The New Normal and New Methods
By Matt Sandbank I
t has been two months and an eternity since the March afternoon that my first show was cancelled on account of the coronavirus. We are coming to understand that the cancellations and social distancing could extend into the summer and beyond, and that the pandemic poses an existen- tial threat to their livelihood. If it weren’t for my prescient and technologically savvy wife who foresaw the need to transition my business fully and immedi- ately online, I might be looking ahead at a year with zero bookings and no income. For now we have been able to stem the losses, but it took a month of dedi- cated effort. It has been a series of quickly assembled forays into virtual puppetry. Perhaps the lessons I’ve learned might be helpful to other performers. The Internet is not the most hospitable place for my usual shows but it offers the opportunity to present material in new formats. I considered moving pre-recorded versions of shows to an online platform, but I opted to combine vignettes from several shows with at-home activities to create online workshops. These are housed on password protected pages on my website, in short sec- tions that kids can watch at their own pace, with activities based around materials that might be found at home. My goal was to provide something that families could access on their own schedules with the materials that they already have. Libraries, navigating their summer reading programs, have begun to innovate by creating ‘grab and go’ activity bags that patrons can pick up and take home. Some have created shadow puppet kits that pair with my workshop activities. I also began offering virtual parties for kids across the nation whose birth- days were cancelled by social distancing. Although retooling my material initially seemed like a huge undertaking with little payoff, but I’ve realized that I could expand what I can offer, and can compliment my live shows in the future. Alas, COVID-19 flare-ups will threaten last minute cancellations for some time to come. It will be nice to have something to offer in those situations.
Navigating this new terrain has forced me to familiarize myself with new tools. It’s been a rocky road of learning the best secu- rity settings on zoom (to protect against the unfortunate trend of ‘zoombombing’), such as sharing host capabilities with clients, password protecting meetings, and disabling chat and screen-share for meeting attendees. The success of my show depends on the clarity of the shadows and sound effects, so I had to dust off our Canon DSLR camera and identify the cords and adapters needed to plug into my computer. One particular program, Ecamm Live, is a useful tool for switching quickly between camera views, and creating split screens that allow viewers to simultaneously watch the show in front and behind stage. This offers a visual experience that I hadn’t previously provided to live audiences. Performing live to digital silence has been a humbling experience that recalls
Photo courtesy of Matt Sandbank
the early days of my career when I had no idea whether jokes would land, but I’ve found that projecting the audience on my wall, using gallery view on Zoom, allows me to see facial expres- sions and gauge how well the performance is going. This new reality has brought many challenges, but it also brought opportunities. In the last 5 years, as I’ve expanded my family, I’ve had to vastly curtail the radius of my summer per- formance travel. I can now return to the libraries I visited in my young and wild days of extended cross-country puppet tours. Some of them want me back! No longer limited by geography, I can zoom into libraries across the nation, and I have used Google Ads to advertise birthday parties to anyone in the US that might be searching for social distancing party options. As I bring my spring in for a crash landing, where do I go from here? We might be facing some level of disruption for at least another year, and possibly for two. For my business, which is based heavily on school-year performances, I need to retool my shows to be suited for the socially distanced classroom. Instead of auditoriums packed with kids, I’ll be video-conferencing with classrooms of students, desks spaced six feet apart, smiles hidden by their masks. But puppetry is an art form that can rise to this challenge. Zoom allows for green screen backgrounds and Ecamm Live allows me to incorporate text. Can I integrate high resolu- tion videos as backgrounds to my shadow puppet silhouettes? Can my sound effects be augmented with live comic-book style onomatopoeia (e.g., ‘POW!’)? The first step was to figure out how to perform a show that succeeded despite the technological chal- lenges. The next step is to make a show that succeeds because it leverages technology.
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