I'd borrowed a bright and powerful projector (Sanyo 106: XGA 4,500 Lumen) and a 3.0m screen for the display. Keren and I had been up some weeks before to ensure that the set-up would work in the space: but it's amazing what can go wrong when it all starts to go wrong (little did we know...).
I was really excited by the prospect of collaborating with Seth Harsh over the performance. I sent Seth one of the draft versions of the animation for him to check, and it all seemed OK, but I think in the end we all overestimated how difficult the exercise was. Seth rang me in the week before the wedding to say that he was finding it impossible to get the timing right when playing to a silent movie and that he really needed an audio feed to get it right.
So after some quick investigation (needed to be very quick), we decided that a BlueTooth Ear-Piece should work; although we were concerned with the 10 metre range (max), so Seth said he'd take a wired option as a backup. Unfortunately all my well laid plans of transparency and practice had come to naught and we were going to be sorting it out on the day; I had therefore prepared myself for a total non-start if it went completely pear shaped.
We were at the Church at 9:30am setting up with Seth and ensuring that it was all going to work. The BlueTooth Ear-Piece was a little flaky but Seth said it should work as it had connection more than it didn't; we moved the laptop and piano as close as we could. Come 10:30 and Seth wanted to practice the piece with Nicole Laurelle Falleiro and Asante Viswasam and low-and-behold: No connection with the Ear-Piece! So we moved the piano to the laptop side of the Church, only a couple of metres from the laptop: and all was good for a short period of time, before Seth said again that he'd lost all connection.
Seth said that it was time to use his wired backup, so connected the laptop to his amplifier and an ear-piece to his amplifier. Perfect! Until the jack, which Seth said someone had broken on his last concert, decided to fail completely. It was at this point, 10:45am with the wedding due to start in 15 minutes, that I decided that it was better to call the piece a non-starter and turn everything off and take my seat.
I was sitting next to the mortified Sandi when at 10:55am Seth came up and said that he'd play the audio off his phone from YouTube. I was unsure, but Sandi kicked me hard in the shin, and funnily enough, this outcome was much more how I envisioned it initially. So I turned everything back on, Seth took his seat at the piano and made sure his phone connected with YouTube (oddly enough it did and didn't fail?), and Seth started playing incidental music while waiting for Danni to arrive (which she did in about 15 minutes); and I waited back in my seat for the performance, which would now be performed in a format completely untested and unpracticed.
The wedding service was one of the most sublime events I've been part of, so it was not difficult to forget about the performance of the piece, but thankfully I remembered not to return to my seat after communion, but to wait at the laptop.
The Signing of the Registry came and with a sideways glance at Seth I started the animation. It was at this point, being totally unpracticed with using YouTube through a phone, that we were bitten: the animation and the YouTube recording had completely different lead-in times. So it was virtually impossible for Seth to get the start timing perfect, and he was quite late coming in.
We were bitten, but not seriously: no one noticed except me, and I just had to sit down and let the piece do its own thing, as it was a little like Keren: all grown up and now out of my control.
I watched, wincing at each mis-timed sequence, but I also heard the Church's reaction to the slowly evolving image – recognition of faces, places and events and then surprise at seeing Keren & Danni appearing before them! and I was very satisfied with how it turned out.
I am enormously grateful to Seth for not giving up, and enduring to the almost final moment. Without his persistence the piece would not have been performed. Nathanael was also very encouraging during the difficult and dark minutes when the world went pear-shaped.
