Hello, my name is Matthew Schiller, Brad’s son, and I have taken over my dad’s column to tell you about my first programming experience. My high school in Austin, Texas put on a production of Miss Saigon, and I was assigned the position of automated lighting programmer for the show. I programmed this show with new LED technology on a board over 15 years old. Throughout the first few runs of the show, multiple issues happened when a light got stuck or came on or went off at the wrong time. This became very frustrating and took hours of reprogramming or tweaking the lights to fix. But in the end, it was all resolved. By the last show, I had become a pro at running my cues with nothing going wrong. Overall, I had a fun experience programming, and I would love to do it again. I am glad that I took the time to study how to program and practiced with the board prior to the very busy production schedule. I definitely gained a greater understanding about the position of the automated lighting programmer.
— From “Feeding the Machines” by Matthew Schiller, PLSN, April 2014
