An upcoming stage production being put on by the Lake Michigan College Visual and Performing Arts Department will be a lot brighter thanks to new technology being paid for with a Berrien Community Foundation grant.

LMC Theater Instructor Shalico Sain tells us a For Good Major grant of $11,800 will enable the program to rent large-scale LED video wall panels and digital scenery for the March production of the musical, “Big Fish.” She says this technology is perfect for the fantastical story.

“With the LED screens, what’s going to be great with that is we’re going to have a lot of basically digital scenery, which will allow us to program it with digital animated slides to really, at a push of a button, be able to create lots of different places like the circus, a cave, a tornado,” Sain said.

The panels will project animated backdrop scenes spanning the width of the LMC Mendel Center Jenkins Theatre stage.

“So we’re going to have across the back of the stage approximately 20-foot wide LED screen, about 10 or 12-foot tall, and then on stage right and stage left, dunce length, about 4 -foot wide panels about the same height.”

Sain says she previously witnessed the technology in action thought this would be a good time to bring it back

“I came in over the summer, and there was a different company that had those panels in there for some other event, and I happened to see them hanging in the theater space, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, where do we get one of those?’ And I wasn’t sure if it would be something that was feasible. And to purchase it was out of our realm, but to be able to put a grant together to rent them for this show was something that definitely was feasible with the help of the Berrien Community Foundation.”

Said said acquiring the technology on a more long-term basis could be a goal for the future. She notes having the LED equipment at the Jenkins Theater, if even temporarily, will give the students a chance to get in some technical training.

“I try to equate it, for my students when I describe it, like if they see the award shows or like American Idol and things like that, and they see the very large digital screens, television screens in the background with the animated scenery and stuff that changes. It’s basically like what we’re going to have in the back. So it’ll be really cool for us to have an opportunity to work with something like that.”

The equipment is being rented from TPC Technologies in Niles and will be installed in March. Sain says she’s grateful to have the support of the BCF.