Making Of Die Zauberflöte

Set designer and illustrator Christof Hetzer: „Our Magic Flute is based on the idea that a boy illustrates his diary, and we immerse ourselves in this book, so to speak, the images and characters come to life and from this Mozart's Magic Flute is created. I painted all the backgrounds with watercolors and then scanned them in very high resolution so that you can enlarge such a small image to the large opera stage. And then you see all these small details that you like so much about watercolors. There is something very, very natural, lively and poetic about that. A lot of Christof's drawings come about through a process like this. If you look at it like that – there are endless building blocks and then you build something together scene by scene from one sketch to the next, to the first landscape designs. We use an effect very strongly so that the images all build up. As if they were really just being drawn. And we can do this by having the elements separate and then animating them on top of each other, as if they were being created in that moment. These are the three ladies; I drew them all in collaboration with and based on the designs of the costume designer Jorine. And then Roman and his team took them apart again and put them in motion. For this we decided to use a motion capture suit... ...it's basically a suit that you wear with sensors on it. The body movements are basically transferred via the suit to the computer. And we then took these three-dimensional movements again and transferred them to our 2D characters using different software. And what we discovered is that human perception is so incredibly well trained to read human facial expressions that you can make very few movements and already create an emotion. And we spent a long time finding the right language. So, with the overture, it was important to us that the videos worked on the beat. For example, here the character is being drawn, and when it's finished, the stage manager knows that the order is coming, I'm giving the cue, and the next video will start. And here in the software, we've basically tested and pre-programmed it so we know what the final show will look like. We're using four projectors. There are two rear projection screens and six elements that move around on the front projection screen, plus an additional projection surface that covers the entire area, which ultimately creates a complete image.”