The After Dinner Joke Animations

During the summer of 2018, I worked as a projection designer for the Potomac Theater Project (PTP), a unique Middlebury College theater program that combines students and professional actors into a single company. I created 36 short animated scenes to be projected on stage during The After Dinner Joke, a dark satire about charity. The play had a four-week run at Atlantic Stage 2, an Off-Broadway theater in Chelsea, Manhattan.

The visuals were largely inspired by Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was an important part of the play's contemporary culture (England in the 1970s). They feature clearly superimposed layers of disparate content, including Photoshopped imagery, live action footage, and a variety of clips collected from the corners of YouTube. I composited and animated the clips using After Effects.

Here is a sampling of the results (which should give you a sense for how all-over-the-place the play is)