Watching an opera (or a film) in its original language allows you to enjoy the story as its author and performers intended it. Of course, that only makes sense if you understand what is being said, which is why subtitles exist.
They are a necessity, but reading them can draw your eyes toward a small screen and away from what’s happening on stage. MASARY Studios, a multimedia design collective based in Boston, just made subtitles much less annoying, merging them with the action and turning them into a another character on stage.
The so-called supertitles technology was recently demonstrated in a production of Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde), a staging of Gustav Mahler’s music directed by Anne Bogart at Boston Lyric Opera.
“The supertitles were projected on the house-left brick wall, which was native to the theater space itself,” Sam Okerstrom-Lang, cofounder of MASARY Studios and designer of the project, told me via email. “The projectors were mounted up close to the theater grid in order to get to an elevated point, which allowed us to project above and over the talent on stage.”
Highlights from Song of the Earth (Das Lied von der Erde) at Boston Lyric Opera
Okerstrom-Lang described a four-unit Epson system. Two projectors had their images converged on the left brick wall and one covered the right wall. The fourth projected from behind onto a scenic window. He said the team focused especially on stylizing fonts and animations to match the music, storytelling, operatic delivery and poetry. The supertitle animations were created to work well with the native brick material using white text only.
“The projection system was connected via a network, allowing us to zoom, focus, lens shift, and calibrate from our media server using Epson Projector Management Software,” explained Okerstrom-Lang. Epson’s units use 3LCD technology, in which three separate imaging panels, one per primary color, build the picture.
The two wall projectors were large-format 4K units, although their exact models weren’t disclosed. The window imagery came from an Epson EB-PQ2010W, a 10,000-lumen 4K laser projector using the same 3LCD technology and equipped with an ultra-short-throw “snorkel” lens.
The projection window carries a PDLC film from Innovate Glass, a material that flips between clear and opaque, switched by a DMX controller (a standard stage-lighting signal). “The projection material on this window was scenic and abstract, allowing the opera to change locations and time through this ‘portal’ like window,” said MASARY’s cofounder.
Epson
The system is not autonomous. A person follows the live performance and presses buttons at the right moment. Okerstrom-Lang explained that a subtitle specialist from Boston Lyric Opera advanced the cues manually using a Touch OSC patch (a customizable touchscreen control panel) connected to Resolume (software for playing, mixing and manipulating video live).
MASARY isn’t the first to give subtitles a little stage presence. People of the Eye (2017) wove creative captions into its visual storytelling, while Deafinitely Theatre’s 4.48 Psychosis (2018) made projected text part of the set. Leeds Playhouse and Ramps on the Moon’s Oliver Twist (2020) deployed hundreds of animated phrases, and Icarus Theatre Collective’s The Lesson explored moving typography and interactions with the actors’ writing in 2021 and 2022.
These productions focused on accessibility, particularly for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, rather than overcoming language barriers. The shared idea is to give words a dramatic role instead of leaving them on the sidelines. In Boston, that means letting the text carry the emotion of the story, not just translate what’s being sung.
Source: Epson
