has an in-house projector, for these same reasons they’ll often charge you plenty to use it. I’m not counting here those theatres that will offer you that old 3.5k Epson they have in a cupboard. If you can make that projector work for you then you’re doing good design indeed.
All these things make touring a projection design expensive, and projectors a nightmare from a sustainability point of view. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. And, as with many things, the greener possibilities are also the more cost-effective ones.
The most polluting part of a projector is normally its lamps. If you can afford it, use a projector with a laser-phosphor light source. They’re more expensive initially, but much cheaper in the long-run. They require no lamp changes, are more power efficient, last much longer, produce higher-quality images, and are far less polluting than lamp-based projectors. Laser projectors are kind of like the electric vehicles of the projector world.
Traditional projector lamps are mercury-vapour discharge lamps. Mercury is a toxic heavy metal that is particularly hazardous to prenatal and infant development. It isn’t containable in landfills, and there’s a significant amount in a single lamp. Be careful never to physically break a used lamp. Used projector lamps should never be disposed of in the rubbish; they should be stored and sent to Interwaste, who have New Zealand’s only mercury recycling facility. Some AV companies store their used projector lamps until they have enough to be worth recycling, so you could find a company that does this and ask them to take your used lamps also. They’ll love that.
Photo Credit: Marcus McShane, The Shoreward Surge of the Sea
However older lamp based projectors are still often just fine for arts work. A five-year-old 10k lumens projector with lamps that are partway through their life will still project around 8k lumens of brightness if it has clean lenses. If you’re making arts work you probably don’t need the highest possible resolution. You just need brightness, reliability, and a wide-angle lens. What that older 10k projector won’t do is connect easily to the latest data types or integrate seamlessly with a newer and higher-resolution version of itself, so it will have been written off by most AV companies and tax depreciated down to nothing. It’ll be sitting in a road case at the back of their warehouse, waiting to be sold to a sports bar to project non-stop daytime cricket until it goes to the great conference room in the sky. Ask for it. If it’s there it’ll be cheap. If you hire it, it’ll provide incentive for that AV company to service it and keep it working reliably rather than just transitioning it into e-waste, and it’ll save you money. If you’re planning on touring to more than two or three venues, this will normally be the most affordable option. It’ll also take away the hassle of trying to set up untested and unfamiliar equipment in every new venue. Just knowing that your projector(s) work, how to set them up, and that they talk to your operating system removes a lot of stress.
Photo Credit: Nicole Davis, Velocine
From a sustainability perspective, however, you should tour fewer things, so if you can be flexible enough to work with different in-house projectors, do that.
Even the same projection for the same show can require different equipment because of differences in venues. It’s important to consider throw distances for your projectors, and if you’re touring a projector you may also want to bring a range of lenses for it. Try to be realistic about your projection capabilities, and work closely with lighting to get the most out of your projection. If you’re trying to map images onto dancers, say, that won’t read cleanly if there’s also a lot of lighting hitting them from the front, even if you have a WOW-level projection budget.
Most touring projection designs are going to use either front or rear projection (or both) on a surface that’s positioned close behind the performance area (like a cyclorama), and if this is the format you’ve ended up with in your design, every bit of front light into the performance area will create light bounce onto your surface, meaning that you’ll then require a more powerful projector in order to not be washed out by lighting. So a careful lighting design is probably the most critical element in achieving the best projection design with the least equipment, and the least equipment makes for the most sustainable and most efficient design. Don’t get into an arms-race over brightness with your lighting designer. You’ll lose.
To keep a projector running well and out of landfill for as long as possible here are some easy tricks:
Use a DLP projector. DLP units last longer and are less vulnerable to dust or haze contamination. If possible, also use a projector with a sealed optical engine. A DLP laser projector is, of course, best of all.
Store the projector in a clean, dry environment, and always in a box or case, with a lens cap on.
Always lamp the projector off and complete its shutdown procedure before turning off its power.
Never touch the lens surface unless you have to clean the lens, and clean it as seldom as possible, and only as the manufacturer recommends.
Don’t use oil-based haze or smoke effects around projectors. Oil-based haze clogs projector filters and coats the internal optical parts with a residue that reduces image quality and is very hard to remove. Use water-based effects instead.
Pay attention to your projector lamp hours and filter hours. An old or clogged air filter will cause the projector to overheat, and old lamps can explode, releasing mercury vapour and damaging the projector.
Be careful with your data ports. A surprising amount of projectors become e-waste because someone has yanked a cable out of them and damaged the socket. I’ve learnt the hard way that if a projector won’t receive data, it’s not much use to you.
Marcus McShane
Marcus is one of New Zealand’s most prolific designers, having produced over 500 theatre designs and installation artworks since 2005. He has 22 awards spanning visual art and design, specifically in the areas of theatre, fine arts, architecture, and museum design. Marcus has a graduate degree in English Literature and Philosophy that he’s philosophical about, and his interests include finding sneaky ways to keep his carbon footprint low, growing vegetables, building bicycles, and reading things worth reading.