Photo Jacob Cohl
A spider is an eight-legged creature. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has as many moving parts, and keeping them fully functional is the job of Fred Gallo, Production Resource Group founder and president of PRG’s Scenic Technologies division.
The second challenge for Fisher Technical Services was how to achieve believable, high speed, superhero-level flight sequences over the audience, often involving more than one performer at a time. Traditional 3D flight systems are very good at this type of movement, but it’s difficult to coordinate the rigging for a multi-line system with other objects in the space, as the lines will “sweep” through the entire volume of the flight space during motion. Since the main flight sequence involved Spider Man actually engaging in full-contact, mano-a-mano aerial combat with the Green Goblin over the audience, an alternative had to be devised.
Bouncing Off The Walls
Probably the first thing to clear up on the performer flight systems for Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark is this: Spider-Man can’t actually fly. “Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man refers to himself as a ‘webslinger,’ which is not the same as flying—he can jump very high and very far, and he can swing on a web line from location to location, but unlike a lot of other superheroes (and supervillians, for that matter) he does not possess the power of flight,” says Scott Fisher, principal of Fisher Technical Services (FTSI) of Las Vegas, NV, who were contacted to provide the performer flight systems for the show.
PRG, which provided much of the technology seen on and the around the Spider-Man stage, has produced a series of “webisodes” on the project, the first of which can be seen here. Read the rest of this entry »
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© 2012 Penton Business Media, Inc.
