House of Horror, produced by Stardust Circus International, which combines the drama and theatrical gruesomeness of Gothic horror with quick witted and fantastic illusion art, was launched at the Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where it enjoyed a hugely successful seven-week run before going on the road.

The action includes mind-boggling special effects that help transport audiences into a strange world where nothing is as it seems, as Hans Klok’s House of Horror tests and exceeds the limits of the genre of ‘illusion.’ The epic-scale family horror show offers a cast of freakish and fantastical characters together with the Master of Magic.

Luc Peumans, commissioned as light and video designer, led the Painting with Light team, which utilized one of its new d3 Technologies’ media servers to great effect to help produce some gripping video special effects. They evoke the mystical world with many gruesome tricks and twists as Klok is pursued relentlessly by a pack of master illusionists from the past seeking to protect their realm of secrets.

The newly purchased d3 Technologies 4×2pro media server, supplied via Benelux distributor FACE, was specified as the most flexible and stable solution for storing and playing back House of Horror’s media elements.

“This show required maximum fluidity in the workflow and the ability to edit right up to the last minute.” According to Luc: “d3’s ‘flexible and intelligent’ timeline programming together with the pixel precision, superior mapping features and the quality of the image produced, made it ‘the best choice’ for the production.”

The d3 was programmed by Painting with Light’s Katleen Selleslagh. Luc and the entire team – Jos, Sina and Katleen – appreciated d3’s pre-visualisation capabilities, which were invaluable during the many House of Horror video brainstorming sessions as they prepped and reviewed the content. 

“Using the video visualisation package, we could look at all the footage and see exactly how it would appear onstage, onscreen from multiple angles and positions,” Luc explains.

The d3 system running the video cues is triggered partly by timecode and partly, manually, by the grandMA2 lighting console operated on the road by Stefan Hegteler.

The tour is currently scheduled to run until January 2017.