Wires snake around mixing desks. Computer monitors perch on most available surfaces. A homemade electric toy car, a kind of souped-up DT project, slides along a makeshift monorail to hover over a single sausage in a frying pan, itself balanced on top of a portable stove. This is the headquarters of Foxdog – or rather, it was their living room, until the props from their interactive tech-based comedy show began taking over.
Foxdog is friends Lloyd Henning and Peter Sutton. By day, they run an IT consultancy from their home in South Manchester; by night they moonlight as musical comedians, schlepping their haul of homemade tech to venues across the city. The pair met at the University of Manchester and decided to start their IT company upon graduating; the comedy came later. Foxdog is the name of both their business and their act. “It’s not a great name for a business, and it’s not a great name for an act,” Sutton says. “But it’s kind of an OK name for both.”
Foxdog’s shows rely heavily on audience participation, but not the kind that might make anyone stage-shy baulk. Using a combination of augmented reality, robotics and interactive technology, they allow audience members to join in the action from the comfort of their smartphones.
“Do you want to fire the sausage canon?” Henning asks. He’s referring to a prop in their current show, called Robot Chef, which will debut at the Edinburgh Fringe in August.
The show’s set features the aforementioned toy car, monorail, gas stove and frying pan. To the side of this is a large screen, which shows a live-stream of the stage. Audience members are asked to connect their phones to a micro-network set up within the parameters of the venue, then go to a specific web address. The website tells visitors to draw a character – I draw a dog. My phone becomes a joypad and my crudely-drawn dog is superimposed on the scene in front of me, like a Pokémon character in Pokémon Go. Using my phone’s joypad, I can make it dance around the set.
The AR characters created by the audience then control what happens onstage; they bounce across the screen and land on virtual buttons that set off various actions. The audience directs them to move the toy car, which has an electromagnet on its base, so that it hovers above the frying pan. It then lowers the magnet, fishing-rod-style, to lift and drop the pan onto the stove. “Most frying pans aren’t magnetic enough, because they’ve got a non-stick coating,” says Sutton. “We had to go around Sainsbury’s, putting magnets on all the pans.”
Foxdog then place a sausage into what they call the “sausage deceleration chamber” (a plastic bag attached to an air compressor), which is fired into the pan with a resounding pop. The audience uses the AR characters to switch on the stove – and you’ve got yourself a sizzling sausage, fried from viewers’ phones.
The setup is complicated and takes an average of four hours to put together. “It can be quite stressful,” Henning says. “We ask venues for the earliest time we can arrive. Then we just show up earlier.”
Having been scuppered by tech fails previously, they’ve since written a script that takes into account everything that might go awry. “We write a different script for each show,” Henning explains. “Every time something goes wrong – a misconfigured sound card or something not plugged in – we write it into the script.” Their nerves fluctuate according to their proximity to the nearest Maplin.
The whole show is backed by Foxdog’s irreverent musical compositions, played live with Henning on bass and Sutton on drums. They initially intended Foxdog to be a band, citing Jack Black and Kyle Gass’s comedy rock duo Tenacious D as their main influence. But ultimately, says Sutton, they found combining music with tech and comedy more fulfilling: “We basically just took all our hobbies and put them in a show.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
