Tal Yarden: Multimedia Ringmaster
Apple technology takes center stage in a new production of the classic Wagner opera Götterdämmerung, opening June 2008 at the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp, Belgium.
Over the past few years, director Ivo Van Hove has reinterpreted all four installments of the Ring cycle as a contemporary story. Wagner’s score remains intact, but the productions incorporate bold new elements such as video and electronic devices. The final opera, Götterdämmerung, features live performers interacting with video images and computer-generated avatars projected on a massive 66-screen video wall, and communicating onstage with MacBooks and cell phones.
Behind the scenes, the Mac plays an even greater role, from the ideation and development of all the multimedia elements to controlling and serving images to the video wall. To develop this critical component of the opera, Van Hove and designer Jan Versweyveld collaborated with American video designer Tal Yarden of EyeMag Media. Yarden has worked on several previous Van Hove projects, including other installments of The Ring.
Video designer Tal Yarden (left) and technical multimedia producer Stijn Slabbinck of Fisheye (right).
“I think of myself as doing environmental multimedia,” Yarden says. “I’m interested in working with multiple screens and juxtaposing multiple images in real time, one against the other, as opposed to traditional cinema, where it's all sequential.“
A longtime Mac user (“My first computer was the original PowerBook,” he says), Yarden is self-taught in even the most sophisticated video and graphics applications. He works primarily from his office in Brooklyn, NY, where a MacBook Pro and a brand-new 8-core Mac Pro are his tools of choice.
“Every big project seems like an excuse to purchase another Mac,” he observes. “And rendering lots of Motion projects at 1920 x 860 or 3840 x 1720 is a really good excuse. This show includes about four hours of video, so right there, that’s 50 to 75 hours of rendering, not to mention all the material that will need to be redone as the scenes develop.”
Initial Staging Onscreen
Yarden and Van Hove began work on Götterdämmerung by analyzing the opera’s original story, deriving new ideas and themes that could translate into compelling images and character interactions. “There's a reason for it all,” Yarden says. “It's not just to create a general vibe or feeling. It's about a new way to explore the text, and the ideas in the text.”
Once the key concepts and ideas were on paper, Yarden started his pre-visualization process, initially working with Keynote, the presentation software included in Apple’s iWork suite, to test out various creative options before developing a detailed set of storyboards using Photoshop.
Yarden’s Mac setup enables him to switch effortlessly between applications, giving him an intuitive, efficient workflow. “As I make a storyboard in Photoshop,” he explains, “I save it and drag it into Keynote, where I add notes and build the master list of all the different potential cues. From Keynote, I import it all into iPhoto so that I can publish it to .Mac as a web gallery for the director and others to see.”
To demonstrate more detailed concepts, he pulls frames into Final Cut Studio and adds a soundtrack. “At this point they’re just stills,” he says, “but they’re timed with the music, so others can see exactly how the sequence might work.“
