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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 work – whilst mentally steeling yourself for one last burst of effort to take the show appart at the end of the night. It can be all consuming, tiring and pushes people beyond what they normally would consider reasonable in say their normal work or home life. With age comes experience, less youthful energy, knowing when to give in for the night and take a break and when pressing on is injurious to the goal. You have a calibration of how hard you can sprint for how long. I’m immensely proud of some of the shows I’ve worked on and to date in life they are the benchmark by which I’ve been able to measure other things.

Until now that is. This blog is written on Day 25 of Apollo 13. After 24 days of extreme effort I am uncalibrated once more as to how hard I, and indeed the people around me, can sprint. My employer is part of the government’s ventillator challenge in response to Covid-19 and our internal project name is Apollo 13. There are some good parallels – think “Houston we have a problem”, running out of a scarce resource, having to invent solutions from limited components and above all a sprint of human endeavour to do something extreme. Our morning team leads meeting is “Mission Control”. Today is day 25 – an enforced day off and midnight-to-midnight down tools for the whole team. What follows are some incoherent ramblings about our situation and some thoughts I need to unpack.

I time the project from its offical start on Thursday 19th March. The preceding Friday had seen a call with government and our medical technologists had worked the weekend to demonstrate a rapid prototype. Rapid meaning I was able to view the demonstrator video on the Tuesday. I remember over lunch how impressed I was but also how odd it felt not to be part of the response commenting “if the world needed 5G base-stations to fight a global pandemic I’m sure we’d have responded – shame we can’t contribute.” This had rather changed by the Thursday when the job of software verification was hurtling around the company looking for a team lead and a hasty zoom with a rogues gallery of likely suspects convened on the Friday. The best qualified person could not be unplugged from other commitments. Other equally well qualified people were ruled out as the role is incompatible with supporting young children at home (we’d moved to home working that week). Two minutes is not a long time to ponder a major commitment and my glib response to the brief “we need an awkward bastard” may have swung it in my direction. And that was that. Relieved to say I got the person best qualified onto the team to support me – a vital sanity check.

I spent the next hour extricating myself from ongoing commitments. It was timely in one sense – I’d recently delegated most of Technical Authority role on a long-standing project to several people all of whom hit the ground running and I’m pleased to say have proven me superfluous over recent weeks. The other two projects on my plate were doing final reports that week or the following so some loose ends needed dealing with. When the dust settles on Apollo 13 its team will be commended – but so too should be the people who took on extra things to free up people for the team. Everyone I spoke to said “well duh! this out-prioritises, go do, we’ll cope”. Cambridge Consultants prides itself on responding quickly to new projects – but I’ve never seen a team ramp so quickly. By Friday afternoon we were making inroads into our bit of the problem. Nobody even discussed whether we should work the weekend – we just ploughed on.

I’ve never had a sleepless night questioning whether I should take on a project responsibility before. That’s not meant to sound arrogant. Put simply, nothing has mattered before. The worst a signal processing project can normally go wrong is to miss deadlines or go over budget. Class C medical software (translation “get it wrong and you kill people”) is not my comfort zone. At the time it was believed the UK would run out of ventillators in 14 days. The morals of the situation were terrible. Do nothing – people die. Do something too quickly or carelessly – people die. Do it to perfection and you will be late – people die. There were serious unanswered questions from the MHRA as to what concessions against normal product standards would be allowed – even what specification we were aiming for. The critical path is never a great place to be in such circumstance as software was likely to be. The motivation – do something that could save lives – was clear enough and widely understood. I know I struggled with my composure trying to explain our situation as we brought people into the team. How on earth do you describe what commitment is expected from people in such circumstances? How do you set expectations? With hindsight I needn’t have feared – the team around me share an understanding of the situation and everyone is focussed on the goal. It helped to ponder a conversation from years earlier with Simon Long – ask an ex employee about what they worked on at CC and they’ll pour good humoured scorn on the pointless bluetooth widgets and other daft things they worked on – while telling you that however dull/miserable/difficult the project the thing they took pride in was the thing that made a difference in life (in this case I think some sort of kidney dialysis machine). Anway. Sieze the moment and press on. No time to ponder.

The first week was a blur. Think get up at 6am with thoughts racing, ingest the overnight changes and test data, plan the day ahead in time to sync with the team at 9am and escalate any issues to other team leads by 9.30am’s Mission Control. Inevitable calls and followups. 12.30 team meeting to absorb the mornings work and reset the direction. Not uncommon to get to 4pm when working from home and think “Crap. Should have a shower now and maybe some breakfast”. Then work on in to the evening and often the night. Oddly it’s not a technical challenge – the pneumatics, mechanics and software in a ventillator are not ground breaking – the challenge is to do it in a context where every day counts and where what you have to aim for depends on when you can achieve it. We are not resource limited – but there is a fundamental limit to how fast you can align people and solidify a design and plug in people and hardware to help contribute.

Last weekend was surreal. On the Friday we had a project team video conference with David Baker – one of the original Apollo 13 mission control people – a fascinating insight into a very famous moment in history and he had some thought provoking things to say about what people are capable of when they push as a team. Also a good motivator going into the weekend – our product would leave 5am Monday for government test. Day 17 Saturday saw the first assembly of a full product prototype – electronics, mechanics, software, casework the lot and it was a hell of a relief to see it go together and spring into life around midnight. My corner of the world was a close run thing – we were trying to clear four software milestones in a weekend for a 4pm Sunday code freeze and 5pm delivery to system test. Milestone 3 (minimal viable product) was looking good so we were free to enhance test coverage and push for the stretch target milestone 4. All good in theory until a late breaking bug in 3 came to light at 4.36pm, the test framework had hit issues due to the push for enhanced tests and 4 hadn’t been tested at all – with the test cycle at >20 minutes. We had nothing at that moment – and a timely prod from the TA “will it be ready by 5” was met with a bold text *Maybe* as the best certainty we could give. My longest and most intense 24 minutes of concentration of the project followed as the test framework came together and both milestone releases went through test in parallel. We delivered 30 seconds ahead of the deadline. And breathe(!) The system test went ahead and were done by 2am with 3 hours to spare.

It’s hard when you’re pushing for a target and the target moves. The global picture is complicated and we’re about plan D – plans A,B,C involving pushing pre-existing design production harder, scaling e.g. formula 1 companies to make the parts that cannot be sourced for existing designs, ramping production of more basic export products for the application and so on. Making a new design from scratch is not the obvious answer but it can be tailored both to the disease and to the enormously complex supply chain issues – basically what is in stock or can be manufactured in volume in the UK. And there is a lot of sense to backing multiple approaches. Our plan now has a different end date because we’re aiming for something more sophisticated – the clinical feedback is changing in response to what is being learnt. The world is awash with “dead simple” ventillator concepts that will keep someone alive for 24 hours; less so the more sophisticated support needed to nurse someone to recovery over 14 days without doing more harm than good. And the early designs that do get approved canibalise the supply chains for the designs that follow and the designs have to iterate. Another sadness around an end date that moves is that if you’d known it was going to move on day one you would have gone about it differently.

It’s bizarre when people are so focussed to think we don’t have certainty the design will see the light of day. If we are stood down it’s won’t be because we haven’t delivered a viable product in an insane timescale – it will be a competing design getting there first or because the need has receded or because the government’s plans A,B,C have over-delivered. Whilst all these things should be celebrated such an outcome would be gut-wrenchingly hard for such a focussed and comitted project team.

I try and avoid the press. The companies working on this all agreed to avoid publicity; it’s not helpful and adds enormous stress to the people involved. Dyson is a dirty word for breaking ranks and talking rubbish on this front. The government and associated press releases linked above were probably a response to this – although putting it in the public domain did help in enabling people to talk to their families and friends about what they were working on. It’s sad but I’ve been very careful writing this to avoid naming names and companies involved or to release details into the public domain that should not be.

I struggle with social media. People spout forth with complete certainty as to what should be done or what mistakes have been made. Such people are idiots. The situation is far more complex and nuanced than many imagine. On no day has it been clear what the right course of action is. A vigourous but tolerant debate is needed not such simplistic and entrenched positions. I’ll avoid a long rant here but people need to think harder. Lockdown has its costs – in mental health alone to say nothing of social, cultural and economic harm it does. The economic worries should not be off topic – without it the supply chain for health services is unviable and no you can’t easily delineate what is “essential”. The people who blame the government for everything simply mark themselves out as people who would blame the government for everything in all situations regardless. I try not to get stressed arguing with such people.

Life has its other oddities. If I’m in work I can pretty much chose an entire empty floor of an office building to go work in. Mostly I’m there to ransack labs for test equipment and to build remote-access lab rigs. The doctor doing the evaluations was isolating so while you can’t meet him the cameras for the video links are operated by his daughters because he’s not isolating from his family. Working with a sub-team of 12 people only one of whom you’ve worked with before and only two of whom you know would be bizarre enough in normal circumstances – now with video conference and home working for added wierdness. Michael Gove has written to us as “dear friends” confirming we’re key workers. And so on….

There’s humour too. I remember the general channel in teams carrying “Rumours are circulating it’s gloriously sunny outside. This is FAKE NEWS.”

The hypochondria gets the better of you. The worry that you might be ill or worse might make a project team ill who have to deliver in about the length of time the illness knocks you out for is not a happy thought. I have no idea how much I cough occasionally in normal life – because I do that when I’m in perfect health. I suspect despite pleading with us we’re not being careful enough on social distancing in labs; people are putting it to the back of their minds.

I am grateful to the people who’ve checked up on me. I’m sorry if I don’t seem to listen when you tell me to take a break. I am managing. Theatre taught me well and I know the warning signs when I am tired and I’m monitoring how well I rest. And it’s not like there’s anything else to do at the moment. The team around me are rotating through rest days and I’m trying to look out for them. After 24 days of 14-16 hour days I was pretty tired by the end of yesterday having only had a few hours break on Thursday. I’m not sure of the wisdom of today’s shutdown given I know the challenge of the week ahead but I’m using it to go back maximally recharged. On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 launch it was nice to sign off for Sunday to a message from David Baker encouraging us in our endeavours. There have been phone calls to friends and a BBQ in the sun and so on today. I have food – a large pile of cow does three roast dinners and several curries so my major food groups are covered.

I am deeply proud of the people I work with; they are doing an amazing job in difficult circumstances. I have faith everyone reading this would do the same in the same circumstances which is why I’m embarrased people compliment me on what I’m doing. I’m just being me and doing what I do with all the energy I can summon. We’re not out of the woods yet. For me it’s all about the end goal. It could all come off the rails in the week ahead just as quickly as it’s come together so far. Mis-steps are costly when the timescale is in days. We all desperately want to see this in manufacture. We steel ourselves for the coming days.

“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 compromises are inevitable. If I move the masking off stage I accept the show won’t mask from seat A1, and I’ve traded that for better views for many more people or bigger dance numbers or whatever. That’s a good compromise – an optimal trade-off given an unmoveable constraint (the shape of the building).

There are many more subtle compromises. Almost every light you focus is a compromise between where the wanted light is going and what the beam flare is spilling onto that it shouldn’t. Time is finite so there’s always a time tradeoff – more time spent plotting the finale or more time spent making the more mundane bits slightly better. The rig is finite – should there be more lights dedicated to specials that are used briefly or a better general cover that will be used throughout the show? Making a given dance number flashy is more effective if you don’t make all the other numbers flashy, but in keeping your powder dry the other numbers are somehow not as pleasing. These are all more interesting compromises because they don’t have obvious solutions. They require skill, judgement and experience to get right, and “right” is a matter of opinion – it’s art not science. Bring it on – it’s why designing things is interesting!

Compromises can mount up though. For every idea, light or cue that makes it into a production there are probably several ideas that don’t – each show is a tradgedy of discarded ideas and unexplored potential. These ideas go silently to their graves, known only to the designer, who is in danger of measuring the show against what might have been. I’m often critical of my own work and of the productions I’m involved in. And kindly rational souls tell me “don’t be silly – given the circumstances you were working under it was the best that could be achieved”.

This is where it gets ugly though because it forces you to evaluate the circumstances and how you feel about them. If a production company says to me “there’s no budget this year because we’re saving everything for our big centenary show next year” and I understood the rationale at the outset and it still seemed worth doing, fair enough. I chose to accept the constraints. The bad ones are the ones where the circumstances that lead to compromise were avoidable or unnecessary. The shows where the budget is wrong simply because the people who set it were out of touch, uninterested, on auto-pilot or just “doing the same as last year”. The ones where despite knowing when the show was many months in advance there’s still no useful run-through until three days to go. The ones where these failure modes were pointed out when accepting the project and yet the errors are still repeated as a sort of slow-motion car crash. Doing your best “given the circumstances” is less consoling if the circumstances are infuriating. The gap between what you produce and what might have been grows so it’s less rewarding – but the effort that goes in goes up since you’re also working around the problems. Less for more.

The pernicious long term effect of all this is it forces you to choose your shows more carefully, to take a chance on fewer things, to negotiate harder up front, to force choices and budget before accepting the project. I don’t want to travel too far down that road. Perhaps its time for a long break from shows…

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. I’m going to spend some of the bank holiday playing trying to get organised on RDM and other new desk features. From tomorrow it’s t-minus-5 weeks.

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 stuff on plans that’s easy to make. It definitely skews things towards “functional” rather than “artistic”; it leads to “structural” more than it leads to “coherent visual look for the show”. It is not our area of expertise – people called “set designers” are widely believed to be better at it. However, the production team doesn’t have one of those, so….

We met with the director to go through some initial thoughts on lighting with 8 weeks to go. The discussion broadened into the set since a rough idea of the space we’re lighting is kinda important. And yes, naughty us, we drew some plans.  Iterated them at 7 weeks to go. And so we turned our attention to what we could work out on the lampie front given what we know already re set. Which is?

It’s not giving too much away to say there’s a raised section at the back of stage and space for dancing in front of it. The upstage part of the raised section may also be home to the band, who we might (TBD) hide behind a cloth at various points. So what is the new ADC lighting rig and remodelled auditorium good for?

Basics. Frontwash. Tentatively assuming we want a ton of sidelight (this being a musical) the frontwash had might as well be straight on. So let’s play with the new Source Four Lustr2’s and see what happens. Immediately we don’t quite understand the bridges. At least not the combination. Bridge 1 naturally does what the old bar zero did quite well – if you want a second layer wash starting upstage of the safety curtain it will do fine – in 26 degree the angles are about right US-DS although ideally you want a bit wider to smoothly wash left-to-right:What is difficult is that Bridge 2 is so shallow that anything you put on it to light the forestage massively overlaps the next layer. Here’s two layers of 26 degree units in section – with layer two tweaked upstage to meet the front of the deck. What you see is that L1 also reaches the front of the deck.A bit more experimenting says that to span the width of the forestage right to the corners in Lustr says we need three 36 degree units, or five 19 degree units, from Bridge 2. The 19s work better in terms of overlap. There is no plan to use Lustr as frontwash – no reason we would waste decent colour-changing units on frontwash – however, given the lens pile is restricted (8 of 19, 26, 36 degree) then it is useful to know that eight 19 degree units (5 making layer 1 wash from bridge 2 and 3 forming layer 2 from bridge 1) would work if they were leftover. So three RJ614 will do the whole stage from bridge 2, and reach the corners, and they zoom so we can get the angles right, and having set them up to cover the width they will stretch back to the deck as well. They won’t be desperately bright, but we don’t need them to be, and it means we will run them closer to full brightness and get a better colour temperature from them. This may change pending rehearsals if we need to be more selective with the frontwash but it’ll do for now. We did try a zillion other things with the Lustr – too many to list here – but nothing seemed to quite work for us. Fans from either side didn’t seem to help.

Important stuff. Sidelight. Pairing a 26 and 36 degree Lustr to do the sidelight seems obvious (that’s my ballet brain talking) and seems to work. So the 8-of-each-lenses do forestage, downstage, midstage, and maybe deck. Hard to say without a sidemasking plan. And with the question hanging over the cloth it’s possible we need to split things US/DS of the cloth to cover the band deck. Hiring lenses for the nominally leftover 19 degree units is an option.A pile of Lustrs doing sidelight suggests a new option – can the ColorSource PAR (normally a shoe in for sidelight) do backlight? With the round lenses there are issues. You end up with only three units to cover the width – and a non-sensible overlap – but upstage-downstage this barndoor-free unit will dribble all over the front of the auditorium – and not be desperately punchy at the same time. The oblong lens suggests four on a bar and three bars will cover stage nicely and with a bit more punch.

One thing we’re fairly sure of is that the show will want one or potentially several followspots. Having seen them used from bridge two in recent shows they look really good – no daft beam the length of the auditorium lighting up the haze/dust, and about the right steepness. However, there’s a catch. We don’t yet know if we’ll need to followspot on the deck – an issue because you can’t. From the Lx Box a spot can light a 6′ person stood on 6′ deck (the prosc. height being 12’5″) and this gets worse the further upstage you get. The new bridges make this slightly worse. But from the bridges it’s basically not possible to spot someone on deck – they’re similar in height to the lx box spot, closer to the stage, and from bridge 2 bridge 1 gets in the way as well. Perhaps we throw some moving lights at the problem.

Some experimenting

So for what we know we have some sketchy thoughts to cover off the basics in terms of washing the stage. It leaves a ton of TBDs – mainly around having pencilled in all of a given type of unit and then needing more to deal with the deck or band. For Lustr we might hire lenses, for ColorSource it’s not an easy hire option (a different type of unit being colour matching pain at least). And the new rig? Partially working for us (it’s progress that all bar three of the units we’ve mentioned are colour-changing) and partially a source of worry (bridge 2 angles are shallow, the lens pile is restrictive, would be great if there were some punchy LED fresnels with barndoors). Who knows we might rip up everything I’ve written here as more detail emerges – and experience says the first time you light a new rig or venue is always the hardest.

It’s a start. I’ve done all the procrastination things. There’s a wyg model with 27 blank scenes, a load of side-masking and top-masking drawn just waiting to be dropped into place, and some tentative lx bars.  The rest is pending on blocking, run-throughts and set.

As I write this it’s Sunday – 6 weeks from now we’re in the get-in. More news as the situation develops…

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.

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 clear or perl and 40 / 60 / 100W. I have largely ignored the newpapers whining about domestic bulbs being outlawed having long since swapped everything at home for something more energy efficient (and, sadly, less warm, pleasant or homely).

It turns out that people have a strong concept of what a light source should be – and it should be a filament lamp. Much like the way you colour nightime or moonlight on stage doesn’t really make any sense but is universally understood. So this week I found myself in need of a bulb – and with the clock ticking to the next show, it was Amazon Prime to the rescue.

It seems that the bulb is back in fashion. Restaurants love their highly stylised filament lamps, and Amazon will even sell you a retro twisted single core cable set (apparently with a CE mark). You know – the sort you occasionally find at grandparents houses that make part of your brain scream “electrical hazard from previous century”. There is now a huge range of styles and shapes and sizes. There are a lot of bulbs that are LED – zillions of teeny tiny LEDs made into a filament-shaped string – a quite remarkable bit of technology if you stop and think.

For stage use there is good and bad news. The good news is there are a lot of physically larger bulbs. An old-fashioned bulb borrowed from your house always looked slightly pathetic hanging above a vast stage. Bad news is that the fasion for retro is expensive so you have the outrage of paying a tenner for a light bulb. Also, sadly, Edison Screw is all the fashion. Bayonet Cap BC22 is available and while I prefer it because it damn well reliably latches it does restrict your choice. So here is what I ended up with:

Yes, that is a “designed to look retro BC lamp holder” and yes the part black “distressed look paint” does come off all over you as you wire it. No I didn’t want to have to buy that but all my local screwfix had to offer was bright white plastic. Biggest worry now is that for a 60W light bulbs it is a lot dimmer than I was expecting which may ruin the effect. While it’s hard to tell from the photo the fact you can see the reflection of my patio doors in it gives some idea!

So there you have it – 125mm diameter bulb outputing a mere 320 lumens. Accoding to the label it hits 100% brightness in 0 seconds. This is factually incorrect, unlike the “E” energy rating!

…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 lx practicals, found some followspot crew and even done a bit of carpentry to help the set along. One set of hires is in the venue, the other is loaded in the van. The car is loaded with ropelight, nylon cord, hard hats, hi viz, toe-tectors, just-in-case items (DMX, black wrap, glow tape), and my magic blue box (colour, frost, gobos, plans, bar tapes, USB key with show file, tools, tape measures, gopro). Lunch! Damnit, mustn’t forget the things in the fridge or the biscuits for the crew; don’t want a mutiny.

So the theory is good – hours in advance save minutes on the day and minutes on the day are finite; we’ve done the prep. Tomorrow we find out if it works. Most of the day will be spent rigging, cabling, addressing, patching. Some of it focussing. The actual percentage of the day spent looking at the lighting to make it better will be very small so we have to make those bits really count.

Brain ought to relax now. The show’s all loaded in vehicles, and, barring things from the fridge which have to be tomorrow, can’t be forgotten. Brain is the weak point now. Being at home with multiple computers and a visualizer to marshal the information is all well and good; at some point tomorrow, brain will have to recall (unaided) how all 103 lights point, zoom, shutter, and what on earth it was thinking when it originally plotted all those cues. Ok, so I try to write focus notes, but 3D problems don’t map well into English. Early night, won’t sleep, early rise, stare at the information and memorise it. Oh, and colour palettes. My brain thinks they’re colour A, lighting desk says colour B, visualiser colours C,D,E,F for each of the different fixture types. Trying to remember what you aimed for when watching multiple wrong versions of the truth is a headache at best.

Apprehension. How many crew? What is pre-rigged? What will go wrong? What haven’t we thought about? Have to be nimble; the plan is good, but must adapt and change as the day wears on. Going to be on a mission tomorrow to get it rigged and focussed so we can actually do the creative bit; must keep the energy up; must remember to eat and drink. Oh yes, and the big one – will it work as a design, or is it going to be a very long week? Tomorrow is the moment of reckoning.

It’s a privilege to work with the talented people who are trying to make this show happen. It could be good. It should be good. All we need is a little luck along the way…

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 (ETC Ion) and a pile of Source 4 profiles. The new profiles have a much cooler beam and effectively mean gobos can now last forever – compare and constrast the following:

There was the usual constraint of having to send the lx plan in before having seen any run throughs. That first rig was a fairly traditional dance rig – as many colours of sidelight as the PAR can pile would allow, some shins, two colours of backlight, a breakup wash, some cyc colours. Specials were four gobos, a fan of 6 PAR Cans, two floods for some shadow-play on the cyc and three areas (DSL, DSR, MSC). Even back in 2011 I had a primitive visualiser (WYSIWYG design) so was able to draw a plan with confidence the focus would go well. Video had already found its way onto the techno-must-have list and I duly wandered off to video the two weekend run-throughs.

The brief from the company was simple back then – “most dances will consist of just one set lighting state throughout the dance. A few will require a little bit more but it will still only be 3/4 cues per dance. There are 21 dances in the show.” They were concerned about not over-running the three hour lighting plot and the costs of venue overtime. So preparing to plot was a two stage process – the first a “rough states” spreadsheet with one line per dance, capturing costume notes, possible colour combinations and any specials. From this a more detailed “cues” spreadsheet was built with fade times, notes for each state, approximate music and visual cues. Armed with this information the show was plotted over cans in the Mumford; venue tech on the Ion, me in the middle of the auditorium with my laptop. I surprised the company by sticking to the plot time – annoyingly it turned out there was a spare hour in the plan “because everyone overruns”(!) I hadn’t stuck to the “one state per piece” rule either though mostly where I hadn’t the states were easily related (state, add spot, remove spot, or alterating verse state vs chorus state). Plotting 117 cues in 3 hours is one every 90 seconds, or about 3 minutes to build from scratch, adjust and look at each state once you factor our the duplicates and the blackouts. I hate to think we used to plot this way. And don’t forget the three(!) effects – actually they were four but the latter was done manually with flash buttons.

That first year was well received; it was also an excellent spring-board for the following year. It’s always a massive advantage to have lit a venue or a similar show before; the 2012 rig was an evolution with many subtle changes based on learning from the previous year. The colour palette was updated – partly for colour changes but also to try and maximise the light output of the sidelight when covering a huge stage. Subtle tweaks to the backlight positioning and focus also led to more useable light on stage. Plus more time to think about adding gobos and changing the specials.

2012 was also the first year I’d stumped up for the full version of WYSIWYG Perform. The idea is simple enough – you connect your lighting desk offline editor to the Visualiser, and as you programme the show into the offline, the visualiser shows you what it looks like. Back then it was a revelation. No more truly “blind plot” – no more staring at a screen full of percentages and trying to imagine what it might look like. There was still the issue of the offline occasionally throwing out spurious DMX frames – it did this so you couldn’t use it instead of buying a real lighting desk. But the main issue was calibration – how would the show look like on stage vs in the visualiser? Fortunately this went well – the usual 3 hour frantic plot session replaced with “does this look ok? Next cue….”. The show had grown to 24 numbers and crept up to 150 lighting cues. Being able to plot at home meant being able to devote two whole days to the plot; time was still the enemy however as the offline editor is a rather slower thing to programme than the real lighting desk.

2012 was also the first year I had the pipe-tape printer – basically a 1:1 scale lighting plan you drop onto the lx bar. Also deployed for the first time on the dance show it lets you get lights positioned much more accurately – which is helpful when you have geometric beam patterns and the like. Hires that year extended to a haze machine and an Atomic 3000 Strobe.

2013 brought a small but welcome innovation – multiple cue lists in the lighting desk. All the dance numbers were now separate cue lists; more manageable, more logical and sensible cue numbers – and much easier to deal with when the company changes the running order. The only slight panic it caused was when the venue loaded all 227 lx cues into the desk but all the screen showed was “prestate, blackout”. Yes, now at 28 dance numbers and with the visualiser tamed the number of cues in the show had roughly doubled. 2013 also saw heavy use of Intensity Palettes in the pre-plot – making the Wednesday “quick look and fix” session more efficient. States that were meant to look the same now did having tweaked only the first of them. Likewise balancing four colours to get the intended colour mixing on the cyc only had to be done once per colour.

2014’s innovation was timecode. Until that point timing of cues had been via one of two means. Approximate timing in the music happened by someone watching the CD player and reading out the display over cans. Anything more precise required watching the dance rehearsal video and basically memorizing it. Together with the ability to offline visualise and plot it was getting to be quite a lot to remember and running the live show was nothing if not adrenaline filled. Timecode let me set cues exactly where I wanted them in the music – and with such accuracy it opened up whole new ways of plotting. Particularly for effects, flashes and big finishes things you would never dream of trying to do manually were now possible. 90% of the 246 cues were run this way the rest remaining as visuals. Timecode has its costs – it is hugely more time-consuming setting the cue points in pre-plot. One of its main advantages is that more of the dress rehearsal can be spent worrying about light levels and the look of the show – without also having to operate flash buttons, poke GO a zillion times and count eights and seconds in your head. Running the show brought very mixed emotions; delighted at how sharp the cues could be it is hard to describe how flat I felt after the first night. There’s something magic about opping a live show, focussing intently on the dance and the music, keeping a wary eye on the desk and generally trying to do a million things at once without cocking it up. I’m sure timecode is more reliable but it was way less fun. I did bits of the finale on flash buttons just to cheer myself up.

2015 saw the hire of a “proper” haze machine – able to go from “no haze” to “haze everywhere” in seconds. The main learning point was “don’t test this in the kitchen”

2016 was all change with the show moving from the Mumford to the Leys Great Hall. All the work of a new venue – positions, angles and focus, side and top masking all done from scratch. The rig was now a mixed LED and conventional rig. And with two washes of colour-changing units for the backlight and sidelight you end up with far fewer units. The first show in the Leys weighed in at 87 lights (all the Mumford rigs had been over a hundred units). You have less to focus when one wash can do any colour but it costs you time checking your colours actually look nice. I’d settled on a palette of about 16 colours; the new hell being to keep a clear idea in my head what colour I wanted them to be in the venue (different to what the visualiser thought they looked like, which was different again to what the lighting desk’s colour picker thought they looked like). One day the world will calibrate this stuff properly! There’s more setup too – the lights have fixture modes, dimming curves and other parameters to manage; the 87 control channels plus the venue house lighting end up mapped across five universes of DMX in total. On the plus side it was great not to be reliant on three colours of PAR can for the sidelight; on the minus the LED light quality simply isn’t as nice as tungsten or discharge. It’s hard to say what’s missing – but something definitely is.

I also discovered Show Cue System in 2016; no more having to find an Apple Mac just to run timecode in QLab. It’s quite a capable bit of software and its pricing and license model are very reasonable.

2017 got off to an expensive start with the purchase of a programming wing. It’s equivalent to the main control surface of the lighting desk minus all the submaster faders. Together with two touch-screens it makes offline plotting a lot easier than with a QWERTY keyboard. It can also spit out real DMX and Ethernet control frames – no more visualizer glitches from “offline” mode. Unlike the normal offline editor it also connects to real external MIDI sources – so for the first time it was possible to test the timecoding (Show Cue System + MIDI + lighting desk + visualizer) prior to leaving for the venue. Also on the expensive list was a GoPro camera. I first bought a video camera for rehearsal in 2009 – it had been a massive help and a great productivity boost; however, you always ended up filimg rehearsals rather than watching them. And rehearsal rooms are never large enough – you end up filming from at most a metre in front of the “stage” space. Hence the massively wide-angle GoPro – now the camera just sits there and captures everything and I can concentrate on making notes and thinking about what I’m watching.

And 2018? We made hanging booms work at the Leys. So now the colour-key sidelight is much closer to body height but not so low it causes problems with entrances and exits. And it’s in a different place and from a different angle to the general lavender wash – so the two compliment each other rather than washing each other out. Not rocket science but still a welcome improvement. Also, a full 19 years after I’d first put moving lights in a show, we eeked out the budget to include two movers. Ok they only picked off some of the specials but it hints at a world where such things are more affordable and if cost can be squeezed out elsewhere it’s possible they could be more of a feature in future years.

Overall then a lot has changed. The basics are quicker and easier and the tools are better – but more can be done with them and more is possible – indeed expected. The unchanging thing is that time is still the enemy: there are 50 percent more dance numbers in the show and four times as many lighting cues but there’s still only the Monday and Tuesday between first seeing the show in costume and having to be plotted. The world has changed around us too – a non-moving light design tends to be the exception not the rule today and people are used to the eye candy they see on television and at live events – the show has some catching up to do here. I’m glad to say some things haven’t changed – the nuts and bolts of colours and angles and how they play with form and movement are still important; the dance is ever changing and the performers’ enthusiasm undimmed. The live spectacle is always something special.