Location Research

At the beginning of this semester, we knew we need to find a place to set up our musical showcase with a lot of equipment since we are working on an AR broadway experience. However, any location-based experience under the COVID situation is not easy at all. We spent a few weeks communicating/negotiating between clients, faculty, and Carnegie Mellon University to develop an all-satisfying and workable plan. To avoid gathering, we cannot include our clients and their crews since they are outside the state and under travel restrictions. Therefore, the team is looking for somewhere that is easy for us to set up those bunch of equipment, such as lights, speakers, stage, projectors, and .etc.

ETC faculty and clients have suggested serval places, like NOVA  at northside, an alleyway between liberty and Penn around 9th street, riverside park at southside, Paramount Film Exchange, and Margaret Morrison CMU.

The main concern for us is maintenance. Any outdoor option seems unrealistic for us to set up scenes and playtest iteratively. Moving equipment around and following the weather also causes more uncertainty and workload. Therefore, an indoor ground plan with a nearby outdoor option will be better for our situation. There is a name on the list at the very beginning and it seems to fit best for us now, the ETC building.

Outdoor Ground Plan

Indoor Ground Plan

We made an appointment with the faculty of the ETC support team, David and Janice. They are generous to show us all potential options and resources we may access at ETC. Knowing we have a full backup from ETC and clients is exciting. We spent the whole afternoon at ETC and walked around every potential place, including the Cave, the greenroom, many project rooms, the painting room, the wood workshop, and the Randy Paush Auditorium. Considering this is a special semester that most of the students don’t come into the building, we get permission to book the RPIS for the rest of the semester to do our playtest. With well-prepared equipment(speaker, lighting, projector ready) and pretty big room for stage performance, the auditorium is absolutely our first choice of the ground plan location.