The Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, California
VADA on the Back of The Lobero
As pretty much everyone on the face of the Earth knows, 2020 was a dismal year. Then along came 2021 and many of us got vaccinated and the door for creating events and performances slowly started to creak open once again.
Our first “proper” show was on the beautiful back wall of the venerable Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. The students in VADA (Visual Arts and Design Academy) at Santa Barbara High, were despondent. After all, what’s the use of art if you can’t show it to anyone? To raise their spirits, Kym had talked to Daniel Barnett about doing … something.
We’d done a pro-bono projection show for VADA in 2020 for the students’ graduation on a wall at Direct Relief in Goleta. Everyone had arrived as masked and isolated family units with each small group dutifully sitting in or on their vehicles. Even so, it was a great success. Then in January 2021, we were contacted about putting on a show of the students’ art on that sumptuous Lobero back wall.
Examining the venue, we realized that the only way we could make it happen was by using two ultra-short throw projectors using identical imagery that were stacked on top of each other, thereby doubling the amount of lumens. It was a tricky affair. This type of projector is finicky; if either of them moved by a hair the image would be off. Even so, we pulled it off for three nights in a row.
Daniel sent us hundreds of images that we edited into one long class-by-class movie. Standing on the roof to monitor the projectors we could hear the cheers of students as their art or that of their friends appeared. It was a gratifying experience.
We did a second show, several months later using the same setup but different imagery.
