Fun Home
Hollins Theatre Institute
Directed by Ernest Zulia and Rachel Nelson



During the Winter of 2019, I was involved with three productions at the same time; I was the Sound Designer/Engineer for The Love Code, Sound Designer/Engineer for Community Garden, and played the lead in Fun Home. Two weeks before we opened, I was sitting in the audience with one of the directors talking about the scene we were observing. He threw out some ideas about his storyboard for the projection design and he asked for my opinion. I brought up the idea of creating sketches of each setting that resembled Alison Bechdel's cartoons from the graphic novel of the same name. As the director still hadn't found anyone to design the projections for the show, he recruited me to Design and Engineer the production since I was one of the few members of the department that was capable of completing a design that complex due to my experience with QLab. Since I was attending every rehearsal as an actor and working on two other shows, I asked a friend to do the Projections Design, aka the sketches of the scenery. I used screen-sharing to record each of her digital sketches, and then reformatted them in QLab to fit each of our Christy Microtile surfaces that were built into the set. Our concept was that the sketches would appear at the top of every scene as if Alison was drawing through her past. As soon as each rehearsal was over, I'd pull all-nighters in the theatre to finish the immense amount of programming that needed to be done in a week. Additionally, since I was acting instead of being the Sound Designer/Engineer, I also trained the Sound Crew how to mic actors and taught basic QLab skills. We also had an understudy run, in which I acted as both an A2 and an A3. During tech week, I could be seen dashing back and forth between the stage and the tech booth to update cues, which was particularly difficult since my character never exited the stage during the performance. This experience finally taught me the lesson my Technical Director constantly told the technicians during his classes -- every technician should act in at least one production so we can better understand the different departments that make a production possible. All in all, it was an incredible experience both as an Actor and a Projections Engineer.
Performance Clips
It All Comes Back
(Opening Number)
Raincoat of Love
Maps
QLab programming



*The red Xs are a result of the video surfaces not being available when the screenshots were taken
Christy Microtile surfaces

Book by Lisa Kron & Music by Jeanine Tesori
Based on the Graphic Novel by Alison Bechdel