2007 Sep 14 - Fri

LightFactory for Lighting BMDS' Production of The Sisterhood

It was an interesting experience, to say the least, in terms of being a first time lead lighting designer, introducing new equipment to the theatre, and learning a new piece of software.

All in all, the time was well spent. Live cue updates during rehearsals were simplified through a logical layout of lighting instruments in LightFactory.

In the diagram, instruments are assigned positions based upon the area they illuminate rather than the location they occupy in the grid. As such, in the diagram, there are five groups of four instruments. The top one of the diamond is a down light, the left was an amber 'warm' wash light, the right was a blue 'cold' wash, and the bottom was a lavender wash for the dark skinned actor, (the remainder of the cast were light skinned).

The channel over each of the four ColorCommand lights controlled the intensity. Each ColorCommand had three colors (magenta, yellow, and cyan), plus a beam width control.

Some of the specials were: 35: the bar bottle highlight, 32: a spot for a solo cast member talking to the audience, 19: a red downlight for the lovers, 2: the greenish downlight on the phone, 17,23: plant decoration, and 48: audience lights for intermission.

Over five acts, there were a total of 44 cues for the show, including one for doing a 15% on all lights for a lamp test.

The biggest hassle with LightFactory was in using the color lights. It took some time to work around some issues of assigning colors to a group of color lights. I think this has now been fixed. From what I see in the bug reports, there were some fixes implemented for refreshing Channel Groups and Palettes in a more timely fashion. I thought about updating the software once the bugs were fixed, but decided to run the software as it was through the show: better an enemy you know than one you don't. I'll update the software for the next show.