★★★★★ The Telegraph
“The evening triumphs through technical slickness, loving attention to detail, a high gag-rate and character-count and a trenchant storyline.”
“The staging is striking too, taking us from Buckingham Palace to Ukraine, via the sky and sea.“
★★★ The Guardian
THE REP, BIRMINGHAM
MARCH 2023
PixelLux’s Creative Director, Nina Dunn, was approached by Emma Brunjes Productions and the Birmingham Rep to join the team for Spitting Image Live. The show brings to the stage the legendary satirical puppet TV show which ran from 1984 to 1996 for over 18 series in Birmingham, hwre very first series was filmed.
“At the time when the show was first announced, Boris Johnson was still the UK Prime Minister so as you can imagine between June and the following January when the show would first find its audience, there were many and dramatics script changes. This was the first of our challenges: to know what we were designing for.” explains Nina.
Nina, Alice Power (set and costume designer and on this occasion also penis costume designer) and Sean Foley (Artistic Director of the Birmingham Rep and director and co-writer of Spitting Image) worked together from the early stages to create a design that would accomodate the environments which the 106 puppets and 12 puppeteers would inhabit during the show as well as instertsitial pre-filmed content.
The wider PixelLux team contributed to the scenic settings for the show and beyond that, Nina’s original training in broadcast design came in very handy. The design called for a complex but hilarious shoot to pre-record some of the puppets using green morph suits and then post-produced the footage that was inserted in some of the scenes as narrative vignettes.
These included news bulletins read by Huw Edwards, a hysterically funny version of Bohemian Rhapsody featuring the Royal Family and some rather unmentionable footage of Nigel Farage.
There had to be very close dialogue between lighting, sound and video because the voices in the show were pre-recorded and it was important to ensure that lip sync was maintained between shoot and final recording incoprorating scriot changes that kept the show current right up until press night.
The video rig comprised of five projectors and five TV screens inserted into the proscenium arches. The latter were skilfully dressed with what looked like a scenic painting of cherubs but came to life in specific moments of the show. PixelLux also provided discreet lighting effects: proscenium surfaces were mapped and re-projected so that the embedded screens looked better when lit and to allow for icredible world warping effects.
The ground plan was fairly tight with a large quantity of flown items and giant scenic props so the projectors had to be rigged at very acute angles, which Harrison Cooke calculated in advance using Mapping Matter.
The hysterical, episodic narrative of the show takes the audience to an eclectic array of settings for which PixelLux created a pick and mix of visual settings, constisting of music video backdrops, virtual 3D environments, photographic scenic set-ups and envirnmental effects
The creative team had an extremely tight, very productive dialogue whilst making the show where ideas would be put forward and then expanded upon based on how funny they could become. Constant changes were the order of the day and content had to be adjusted as news evolved almost daily.
It was a very enjoyable process and the team at Birmingham Rep were extremely accommodating.
Creative Team
Director – Sean Foley
Writers – Al Murray, Matt Forde, Sean Foley
Caricaturist Supremo – Roger Law
Set Designer – Alice Power
Video Designer – Nina Dunn for Pixellux
Sound Designer – Paul Groothuis
Lighting Designer – Tim Mitchell
Puppet Master – Scott Brooker
Costume Designer – Lotte Collett
Choreographer – Lizzi Gee
Puppetry Consultant – Laura Bacon
Song Arrangements & Producer – Felix Hagan
Incidental Music Composer & Musical Director – Alexander S. Bermange
Incidental Music Arranger & Producer – Jerome Van Den Berghe
Penis Costume Design – Alice Power
Associate Director – Nyasha Gudo
Associate Sound Designer – Simon King
Puppetry Casting Director – Mikey Brett
Production Manager – John Rowland
Creators of Spitting Image – Peter Fluck, Roger Law
Producer for Birmingham – Rep Chloe Naldrett
Producer and General Manager – Emma Brunjes productions
Producers for Avalon – Richard Allen-Turner, Jon Thoday
The PixelLux Team:
Creative Director and Video Designer – Nina Dunn
Technical Director – Harrison Cooke
Associate Video Designer – Libby Ward
3D Animator – Will Jarman
2D Animators – Nina Dunn, Hannah Schlenker, Libby Ward
Video Programmer – Arthur Skinner
Production Video Engineer – Nick Ward
Video Engineer – Ed Aspinall
Producer – Helen Slevin
Studio Manager and Creative Associate – Laura Salmi
Video Equipment Supplier – Universal Pixels