
Taking Theatre Online with WebGL and WebRTC - seacaster
https://chrisuehlinger.com/blog/2020/06/16/unshattering-the-audience-building-theatre-on-the-web-in-2020/
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Uehreka
Author here! Let me know if you’ve got any questions about the show or how it
was built.

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rjrodger
This is awesome! How much is open source? Fascinated to see how you put the
code together...

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Uehreka
I'm going to open source it in a week or two once the show's over. There are a
couple instances in the git history where secrets got checked in, so I want to
clear out the history and create a new repo.

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jfengel
I'd love to see tech improve for live theater. We just did a short play
festival on Zoom, streamed to YouTube to reduce strain on the server (and to
archive). It worked pretty well, for a relatively low-tech production
specifically designed for the medium.

I did miss having audience feedback, most notably laughter, which is one of
the best reasons to do live theater. I treated it as a radio play, another
successful medium with somewhat different rules.

Working on a full Shakespeare play is harder. The group scenes are notably
difficult, since you don't get to the usual physical cues about who you're
talking to. Feedback from background characters is important in helping the
audience connect, and that's harder with a big Brady Bunch screen of faces,
and no eye contact. In rehearsal last night, it was hard to have the final
reconciliation with Romeo's father as just one face among many, and it was
sorely tempting to "indicate" sadness rather than organically being in the
moment. (Turning off our own faces helps: if you're feeding back on what you
see you're going to try to force yourself to look like what you're feeling,
which always looks false.)

This was a project already in production before lockdown. We'll probably just
move it to Zoom, which is very sad because it's only a fraction of what it
could be. We probably won't move on to our next scheduled show until next
year. We'll keep artistically alive with projects like that play festival.

Fortunately for us, we don't have a theater to pay for, or salaries. The
professional theaters are desperately trying to keep out of bankruptcy, both
themselves and their staff, but this is going to be very, very bad. Tech will
help replace a tiny bit, but this will devastate theater for years, even if we
get a vaccine by the end of the year.

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noneeeed
On the subject of audience reaction: The Infinite Monkey Cage, a BBC Radio
science/comedy show hosted by Briana Cox and Robin Ince has always been
recorded in front of an audience. They have recently been experimenting with
remote audience and it's worked surprisingly well. They have built a webapp
for it called the virtual audience recording system that the audience members
use while watching the live show in zoom. The performers and audience can hear
each other through it, so you are not just laughing to yourself.

It's really quite striking how much of a difference having an audienceakes to
the performance. The conversation seems to flow much better and theres a lot
more energy to it.

Ive been involved in community theatre for years and I've always found the
interaction between audiences and cast absolutely fascinating, especially with
comedy, where a near identical performance can feel so different from one
night to the next.

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nmstoker
Saw two excellent productions by Big Telly that were done over Zoom and they
made pretty good use of tech tricks to add a lot to the experience

Some details of one of the shows, Return To Elsewhere, here: [https://www.big-
telly.com/return-to-elsewhere-23-24-may/](https://www.big-telly.com/return-to-
elsewhere-23-24-may/)

And a talk they gave about how they did their shows:
[https://youtu.be/iYTizaG6NOc](https://youtu.be/iYTizaG6NOc)

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mstresh
Hi Chris, I just saw your show today and had a good time. Keep it up!

