Mysterio

Sound designer

Holiday World — Hoosier Celebration Theater

Mysterio follows a young man, Sawyer, in his pursuit to become a magician. His story begins with an enchantress appearing and introducing him to the world of magic. He is mesmerized by everything he sees, and tries to do the things that the enchantress is showing him to no avail. The band of magicians decide they are unsure if they can trust him to know their secrets and put him to the test. The concept for this section was to be the darker side of this magical, mysterious world. The term the director kept using was "Alice going into the rabbit-hole." We had discussed several options outside of this area for what audio could do to reinforce this. With this production company, the tracks for the show, including vocal "sweeteners," were premixed into the track with little ability to control these elements, so my focus as sound designer was on system design and vocals. We discussed several vocal effect options and decided that we wanted to introduce the "skeptical" magician, who imposes this test on Sawyer, with some treatment that provided an exposition into this world and fit with the style of the music.

To the right is a sample of my signal flow schedule. Each performer has a sick track that plays in QLab ready to be enabled at any point in a production. These are useful backups in cases of vocal fatigue, or technical issues. We recorded one performance during rehearsals via the existing dante network. Soon after we had to use them for a fatigued performer. The switch was made using one page of the user defined keys which switched "snippets" on the console and only affected the input source of the individual channel. The signal processing remains the same and the A1 continues to operate the show just the same as the live vocal.