DPI:

Do you find that your designs are reproduceable? Why or why not?

Hal Eagar [1]:

I used to run the shows I designed, for various reasons; from there was no separate operator budget to its more work to make it easy for someone else to run. Also I like the idea of the live animation and the ability to change things from day to day, that I enjoy kind of playing the video system like a instrument. Of course I tended to build them like that because otherwise I'd get board running the show myself as well.
Anyway that made it harder, but not impossible to reproduce, just more dependent on my brain than a book.

But now I'm living in the permanent time crunch that comes with being a parent so I'm always planning to have someone else run the show. I think this probably changes the way I create a show, less fiddly controls, just the crucial things.
That means that I do manage to put just about all the info needed to reprocude it into a book, or at least into someone else's head.   It may not stay in that person's head, and the book might not have enough info, since re-mounting the production is not my focus while putting it together, but it's a good start.

I don't really think about reproducibility as I'm going, and sometimes I can make something that can be tricky to reproduce. But I'll often be able to cut the equipment down a lot on a second reproduction of a show, because I know what is happening at the start of the build and I can figure ways to double up on uses of projectors and computers. If something is going on tour, it's really worth the time to re-write patches to cut the equipment down to a minimum. It's a little more unwieldy in a lot of ways to try and run 3 projectors from one computer, but it's often not viable to tour with the extra 2 computers.

So in the end, I guess the answer is, that if the show is good enough to reproduce I will make it happen, but I don't worry about it untill I need to.  So far everything has been reproducable.  In the future I expect they will be easier to reprocuce.