2008 Jul 12 - Sat

Open Source: Sonic Visualizer

This blog entry should actually go under the title of Open Source Package of the Day, but because it solves a different problem for me, it comes under the heading of Lighting.

Back in April, I did lighting for a student Jazz group. As part of the show, I wanted to do my own little ditty. My desire was to do a mini light show set to music. In some shows, I've seen the lighting designer loosely sync the lighting display to the music theme. My goal for this particular display was to ave the light show visibly keep time to the beat of the music.

I considered quite a number of ways to do this. Some more manual than others. A key feature had to do with my inherent 'laziness'. Why should I have to manually redo and retranscribe the beat when I should be able to get that out of the music file itself? Easier said than done. I first turned to Cakewalk's Sonar Producer Edition to do waveform analysis for me. With the waveform editor, it is easy to find 'note starts'. Those note starts don't necessarily carry the rhythm. Another tool within Sonar allows one to filter to certain frequencies. I was interested in the bass beats. That helped, but would still very time consuming to identify and place a note by hand.

I finally cheated. I found a fully functional MIDI file of Pinky and the Brain. All the instruments were nicely laid out, plus it had a kick drum track. This kick drum track was monotone, as a kick drum track should be. This made it dead easy to set off cues from the MIDI input in Light Factory. I ended up with a 20 to 30 second subsection with 157 cues.

The little ditty worked very well and the audience loved it.

Now that I've figured out music timing, light timing, and integrating the two, not to mention that amount of time one can spend on making it look easy, I've been thinking of turning the concept up a notch, and maybe doing a larger production.

Up till now, I figured I'd only be able to this with MIDI tracks, as the timing and instruments are all laid out, and I really didn't/don't want to go back to waveform analysis, at least being limited to what Sonar provides.

Enter Sonic Visualizer. With this, one can take a mucic track and run the standard note start tools on it. The cool feature is the spectrogram views. One can actually see the vibrato of the violin, the beat of the drum, the complex weave of tones of a symphony, .... The program also has a MIMDI annotation feature.

I'll have to manually key in the MIDI notes I want for cue changes, but with the visible segmentation of notes, instruments, and voices, creating and coordinating a lighting show tied to music could be a delight to do. Lots of time will be eaten, but with Sonic Visualizer, Light Factory, and a lighting show visualizer like Capture Console, it could be quite an experience, not only from a design point of view but from an audience pleasure perspective.

Ok, back to daydreaming. In a previous article, I wrote about a light console. Not any ordinary console, but one which is simply a piece of acrylic with infrared sensors on it. This would allow realtime multiple touch live input. By including this in the show, on stage, a light show would become live performance art in itself. I think a live spectogram would be an interesting light show addition in itself. Are there such shows out there?

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2007 Sep 13 - Thu

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.

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2007 Sep 12 - Wed

Lighting for Moliere's Sisterhood, the 80's Version

From this month's production of Moliere's The Sisterhood at Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society, here are three shots of the set during the Pre-Show, Intermission, and Post-Show Decoration cues. During the periods of activity, the set is fully lit, with subtle dimming of unused area. Unused areas would be the bar and the sofas at various times. This is my first show where I was lead on lighting design and programming.

The goal of the color splashes were to offset the black and white patterns of the main set. The color changes were also meant to occur in a somewhat early morning (cool of the day), mid day (warmer, hot sun), early evening sequence (heavy on sunset colors). The purple and green in the second were used to highlight the only actor with a color wardrobe, Trissotin, who had bright green and purple in his clothing.

I used three HighEnd ColorCommand lights to light the French Doors. One light was aimed at one door from far stage right, one was aimed at the other door from up stage center, and a third provided a splash across the backdrop from up stage center. The beam width was adjustable to provide a beam or a wash as I needed.

Although the pictures don't show it dramatically, a purple color splash was 'thrown' on the red backdrop in the hallway to highlight the phone. A slightly greenish downlight served to show the phone in stark contrast.

A square shuttered light was used to provide a highlight on the bottles at the bar throughout the play.

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2007 Sep 01 - Sat

The Royal Gazette's Review of Sisterhood

Here is what Jennifer Hind of the Royal Gazette had to say of opening night for the Sisterhood:

Black and white with a touch of colour/classy and classic/heartless and cold?

Getting the balance right is one of the themes of this modern translation and reinterpretation of the classic 17th century Les Femmes Savantes by Moliere. The Sisterhood, R.R. Bolt's 1980s take on this comedy of manners and motives, explores sibling rivalry, the battle of the sexes and the conflict between intellectual snobbery and personal integrity at a cracking pace in rhyming couplets, replete with clever puns, irony, witty repartee and physical comedy.

It is also marvellously self-aware, with one character suggesting all the books should be burned . save the collection of Moliere as they must be worth a fortune.

The current production at the Daylesford Theatre, directed by Suzann McLean and produced by Jo Shane, is a clever realisation of a very clever play and well worth the price of admission.

Sisters Armande and Henriette are like chalk and cheese, with Armande seeking maternal approval through the parroting of her mother's and aunt's intellectual pretensions and aggressive feminism, while Henriette declares herself more interested in the sensory world than the world of the intellect.

The rivalry of these siblings, 'marriage is slavery' versus 'sex is better than speculative thought', is compounded by the fact that the poor but charming Clitandre, spurned by a scornful Armande, finds a warm welcome in the arms of Henriette. The young lovers' relationship is supported by Henriette's sympathetic but ineffective father, while her domineering mother has other plans for her daughter: marriage to a poet of dubious ability and large ambition. The parental battle of the sexes is spiced with a liberal sprinkling of a saucy maid, a lascivious aunt and a disloyal pal.

How the happy ending is contrived with a little help from their friends, involves a clever twist and a surprising revelation.

Very little, if anything, has been left to chance in this production. Even the music between the scenes, such as Madonna's 'Material Girl', and Hall and Oates' 'Maneater', have been carefully chosen to underscore the themes of the play. The scene is set with a black and white décor, carefully styled but unnatural, closed off from the colourful world of nature by a pair of French doors. The black and white theme is carried over to the costumes, with one exception: the flamboyant Trissotin appears as a Technicolor Boy George.

Enhancing the witty lines is a lot of delicious stage business . my favourite being the 'musical chairs' on the sofa in the second act. But even the manner in which Chrysale deals with the 'meaty matters' concerning the very down-to-earth Martine and the solving of the Rubik's cube puzzle show the deft hand of a thoughtful director.

There are generally strong performances from the cast, and the few pauses and flubbed lines could be put down to first-night nerves. That the play's rhyming couplets are never intrusive and even sound almost natural attests to the competence with which they are delivered. I am reluctant to single out individual performances, as all the acting was solid, with even the minor characters making striking impact.

I came away thoroughly amused and anxious to dust off the Hits of the 80s album buried at the back of my CD collection.

The play runs until September 8, with no performances on September 2 or September 3. Tickets ($25) are available from the BMDS box office 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. on performance nights.

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2007 Aug 29 - Wed

Lighting for Moliere's Sisterhood

The last I wrote regarding lighting effects for The Sisterhood was in an article back on Aug 11 where I discussed getting the equipment ready prior to design.

Working with the equipment is a whole other story.

The set really wasn't ready for use by the actors until about Aug 29. All I could really do in the meantime was get most of the basic lights mounted and pointed in the right direction. I lit the stage with cells of three lights, with the three lights each of a different color: amber for a warm wash, a blue for a cold wash, and a lavender for part of the wash with a black actor.

In my previous article, I wrote about obtaining a second USB-DMX box so I could use the sliders on the existing lighting board as input. It did arrive, and I did use it. It was interesting to work with LightFactory to figure out which was the input and which was the output, based upon the flashing activity light on the convertor. I also found that the input channel froze every once in a while (perhaps the light board was set to send too fast). In any case, I found that I really didn't need slider input once I discovered that one can layout channels on a canvas in LightFactory. This turned out to be even better than trying to cross-patch channels in some sort of meaningful layout. By arranging the three color cells along with a no-blue blue downlight in how they lighted the stage, adjusting dimmers became easy. I simply control clicked (for selecting the amber channels) or box-selected dimmers (for the channels in one or more cells), then used the mouse scroll wheel to increase or decrease intensity as desired. I have no desire to use a lighting board after experiencing the ease in which the software allowed me to make changes on the fly.

I did spend a couple long days trying to tame the color changers though. The software made it easy to select colors and intensity, but it got in the way when trying save and retry groups and palettes. I ended up submitting five or six bug reports one morning after figuring out how to work around my frustrations. I was surprised when I received responses back that same day from the vendor to say that they had fixed the bugs. That was excellent turn around. However, that does cut both ways: why did the software have these silly bugs in the first place, but when encountered, they did fix the problems quickly.

I did spend quite a bit of time in the grid for light focussing. The PDA based remote focus software worked well in conjunction with LightFactory. I just wish it had a slider, and a better scroll back buffer. I had to turn off power management on my PDA so it would remain on, otherwise I'd have to restart the remote software as it would lose the connection to LightFactory.

For lighting, there were five major areas: an outside patio up stage right, a hallway with red wall on stage left, a bar down stage right, two sofas up stage center, and main stage area down stage center. I used three color changers in the patio area at various angles to provide various day time color changes and mixes. I used a single color changer in the hallway to cast a purple light over the hallway phone. The bar had a Source Four angled and shuttered to give a hightlight to the liquor bottles as a kind of ornamentation.

For the remainder of the stage, there was one light cell (three colors plus down light) for each of the two sofas, one for the french door entry way, three cells for down stage center, and one for the bar. I ended up having to do three long throw Source Fours to get stage left as regular lights cast a bad shadow into the hallway (only 8 ft walls).

The director decided to highlight certain parts of the stage by dimming cells in other parts of the stage when no activity was being undertaken. Ten and fifteen second fades were used to make the transitions subtle to the audience.

This play was used to come up to speed with the software. The usual excuse, if I'd had the time, I could have done more interesting things with the fades more often. As it was, it was good. A photographer took some pictures of the set as lighted for intermission set decoration. I hope to get some loaded here soon.

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2007 Aug 11 - Sat

The Geek Side of Lighting

Saturday didn't start off so well. I was going to ride my pedal bike into town for the day. That was not to be. On getting on my bike, I find that it had flat. Rather than fixing the flat right then, I put it off till Sunday, and drove my car into town. This turned out to be fortuitous, as the theatre was having 'cleaning day', and I was able to pick up a few pieces of furniture to haul home. However on the way back in, I decided to take the 'scenic route' down to Flatts and back. It was such a nice day for a drive. My car didn't think so. It decided to konk out a little ways back from Flatts on Middle Road. I spent an hour or two sitting in the grass waiting for the tow truck to arrive. In waiting, I noticed that there weren't too many, if any, 20 year Toyota's still around. Most of the drivers had spiffy new cars. So being without transportation made it a bit difficult to make it to a party I supposed to go to.

Instead, much belatedly, I made it back to BMDS and worked on finishing up making DMX cables for the four new High End Color Command lights the G&S Society donated. Making up the cables went well. When it was all said and done, I had the following DMX chain:

• My laptop running LightFactory with a 512 channel license, and the High End light fixture library
• An Enttec DMX USB Pro adaptor, to control the DMX chain over USB from my laptop
• Four Color Command static color change light fixtures, with DMX offset 73
• A four channel dimmer pack for testing the ColorCommand light intensity control, with DMX offset 49
• the 48 channel house dimmer system, at DMX offset 1

In an earlier article, I made some misguided remark as to why the Color Command offset appeared to be off by one. Upon reading the instructions, I found that the first channel is assigned to the Color Control box itself. Sets of four channels after that are each assigned to the Color Command lights: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, and beam width. The colors turn out to be bright, intense and beautiful.

I found that even though the DMX USB Pro has a DMX in, it doesn't segregate the in-stream from the out-stream, it is simply pass through device. Therefore I couldn't connect up our ETC Express 72/144 Light Board and use it as a physical submaster board input to the software. I've ordered another DMX USB Pro to resolve that little issue: one will be 'in', one will be DMX control 'out'.

My laptop is connected to the internet through a wireless access point. My PDA has 802.11 wireless capbility. The LightFactory software has a remote telnet capability with software that can be loaded on my Windows Mobile 5 PDA. The combination makes for a time saving and vocal chord saving ability to test light focus right from within the grid.

The easy part is done. Now the fun part of doing the lighting design is next.

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2007 Aug 10 - Fri

The Sisterhood ("Les Femmes Savantes")

BMDS has a new production opening up on August 30, 2007. We have another imported directory for this one, Suzann McLean. The Sisterhood is a "farce about cultural elitism and the triumph of true love over snobbery. One of Molière.s most popular comedies." The play has been modernized and is set in a chic 1980's salon. I'm assisting Doug Parker on this one. We had our first production meeting with the director earlier this month.

The set, for the internal areas, is blacks and whites. The outer courtyard will have more color in it. As of tonight, set construction has proceeded to the point where most of the basic wall structure is place. There is still some question as to how high to make the walls, a standard 8 feet, or would a total of 10 feet be better? Producer Jo Shane is working her way through that question.

From a lighting perspective, after taking a quick glance through the script, I thought it might be another simple lights-on/lights-off type of scenario. But after some clarification from the director that the story takes place over the course of the day, we find we can have some fun with light angles and colors to simulate a moving sun. In addition, the interior set has a three or four primary areas: a bar area, patio doors, a couch area, and a hallway with telephone. The director has called for subtle light changes to highlight the action areas as they occur.

Earlier in the year, the Gilbert and Sullivan society donated a new light board and four High End lights. We were able to use the lighting board for the Famous for 15 production. As we were missing cables and connections for the lights, we couldn't use the new lights then. They would have proven useful for the night club play.

I did order some DMX connectors from SIRS Electronics in McAllen Texas. I ordered through their web page. The order was handled quickly and was complete on arrival. The color lights have a controller box, and are connected to it through four pin DMX connectors. The box is connected to the light board with a five pin DMX connector. After some research on Beldin's website as to an appropriate cable to use with the connectors, I found that standard Category 5 network cable would fit the bill. There is ample supply of that type available to us.

After work this evening, Doug Parker and I met at the theatre to try out the colored lights. Mary Brier stopped by for a bit to see how things were going. Doug did the plugs for the light electricals, and I soldored some test signal cables together so we could see how the things work. After suffering through a mild blonde moment where we couldn't get the light to come on, we realized the grandmaster wasn't up (ok, that did prove my soldoring job first time through was good). Whew, simple problem number 1 down. The second problem took a bit longer to figure out. With no manuals to work from, we had to go by guess and by golly. I imagine the light manufacturer had the same question often enough, such that they printed the directions on the control box. It took a bit of fiddling, but we found an auto mode in which the control box found its light. After that, it was smooth sailing. One thing to remember is that the sliders on the light board are numbered starting from 1, and DMX channels are numbered starting at 0, which I think is why when we progammed a DMX offset of 73 into the controllor, we had slider 74 as the first active slider.

Saturday we go back in to make the remaining control cables and test out the three remaining color lights.

As part of the order with SIRS, I obtained a copy of Light Factory. Light Factory has a downloadable fixture library for the High End lights we have. Perhaps we can try out the new lights as well as the new software for the upcoming production.

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2007 Aug 09 - Thu

Lighting Assistant at Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society

Since the beginning of the year, I've been helping out with Lighting Design with the Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society at the Daylesford Cinema on Dundonald Street in Hamilton. The first production was a straight forward, almost as simple as white lights on-white lights off, lighting requirement for Sordid Lives (A Black Comedy about White Trash). The lead lighting designer, Mary Brier, came down with pnemonia just prior to opening night. As such, I 'ran' the lights for the 10 nights the show was open. No big deal. Press the 'go cue' button when called to do so by the stage manager. Stage manger was Nicola Wilkinson, who was great to work with.

Next show up was a musical by the name of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. We had an off island director by the name of Vivienne Elborne. For lights, Doug Parker, the lighting designer on this one, took a different approach to lighting. For primary lighting, he ran with a number of clusters of three lights each. Each cluster had red, green and blue filters. As such, any color could be chosen for lighting the covered area, including white. Because three separate lights were used, we had some interesting colored shadows as artifacts. At first I thought it was a bad thing, but after a while, It seemed appropriate for how the stage had been designed. We did use some fill in whites as well as some specials. One of the specials was a white light shining out of the crypt, with a smoke generator running, as a cue to Drood to come out. It looked quite good.

Mary Brier was lead designer for the next production, Famous for 15 Minutes. This is a production with six plays, each being fifteen minutes long. Lighting this production taxed the inventory of lights and lighting channels. One of the more challenging plays of the sequence was Bermuda Triangle, which is set on a sailboat about to encounter a hurricane. This one required careful timing of lighting (lightning) and sound (thunder) queues. As the storm approached, lightning and thunder became stronger and closer together. The play that did win the Golden Inkpot was Grass is Greener. To simulate a light club we did a simple two light special by shining an emerald and a purple spot on the back wall.

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