Meet Travis Kent, the lead in Burning Man: The Musical
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| Travis Kent as Joe in Burning Man: The Musical |
How did you first get involved with Burning Man: The Musical?
I did a solo concert at 54 Below in April, 2015, and Matt Werner came to see me perform. He gave me his card, and the rest is history!
How did you prepare to sing all of the male vocals on the opening track? What was that experience like?
With a good vocal warm up. Ha ha. And plenty of water. I’m used to creating distinctive character voices through my work with the YouTube channel AVbyte. It was fun to create so many vocal characters all in one day for Burning Man. Usually I’m playing one character for a day, but in recording Burning Man, I got to bring an entire company of characters to the microphone in one session.
What is it that you like most about the character of Joe? What have you done to make the character your own?
I like Joe’s ambitious perseverance. No challenge is insurmountable to him, and he doesn’t take no for an answer. Even when it seems impossible to achieve his goals, he finds a way to make it work. Joe and I are both really active dreamers, but where we differ is that he spends his work days behind a desk with a computer screen. My work life couldn’t be farther from that! So to bring myself closer to him I added personal touches like my Rubik’s cube to his work space.
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| Travis Kent (right), with Mitzi Akaha and Yaron Urbas |
No. Ha ha. But I will. I got a stomach bug the night before we started shooting. In the first day of shooting, which included the shots in the office space and on the rooftop captured over 13 hours, I ate two bananas and about a half gallon of gatorade. By the end of the second day, I was feeling significantly better, and after two days of starving with no appetite, the slice of pizza at the end of the shoot was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
In the photos on Facebook, we see there’s a deleted scene of you hanging from a rope in front of a green screen. Can you describe that shoot?
I really can’t wait to see the bloopers of that footage because there’s so much gold in it. The original concept for the opening sequence of the video was to see Joe skydiving into Burning Man (If you watch closely, you can see that I throw a parachute pack out of frame at the beginning of the studio-lit dream scene). To achieve the effect, I was suspended from the ceiling of a Brooklyn studio space by a rock climbing harness turned backwards with an air compressor blowing in my face as I sang the opening lyrics. It was by far the most painful thing I’ve ever done for the fine art of acting. Ha ha. The idea ultimately got scrapped as the deadline quickly approached, but the memories will last forever.
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| Travis Kent skydiving into Burning Man in deleted scene (photo by Jianna Hall) |
It was really a pleasure getting to know everyone in our incredibly diverse cast and crew while the camera wasn’t rolling. It’s an amazing group of collaborators with boundless amounts of creativity and artistic vision. I especially enjoyed learning how to juggle from Kat and conversely teaching her how to solve a Rubik’s cube. On camera I really enjoyed filming options for the moment when Steve Jobs reaches out of the frame of his portrait and touches Joe. It was at the end of the second day of shooting, and we were being as ridiculous as we could be. I also loved filming the dream sequence. Those shots involved almost the entire company and required a lot of precision choreography around a moving camera. Way to go, team!
Could you talk more about your theater training and education at NYU? Which past roles have you played that prepared you for this role?
I trained at the Atlantic Theater Company and CAP21 in my time at NYU. In that time I played a Latin-American political prisoner, a disgruntled English school boy, a sexually frustrated German teenager, a disco Shakespearean war hero, a presidential assassin, a televangelist preacher, and a rebellious insane asylum inmate… So I don’t think any of those roles have quite prepared me to play an entrepreneurial techie. Ha ha. I do always love a new challenge, though!
What reaction have you heard from friends and family about you being in the video?
My friends and family are loving the video! It’s making people who don’t know about Burning Man really curious as to what it is, and my friends who do know about or have even been to Burning Man think it’s hilarious. My grandma has no idea what happened in the entire five minutes, but she loved it still!
You have already played characters in viral musical videos on YouTube, such as Sherlock: The Musical on AVbyte. How was the filming of Burning Man: The Musical similar or different to those?
Filming Burning Man was a veeeery different process from filming the AVbyte videos. First of all the scale of the production for the Burning Man shoot dwarfed that of an AVbyte shoot. I think there were somewhere around 50 people involved with shooting Burning Man. A typical AVbyte shoot involved around six people. The timing was very different too. The amount of time between my first meeting with Matt to discuss the script and characters for Burning Man and the release of the finished video was about three months whereas the amount of time between Antonius (the composer of AVbyte) pitching an idea to me and release of a finished video was never more than a week. The process was also reversed for Burning Man. To make videos so quickly for AVbyte, we would record the video to a scratch track and then record the audio to match the video at a later date. For Burning Man, we recorded the audio track long before we started filming. It’s fun as an actor to experience different styles of production and see how they manifest in the final product.
Given your dance background, can we expect any Irish dancing in this?
Ha ha. I guess you’ll just have to wait and see. ;)
