Apollo 13
A theatre production is a team effort and it can bring out the best in people. Strenuous efforts where you sprint for the finish line (opening night) are the norm, followed by the relentless feedback to refine the show performance by performance until that last night where you can relax, sit back and enoy your…
Synergy
CUTAZZ Synergy here we go. Time is short so will be updating one blog post as the days go by this year… No promises it’s an exciting read but if this stuff interests you then you might be interested to know how this show has evolved over time, how the job of a lighting designer…
Decade
I’ve gone grey as my lights got more colourful; here’s hoping they won’t fall out of the grid. So how does the last decade measure up and what does the next one hold? It’s a story of shows, of friends, of venues and of producing companies as much as it is a story of technological…
Compromise
“Design is the art of compromise.” is an uncompromising statement. It forces us to confront the negative concepts we have of compromise and elevates that to an art form. Seriously? Nobody likes to compromise. Dictionaries talk of expediently accepting standards below desirable and of settling disputes by making concessions. And yet nothing is perfect so…
Evita-t-minus-6-weeks
Week t-minus-6 has been and gone. Rehearsal schedule update has moved the first stagger later to t-minus-11-days. CAST Software have sent me updated SpectraCyc 200, Roxie and ColorSource PAR files which I have incorporated into the model. Essentially we are stalled. No change re set but there may be conversations about that early next week.…
Evita-t-minus-8,7weeks
Evita87 because, well, Evita is the next show and this blog covers 8 and 7 weeks to go… We’ve been naughty lampies. Back at the beginning we said “we don’t do set design”. We said this because techies with CAD tools and a good understanding of what’s in the stock pile are great at drawing…
Redevelopment
So the ADC has done (another!) redevelopment – this time replacing the ceiling and adding air handling in the auditorium. The lampie interest is of course the remodelled ceiling and lighting bridges. This led to quite a lot of updates to the Wyg model and stage plan. It transpires that while the 3D CAD needs…
Hell
Hell is chosing colour palettes. Really. Longer rant postponed as I’m still faffing with colour palettes and running out of time. Let’s just say that none of the following agree: brain, lx desk, visualiser, the actual fixtures.
Bulb
Domestic bulbs used to be so simple. When they blew you bought a replacement from a shop. For stage use an unshaded bare light bulb was always a bit bright – the sort of thing that would burn a hole in your retina whilst simultaneously offering no light to the surrounding stage. Your choices were…
Calm
…before the storm. Tomorrow we get in Sweet Charity. There’s not much time to blog when you’re focussed on the task so by way of update Rob & I have shot 136GB of rehearsal video, designed the rig, plotted 225 lx cues, fettled the plans (overstage, FoH, booms, section, set/stage/focus points, scene-by-scene, lx-everything), made the…
Evolution
How has the job of the lighting designer changed over time? Having looked after CUTAZZ’s annual dance show for a long time now I thought I’d pause to reflect. The first year I lit the show was all change – new lighting designer (muggins!), and a newly refitted Mumford theatre – so new lighting desk…
Moment
That moment. Suddenly you are confronted with your design, live and projected onto real people a few feet away from you. Not the badly rendered computer simulation, nor the messy black box of an empty stage with light thrown at it where all you can see is how well black paint takes light; the actual…
Obligatory plotting photo
It begins. Main screens left to right are Eos (cue sheet, magic sheet), rehearsal video, audio editor in spectral view. Eos connects to WYSIWYG which renders what it should look like onto the projection screen in the distance. Laptop in the foreground is running Show Cue System (sound files for the show and also timecode…
Tipping point
Today was the day that the sliding puzzle fixed itself. Hires booked; rig finalised, desk and WYSIWYG patched, some last minute faff about fixture modes, groups plotted, colour palettes sorted, magic sheet created, 29 empty timecode lists attached to 29 empty cue lists. Yesterday was the first weekend run-through. Sadly almost no costume, so the…
Hyper-procrastination
There isn’t really a word for it. I’m talking about the transition between procrastination (when the show is in the future and life is getting in the way of all those good intentions of starting earlier), and panic (when possibilities are bounded solely by the available time). That time when it’s definitely time to start…
Here we go again…
It feels like an eternity since I last had a show to think about – Priscilla was back in July and I’ve had an unusually empty diary since then. I’m off to watch the show recording tonight – as usual, dreading what the video recording will have done to the lighting design. But it’ll be…
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