Portugal.TheMan Tours with Custom-built Modular Projection Screen and Frame System from Gerriets International

	Portugal.TheMan on tour with custom-built modular projection screen and frame system from Gerriets International.

On its recent headline tour of North America, the rock band Portugal.TheMan brought dazzling visuals into its performances with projection and lighting on a mountain-shaped surface custom built by New Jersey-based theater solutions specialists Gerriets International.

The core members of Portugal.TheMan are from a valley in south-central Alaska where five mountain ranges shape the terrain. "They use mountain themes a lot in their artwork and their songs," says John Frattalone, who collaborated with Nicholas Rubin on the production design for the tour, "so it made sense to make them a mountain they could take with them."

With that inspiration as their point of departure, Frattalone and Rubin, along with lighting designer Ben Silverstein, developed the concept of an irregular, peaked projection surface that could be activated and transfigured with a wide range of content and lighting. "We wanted a huge, continuous surface that would play a dynamic role in the band's shows," says Frattalone.

But the band would be touring by bus and trailer, with back-to-back shows all over the country (and with lighting director Jason Hartwyk overseeing setup of both scenic and lights) so the projection surface had to be quick and easy to set up and break down, lightweight and compact to transport, and adaptable to fit spaces of different sizes.

Frattalone designed a modular system comprised of 31 lightweight panels that assembled to form six different configurations and disassembled to pack flat into a single case. From the shortest version to the tallest, and from the widest to the narrowest, all of the configurations incorporated slopes of equal angles so that the same video could be mapped to whatever configuration was used.

When it came to realizing the design in a way that not only would function as required but also could be fabricated within tight budget and time constraints, Frattalone turned to Nick Pagliante and Drew Russo at Gerriets International.

"The materials we initially had in mind were cost-prohibitive, but Nick Pagliante devised a solution -- traditional scenic flats, fitted with projection screen surface (opaque matte white SCENE) -- and Drew saw to it that the system was meticulously fabricated. The hardware was all loose pin hinges, and one or two guys could put this thing up in half an hour, enabled Jason to focus on what matters: programming cues and focusing lights."

From a technical standpoint, the Gerriets-manufactured Scene front-projection screen surface performed beautifully says Frattalone. "It was able to really grab the light from the projector and bounce it beautifully, so as many lumens as possible made their way back into the crowd's experience of the video content. Also critical was that the material be 100% opaque, which the Scene is. So we were able to take advantage of this in a cool way by staggering the two mountains in depth, which created a gutter, and then placing a good deal of lighting fixtures both in the gutter as well as upstage of the set. So Ben was able to design looks that poured light out from the around the top of the mountains and through that opening and without having it bleed through the screen at all."

"We were looking to create a surface that would take projection in ways that really broke out of the standard box," continues Frattalone. "Nick Rubin and I developed a good deal of three-dimensional content and trompe l'oeil illusion looks that we felt were important aspects of the show. So his content was able to activate the surface in a variety of different ways. In one song, the angles of the peaks would look like a crystal cave exploding in slow motion, then in another song those peaks became jagged outlines of building in a cartoonish city skyline. In other looks we'd use the jagged angles graphically, almost like an EKG reading. And of course, sometimes we'd leave the video off and just allow the light to wash the mountain as a large sculptural surface." As a vehicle for realizing this ambitious creative vision, Frattalone concludes, "the Gerriets surface really delivered."