James and The Giant Peach, a show in 2016, brought many challenges. We were renting lights and projectors for the show which required having another light board operator to work with the student light board operator during the show, as well as someone to run the projectors. For this show we decided to extend the show into the audience on the side walls, through the use of projectors. There were many scenes where the Giant Peach was floating in the ocean. In order to give the audience the feel of being in the ocean, I created 3D computer generated ocean waves for scenes during the day, dusk, sunset and night. We projected these rolling wave videos on the side walls. We also had stills of a giant ship and a student produced miniature movie of the peach landing in city, but the most challenging of all was we wanted to spill the crocodile tongues out into the audience. The very thing that created the giant insects in the show. This was the most difficult of all to create. I had to create a single animated tongue, then replicate it thousands of times in various sizes and make it spew out of a light hole. Hundreds of hours were spent creating these 3D movies for the show. I used a an open source 3D animation software, called Blender, to generate the oceans and tongues. (see below).
