The production presented me with many challenges such as broken or partly working equipment, finding room on very cramped and old electrics for the gear, and a director who changed her mind often and wanted to move very fast through the rehearsal process. The school’s theater facility is more than 20 years old and very little attention is paid to automated lights; in fact, little is noticed about the conventional lights, too. This leads to many problems such as melted connectors, patched gels on strip lights and scoops, and malfunctioning dimmers and sockets. The little bit of automated lighting my school owns was in equally bad shape.
Rigging
My school owns two old wash lights and two scanners. I was able to borrow four LED PARs and two LED strobes to add to the plot. We don’t actually have a console, but my dad helped to find us a very old, and capable controller. The school’s equipment was in rather rough shape, but I did manage to find a use for it all, even with dim lamps and stuck effect wheels.
Putting the lights into the school’s system was a problem in its own. There were very few open dimmers on which I could connect my 10 fixtures. Also, there were giant bamboo set piece walls on all sides and on the electrics, plus a giant helicopter, which also needed dimmers of its own. The school did not have enough stage pin to Edison connectors, so I had to do some creative circuiting with cube taps to get power to all my automated lights. One of the sockets on the first electric was very old, and when we plugged in the lights, it started to pop and shoot sparks. My dad and I unplugged the connector from the raceway, opened it up and repaired it.
Programming
I programmed this show with new LED technology on a board over 15 years old. The main challenge with this board is that it has a very old library built in. We had to write a library for the LED strobes and LED PARs and then use an older computer with a floppy drive to save to floppy disks that could transfer the data to the console. Luckily, my dad had an old computer that could take floppies to write the needed libraries.
During my programming, I also had to save to old-fashioned floppy disks. I had multiple save files on multiple floppies, and if one went corrupt (which happened after my first programming day), there were plenty of disks available, because the conventional board at the school also used floppies. The first step was to learn the board, since the last time I had programmed on it, I was very young. Prior to the show programming, I came home after school for three days in a row to learn the board as best I could. My dad helped me very much with this process. He taught me the dangers of not saving my show often, the wonders and pains of tracking, the usefulness of creating palettes, and many other features. I picked this all up quickly, wondering if only three days of learning would be enough to program the full production. I actually created color and effects palettes at the house for the PARs and the strobes before I took them to the school, because I knew at the school I would have to do the same thing with the rest of the rig and very limited on-site time.
During rehearsals, I started programming Act One and had several cues, such as rainbow lights flying all over the place, purple washes, searchlight effects and the occasional strobe. I quickly found that, with the old board and little experience, things take a while to get going. The staff and other techies at my school had only seen strobe lights through the very old and dim strobe lights the school owns, so when my director said she wanted the new LED strobe lights for the bomb drop at the top of the show, they were in for a big surprise. I selected one of my palettes and had the strobes blast the stage with intense white flashing light. I then discovered another problem, as I was not on headset and could not hear the director talking to the technician on conventional lights to turn my strobes off. I quickly found that I was receiving direction after each scene had completed, and thus needed to take notes and program after rehearsal was over instead of trying to program during the rehearsal. It was much too difficult to try to program the scene as the show progressed during rehearsals.
We never had a proper cue-to-cue, so I stayed late each night to ensure everything was programmed into the desk as the director desired. Our schedule only provided three days to program and learn all of the cues for the entire show, and two days were spent on Act One alone. Most nights, the crew stayed until midnight building sets, programing cues and running our own tech rehearsals with no actors.
Being a new programmer, I ran into several problems related to tracking. Even though I thought I had a good understanding of the concept, I still found some cues that played back differently than I expected. I would then have to go through the entire show to find the source of the problem and make corrections to the tracking. It was not until the third show I had solved all the problems. Some of the time, since I forgot to check my tracking, I had to build setup or mark cues during blackouts, so the next visual cue, the tracking would not be seen. Mark cues were also useful for avoiding seeing a light fly across stage to get to its next position between cues.
The Show
When the show was ready to open, I was extremely nervous, as any first-timer would be, but because of bad weather, opening night was canceled. This was a relief to me, because I had never had a chance to rehearse more than half of the cues I had written. With the cancelled show, I had a bit more time to check all the cuing. Even so, when the show finally opened the next night, there were still some cues that had never been run with the full cast on stage. Each night after the show, I had at least three extra cues to build for the next show, with no prior rehearsal. During one of the shows, when I was supposed to have a wash light come on white and ballyhoo, it came on purple instead. I looked over to my friend on the conventional board, and we both realized what had happened. The fixture had not gone back to the white on the color wheel, so during the middle of the show, I had to home the light. I got its color corrected just in time for its next cue.
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.
The Results
With all the things I learned about programming automated lights from my dad, my part of the show was a big success. Even with the various trials and tribulations, I was able to contribute very exciting and useful lighting to the production. 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.
