Crush, a VR puppet play by Krista Knight, is one of the winners of the inaugural Broadway on Demand Film Festival, a short film festival created to honor the groundbreaking ways creators approach theatre in a digital age and socially-distant world. The award-winning short film will be streamed on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Emmy® OTT platform this fall.
When Knight’s play, a finalist for the 45th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, was canceled due to COVID-19, she and co-creator Barry Brinegar decided to use the virtual tools they’d been experimenting with prior to the pandemic to create something completely remotely, completely in-house. Literally, in their house. Crush was created in Knight and Brinegar’s 500 sq-ft home studio in the East Village. They recorded actor Ben Beckley in two sessions over Zoom (on his iPhone) and set up a home nerve center with five monitors (assembled from a motley crew of tablets, computers, and spare screens) and used virtual technologies to capture motion in 3D space to match the vocal performance. With one person in virtual reality and the other watching the footage, they recorded the live animation.
Krista Knight (Playwright/Co-Creator) is a Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program Fellow (2016-2018), Page 73 Playwriting Fellow (2007), MacDowell Fellow (2008), Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Vineyard Theatre (2011-2012), Chance Theater Resident Playwright (2020), Vanderbilt Writer-in-Residence (2021), and winner of the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville (2016). Her work includes Lipstick Lobotomy (Kilroys List; Trap Door Theatre), Don’t Stop Me(musical with Dave Malloy), Kirk at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt (NYTW’s Summer Residency; Vineyard Theatre reading series; Playwrights Foundation Rough Reading; Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse/ MacDowell Benefit), Primal Play (New Georges; Playwrights’ Center), Hissifit (Cradle Theatre; Berkeley Rep School of Theatre; Rhodes College), Salamander Leviathan (Joe's Pub at the Public Theater; Ars Nova Ant Fest; Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival; Inkwell; KCACTF Musical Theatre Award from the Kennedy Center for best book), Doomsurfing (Parkside Lounge; UCSD), Selkie (Williamstown Workshop; Dutch Kills), and seventeen plays and musicals for young audiences.