PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
Blair makes videos. Blair needs a project. Blair has a webcam. Blair has some friends. Blair’s friends are into some kinky shit.
Premium Content is a play about art, consent, polyamory and the Internet. It’s a play about boundaries: In relationships, in art, and the grey space where they converge. It’s a play about the difference between a funeral and a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s a play about trying really hard to be really cool. In an age where you can access anything online, how do you know what is truly good and what is truly bad?
“A production this inventive and reckless deserves to run for months with people returning not once but three and four times”
"Every night the ensemble of six actors switches roles, adopting one of thousands of possible casting scenarios, to flip the gender and power dynamics within the work. Utilizing live recording from four cameras, Quickdraw Animation’s Tyler Klein Longmire creates a new animation video reflective of the unique casting over the course of the performance. That unique animation piece plays an essential part in the climax of the play."
-Louis Hobson, Calgary Herald
“Premium Content is a bold, refreshing play about personal boundaries and breaching personal boundaries. What is free and what is not free? Rigorous in form and intellectually stimulating, the young characters in Walker's play live on the edge of their desires, bringing us into a world that is as up to date as tomorrow.”
– Colleen Murphy
TYLER'S NOTES:
In 2018 I had the pleasure to work with the Major Matt Mason collective as they created the first production of Premium Content, a play exploring millennial ennui, open relationships, and the internet. The script called for multiple live camera feeds which were manipulated throughout the night, and some animation/video art, right up my alley!
The main trick was that one of the five characters, Blair, is an artist who makes internet-art style of videos, begins to livestream the goings-on at their apartment onto the internet, including some steamy group-sex situations. So for the performance we needed multiple live feeds of what was happening every night projected on stage. But these videos also had to be cut into Blair's pre-recorded video pieces at the end for a dramatic reveal. Also, the actors changed roles (and genders) every night, so none of this could be faked by pre-recording the scene and cutting it in advance. In fact, I had to make three different versions of every character-focused video piece!
There were Blair's more artistic pieces which involved poetry and projections. These pieces I rigged up a Kinect camera, which captures infrared data from the actors, and used that data to make a generative animation piece. The actors performed choreography and their actions were translated onto the projection screen as a human-like blob of triangles.
The piece also required a few different camera spots for different scenes - a "skype call" at the beginning from a laptop, the apartment's "livestream" webcam, the Kinect camera, and a secret hidey-hole camera for the last scene. And these feeds sometimes had to be overlaid on top of one another, or immediately replayed, paused, remixed... there were fun technical challenges to solve. :3
The videos above are some from the show. The first is a major plot point of the show (so, uh, spoilers?), where the video was mixed in with the live feed, recorded minutes earlier during the performance. This is a facsimile of the live projection, which changed every night. The actors switched roles every night as well, so there are a few different versions of this video, with the crying screaming person swapped out for another (pre-recorded, pre-rendered) actor. The second video is from the ending, featuring this green androgynous alien character which stood for Blair in these style of "Space Pieces" scattered through the show.
Premium Content was a lot of fun to work on! We're doing it again in 2020 and maybe a tour, we'll see, people seemed to like it last time (pretty much sold out!) I was asked to make the poster as well:
