What a crowd game needs from your venue

A checklist worth running before anyone commits to putting a crowd game in a show. Every item here has broken a test for us at least once.

A camera position, high

High enough to see past the front rows to the back of the seating. A camera at head height at the front sees the first two rows in detail and everyone else as a texture, which means the game is effectively played by a handful of people.

Ask: is there a lighting bar, a balcony rail, a control position, or a tripod position at the back with a clear sightline? If the only option is low and close, say so early — that is the setup that causes the most trouble.

Light on the audience

Not much, but some, and stable.

A camera cannot see a crowd in blackout. Plenty of lighting designs put everything into the stage, which is a legitimate choice that quietly rules this out. It needs raising with the LD during planning rather than being discovered at focus.

“Stable” is the part people miss. The level matters less than whether it changes during the game.

A screen the audience can see

Obvious, and still occasionally wrong — particularly when reading one section of a larger venue. The people playing have to be able to see the thing they are controlling, or there is no feedback loop and no game.

A power and signal path

Camera to machine, machine to screen. In a small room that is two cables. In a venue it is a conversation with whoever owns the vision system, and it is worth having before the day.

Somewhere to stand

Whoever runs it needs to see the audience and the screen at the same time, because calibration is a judgement call about what the room is actually doing. Operating blind from a room backstage does not work.

Twenty minutes, before doors

To mount, lock the camera, capture an empty-room reference and check the framing. It cannot be done with the audience already in, because the empty-room reference is the one thing that genuinely requires an empty room.

A host

The single largest variable and the one least often planned. Someone has to ask the room to do something, plainly, once, and then hold the silence while they decide. If nobody in the run of show is willing to do that, fix it before worrying about any of the above.