Paddington has moved into London's Savoy Theatre and, for a small bear who arrived friendless from darkest Peru with a sign around his neck saying, "Please look after this bear," London has pulled out all the stops to make him feel welcome. The team of creatives who built his onstage homes in London and Peru include scenic designer Tom Pye, costume designer Gabriella Slade, puppet creator Tahra Zafar, sound designer Gareth Owen, lighting designer Neil Austin, and video designer/animator Ash J Woodward.
Woodward, an Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk Award winner with Finn Ross for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has been nominated for a Whatsonstage Award for Paddington the Musical, which opened at the end of November last year. Although he initially studied directing at Middlesex University, his work in projection design and animation has taken him from the West End to Broadway. His work was recently seen in Ballet Shoes at Britain's National Theatre, where he has also worked on Coriolanus, The Witches, Dear England (2023) and Hex.
Woodward talked to Live Design about using all the tools for this West End hit.
Live Design: What triggered your interest in design?
Ash J Woodward: It was almost by accident really. I was studying directing and I wanted to use video in my shows because the university had just acquired new projectors and Mac computers and no one was really using them. I thought it would be quite interesting to add that as an element in one of my productions, but no one else was interested in doing it. I ended up spending a lot of my evenings teaching myself how to animate. I'd use YouTube tutorials to teach myself After Effects and Photoshop and started implementing my work directing shows with that.
Eventually, I became an assistant for Finn Ross on the show The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
So that was my introduction to video design and working in the industry and I was really excited about the possibilities of it as a medium. The ability to create things at scale and to add so much atmosphere, but also be quite narratively interesting. It was imperative to the storytelling of a piece like Curious Incident, and became the embodiment of Christopher's mind [Christopher John Francis Boone, the 15-year-old protagonist] integrating the projection element into the show.
- Ash J Woodward's Early Design Images for Paddington
- Panasonic Brings Immersive Projection To Life In Paddington The Musical
In a way, it sparked something in me. It felt like directing in a different way, directing pixels rather than people. It is an interesting medium that is very easy to get wrong, but when it's right, it can be affecting and arresting for an audience.
LD: So your technical skills are essentially self taught from YouTube?
AJW: Even now, actually, if I need to learn something I will look on YouTube for a tutorial. But also obviously learning on the job is the best thing—rather than just learning a software or doing a course, you have a problem to solve or a vision of how you want something to be and find a way to do it. That way your design is not guided by the software, you use it as a tool to create the design. It can be a stressful environment to learn in but it is the best one because you are not restricted by what you already know.
If I have an intern or someone shadowing me on a show, the one thing I always tell them is, I have no clue how I'm going to do anything. Every time I do a West End show I have a bit of imposter syndrome but once I have the design ideas the cogs start turning and I figure out how to achieve it. That is part of what's exciting about about working in theatre, and I love that challenge.
LD: Do you approach film projects and projects that will be in front of a live audience differently?
AJW: Yes. When I'm doing a film I have to be very precise. There are budgetary restraints because of grips and camera crew that are very specific, so you have limited opportunities to get the shot. In film it's more about storyboarding, previews, knowing exactly what you want to achieve and getting those details right before you even start shooting. Whereas in theatre, you have a certain ability to play within the space. I make a lot of content, animate a load of things, design worlds and then most of the time that goes in the bin when you get inside the theatre and the space starts talking back to you. And I say that as someone who does a lot of pre-visualization before I even get into the theater, but there is no replacement for being there in person. I've used VR and AR goggles to see what its like to sit in different seats and of course you can understand timings and movement and things like that. But it tells a different story when you're really there.
LD: What do you use for previz?
AJW: I use the gaming engine Unreal Engine because I can basically build my own “game” with the specific parameters I want. Anyone can use it, the director can look at it and see the stage from different parts of the auditorium and scenes can be played out to either cues or timecode so you can see movement.
For Paddington, for example, I had a room adjacent to the rehearsal rooms, with two large screens so I could discuss sequences I had designed with the set designer and director. There are always some surprises, but it gives you a good footing and the creative team can see what you envisage. There is nothing worse than going into a technical rehearsal and being surprised by the content that you're seeing on stage! You can share storyboards and videos on a computer but I think seeing it on the set, as part of the scenic world, really helps people understand what you are trying to achieve. On Paddington I think the lighting department was using something called Capture, and I would have liked us to be a little bit more aligned in terms of software, plus I think Unreal Engine can provide some really beautiful work.
LD: Did you come to Paddington with any preconceived ideas from growing up with the books?
AJW: I wasn’t brought up with the books, although my nieces and nephews love Paddington. I had watched one of the films many years ago which I thought was brilliant. When I had my initial conversation with Luke [Sheppard, the director] I found the excitement of the possibilities and the scale of what we wanted to achieve with Paddington really exciting. We wanted something that many people just won't have seen on stage before. A walking, singing, speaking, bear was exciting for me and the idea of taking a really beloved character and doing it justice. In addition I've always wanted to work on a big, West End musical with the budget and collaboration that come with that.
In terms of references, I definitely went back to the books and their illustrations, and some of the different interpretations of them over the years. There are three design worlds that the video element adds to the piece: The first is a set extension where you wouldn't necessarily know you are looking at video. That was the aim, so it feels as though there could be an infinite number of flown pieces on stage. We wanted to trick the audience's eye into believing this expanded world.
The second was to create a lighting element over the whole of the space as well. Obviously the lighting department controlled specific fixtures, but there were projection fixtures on the set which lit and textured the set in specific ways, for example under arches and architectural elements like that.
The third is the full fat, full-blown video design where we need to transport the audience into a marmalade fever dream or to the depths of a Peruvian jungle where vines grow and build all over the stage and into the auditorium. So those are the three main video languages we are portraying. They are all in the service of both realism/place and fantasy. The video is a storytelling device, but it can also add a “WOW” factor at certain moments.
The vines around the theatre are all projection mapping from six projectors in the auditorium, three in the circle and three in the upper circle. Three pointed at the stage and scenic elements and three at the scrim panels around the sides at the Savoy Theatre. They show the London skyline and become my projection surface so the vines can spill out around the audience. Luckily, we mostly have a flat surface with these big, old school painted backdrops over the silver-leaf detailing of the proscenium. The vines happen during a moment in the show when Paddington is transported back to Aunt Lucy in Peru and the animations sweeps around Paddington and the set and transports the whole audience from the lair of the villain (Millicent) to the jungle.
LD: What projectors are you using?
AJW: Three Panasonic RQ25K projectors on the upper circle and three RQ35Ks on the circle front. We are using specially designed Vicom baffle boxes to stop the fan noise becoming a problem for the audience below them. At the back of the space we have a 9m by 7m LED wall, which is an INFiLED AR2.9 using two Brompton Technology Tessera processors. We are using a Disguise media server, it felt like the best tool for the job because the set itself is very intricate. It's basically a cabinet of curiosities with millions of different little intricate objects in it and different cubby holes that have to be projection mapped onto. We 3D-scanned all of the sets so Disguise was the obvious choice when needing to do projection mapping as well as tracking things as pieces of scenery were coming on and off stage. For example there are a couple of bookcases that fly in and out and we are the lighting for them.
Dan Trenchard, my video supervisor, and I decided on the Panasonic projectors. We had worked on a film together, but this was the first theatrical production together and because we were experimenting a little bit with the content we needed to know the tech was tried and tested extensively. We needed the LED wall to look beautiful, with beautiful gradients and color and the same with the projectors, beautiful color and brightness. So we specced gear we have stress tested on other shows.
LD: What was the biggest challenge for you?
AJW: Making people believe that some of the video is a scenic element, and making those elements look as though the lighting designer lit it. We were really meticulous about the details and making models and lighting them.
I'd put the 3D object onstage where it would instantly look out of place, but then I created a digital lighting rig to light it in the same way that the lighting designer was lighting the sets to create the same angles and shadows. There was a lot of collaboration with Neil [Austin, the lighting designer.] He would push me in the right direction and mention what type of fixture so I could digitally recreate the intensity or color.
In film, in CGI, there is a thing called “uncanny valley” where what the eye sees approaches realism but is not quite right and it can be jarring for the audience. It just feels different to them. So it’s not just getting the color temperature right it is things like not lighting it from underneath where there wouldn’t be a fixture and things like that.
But we did get there: There was a moment where someone in the production, a prominent person in the production, mentioned that they didn’t realize we had paid someone to build a particular piece of scenery, but in fact it was video content. To get that response you have to understand the physics of the scenery, for example, when a piece flies in it doesn’t just stop, there is a tiny bounce when it is flown in by hand. We have to simulate all those little things. And it is not because we are trying to replace scenic pieces or save money, it is because we don’t necessarily have the space or physical objects can’t transition the way video can. It all works together.
But if it's too perfect the audience don’t buy it. It was very satisfying creating those moments we could not have had otherwise.
LD: Do you have favorite moments?
AJW: There are a couple. The Peruvian Forest is one and the popup book of London is another. It was somewhat inspired by the second film where Paddington is discovering London for the first time, and instead of making realistic walkthroughs of the London landscape I wanted to create a popup book sequence. We see locations from the Shard and Borough Market to all over London through Paddington’s eyes. It is fun and much better than just photos which limit the piece to a time period.
It's essentially a lot of mathematics to make the book open on the LED wall and make the paper elements feel like they're attached to the book. Actually, one of the most useful things is that there is actually a real Paddington popup book! I had never designed a popup book before. Just working out the mechanics of how one piece of paper interacts with other pieces of paper and slides etc, I needed to see it.
It is a mixture between a 2D elements that I drew and a 3D system to make it look like a big real popup book and that was done in Cinema 4D.
Like a lot of my design in the show, it feels like a little bit of a love letter to lots of types of animation. I tried to keep it all cohesive but there are things like 2D animation, 3D animation, hand drawn animation, cinematography, projection mapping animations. It just feels like I'm using the whole tool toolkit, which was really exciting.
LD: Where do you see the industry going in terms of gear, what would you like to be able to use in the future?
AJW: The technology that's coming down the line takes off some of the restrictions that we currently have. There are new LED wall products that are really exciting, like essentially a see-through gauze that can give you the brightness of an LED wall. MuxWave is exciting because we use gauze all the time but this is also a video surface without the need for projectors, it is not just a projection surface. There are developments in flexible LED products, there are already new phones screens that can bend and there will be much more advanced LED surfaces that will become available on a large scale. We will be able to wrap set pieces, for example, and so you could have something that looks like a tree but can transform into something else, a candy cane or some other shape.
In terms of media servers or software, things are getting faster and faster and just having the ability to render quicker is huge. AI is also changing things, it shouldn’t be used for content generation but as a tool for things like roto scoping [going frame by frame to change something] or keying out, which will save a lot of time and change the workflow. But it shouldn’t be used as a picture-making tool, even for background generation to make a field or cityscape. Then it starts to influence your vision, and actually doing that design work is a big part of the fun of the job so it needs to be used ethically.
Another use, for example, would be if you wanted to use video in slow motion and historically you would use editing software like After Effects or PremierPro to resolve it. But if you filmed at 60 frames per second eventually each frame has a little “stutter” when slowed down. AI can smooth it out so that you can go up to eight times as slow as the original video. Of course, we also have cameras that film at 240 frames a second now, which is exciting.
There are a lot of misperceptions about AI as well, people can make incredibly sophisticated images but they don’t work out in the world. Where it can be helpful is when people struggle to talk about video, maybe a director is trying to share a vision for a certain scene, so it can help visually. But that takes us back to using video or any technology—it is important to have discussions before you take on a show. Ask what the purpose of video is—it needs to be narratively important, not just because the director thinks it can fix a set or space challenge, otherwise you may end up with pretty images but it isn’t integrated into the story. We have so many exciting tools to use, but they are just tools, not designers.
Woodward is currently in rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet and will be working on a short film later this year.
Creative Team
- Video Designer and Animation Ash J Woodward
- Associate Video Designer Nathan Fernée
- Illustration and additional Animation Majid Adin
- Scenic Designer Tom Pye
- Associate Set Designer Isobel Nicolson
- Costume Designer Gabriella Slade
- Associate Costume Designer Sarah Mercadé
- Costume Supervisor Lydia Hardiman
- Paddington & Puppet Design Tahra Zafar
- Bear Physicality Associate Director & Additional Puppetry Audrey Brisson
- Lighting Designer Neil Austin
- Associate Lighting Designer Nic Farman
- Assistant Lighting Designer Nicola Crawford
- Sound Designer Gareth Owen
- Associate Sound Designer Andy Green
- Hair, Wig & Make-Up Designer Campbell Young Associates
- Props Supervisor Lily Mollgaard
- Technical Director Gary Beestone
- Production Stage Manager Matt Watkins