About

“Video projections by media designer Dallas Nichols are deftly used both to change the scenery and to highlight the theme of constructed realities.” - Kerry Lengel, The Republic, AZCentral.com

The Nether Media / Video Design

The Nether was a year long graduate school process of design. Initially with a pitch for creating an on stage custom blackbox concept that would surround the audience it evolved into an opportunity to include undergraduate student designers into an ASU MainStage show under my design leadership.

Working with the director as a design guide, I built and developed the visual language of the show, and ensured the transitions and overall aesthetic would not feel interrupted across departments. 

A white painted scenic design with subtle architecture was used as a canvas to paint with video and change environments from a grove of trees, an interrogation space with live cameras, a victorian girls bedroom, a victorian foyer, and many other more expressive and visually powerful imagery. Constantly questioning live vs recorded.

The use of live cameras in the show utilized serial based pan tilt zoom cameras. These were enhanced with Raspberry Pi's coded and programmed by me to give them individual IP address, and use the Pi's as translators for simple UDP based commands from the Watchout media server into complex serial commands required by the cameras.