2010 Mar 18 - Thu

2009 Christmas Panto, 2010 Dad's Army

I havn't been writing much in the last while. I should have been. The least I could have done is keep a diary of what I've been doing. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

My excuse has been that I've spent quite a bit of time doing two things: designing, tuning, and running lighting for two recent shows at Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society (BMDS), and then when not lighting, doing videos of the shows.

November and December were taken up with designing the lighting for BMDS' annual Panto at City Hall. This year we had a visiting director put on his work called Robin Hood.

For January and February, we had a local-up and-coming director put on a terrific production of Dad's Army. Dad's Army was a regular series on BBC TV, and was popular with the local crowd. We really didn't need to do any advertising, the show sold itself. After pre-sale tickets to patrons, cast and crew, there were only 9% of the tickets remaining for the general public. I'm not sure if this is a first for the theatre, but we ended up running an extra three nights. Tickets for those nights were sold out within 90 minutes.

I ended up shooting some video over several nights of Dad's Army as a keep sake with my new Panasonic HVX-200A. With that footage, plus a bunch of pre-production footage, I have a bunch of editing to do. Lots of editing.

Our next show is called 'A String of Pearls', with lighting design by one of my mentors. I get to take some time off and catch up on stuff I havn't been doing. Hopefully the updates here will now be more frequent as I catch up on my reading and projects.

I need to take a break when I can as I've been requested to design lights for this year's Panto. The script has been written by the local actress, writer, director Carol Birch. It is loosely based upon the story of Firebird and promises to be challenging from a lighting perspective... I guess me complaining that lighting for recent shows has been too easy, so she going to let me try out some new concepts. Our lighting inventory has been expanded with additional colour changers and moving fixtures, so we should be able to try out a more technically oriented show.