News: Krista Knight's "Crush" Named a Finalist for the Broadway On Demand Film Festival

Image courtesy Emily Owens PR

Crush, a VR puppet play by Krista Knight, is a finalist for the Broadway on Demand Film Festival, a short film festival to honor the groundbreaking ways in which creators approach theater in a digital age and socially-distant world. The short film with the most views by September 13 will be live-streamed on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Emmy® OTT platform this fall. To watch Crush, just create a free account at Broadway On Demand.

Crush is a six-part video puppet play created by No Puppet Co. using virtual reality. Picking up roughly from where Kafka left off—a loner, squatter, and rebel dares to love. We follow the anti-morphosis through a series of beat poetry performances as our hero draws nearer to the object of his desire and his undoing. 

When Crush, a finalist for the 45th Annual Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, was canceled due to COVID-19, Knight and 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 (as in 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 5 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.

You can read our review of Crush from last summer here (and our review of Knight and Brinegar's recent "roadkill musical" Sloppy Bonnie here).

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