Who knew subtitles could sing opera?

Watching an opera (or a movie) in its original language allows you to enjoy the story as its author and performers intended. Of course, that only makes sense if you understand what’s being said, which is why subtitles exist.

They’re a necessity, but reading them can draw your attention to a small screen and away from what’s happening on stage. MASARY Studios, a Boston-based multimedia design collective, just made subtitles a lot less annoying, fusing them with the action and turning them into another character on stage.

The so-called supertitle technology was recently demonstrated in a production of Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde)a staging of Gustav Mahler’s music directed by Anne Bogart at the Boston Lyric Opera.

“The supertitles were projected onto the left brick wall of the house, which was native to the theater space,” Sam Okerstrom-Lang, co-founder of MASARY Studios and designer of the project, told me via email. “The projectors were mounted very close to the theater grill to reach a high point, allowing us to project above the talent on stage.”

Okerstrom-Lang described a four-unit Epson system. Two projectors had their images converged on the left brick wall and one covered the right wall. The room was projected from behind onto a panoramic window. He said the team especially focused on stylizing fonts and animations to match the music, narration, opera and poetry. The supertitle animations were created to work well with the native brick material using only white text.

“The projection system was connected via a network, which allowed us to zoom, focus, shift the lens and calibrate from our media server using Epson projector management software,” explained Okerstrom-Lang. Epson units use 3LCD technology, in which three separate image panels, one for each primary color, create the image.

The two wall projectors were large format 4K units, although their exact models were not revealed. The window images came from an Epson EB-PQ2010W, a 10,000-lumen 4K laser projector that uses the same 3LCD technology and is equipped with an ultra-short-throw “snorkel” lens.

The projection window carries a PDLC film of Innovate Glass, a material that switches between transparent and opaque, switched by a DMX controller (a standard stage lighting signal). “The projection material in this window was scenic and abstract, allowing the opera to change location and time through this ‘portal’-like window,” said the MASARY co-founder.

The system is not autonomous. A person follows the live performance and presses buttons at the right time. Okerstrom-Lang explained that a subtitle specialist at Boston Lyric Opera advanced the tracks manually using a Touch OSC patch (a customizable touchscreen control panel) connected to Resolume (software for playing, mixing and manipulating live video).

MASARY is not the first to give subtitles a little stage presence. The people of the eye (2017) incorporated creative subtitles into its visual storytelling, while Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis (2018) incorporated the projected text into the set. Leeds Playhouse and ramps in the Oliver Twist by Luna (2020) deployed hundreds of animated phrases, and Icarus Theater Collective The lesson explored typography in motion and interactions with actors’ writing in 2021 and 2022.

These productions focused on accessibility, particularly for deaf and hard of hearing audiences, rather than overcoming language barriers. The shared idea is to give words a dramatic role instead of leaving them on the sidelines. In Boston, that means letting the text convey the emotion of the story, not just translating what is sung.

Source: Epson