Visualizers are awesome. Doesn’t matter which one you use, Vectorworks, Martin Show Designer, ESP, or Capture, or the myriad of other selections out there, they are indeed cool. Visualizers are designed to save us time in crating shows, and also give us some pretty powerful renderings to blow our clients minds and convince them that our vision is indeed amazing, and worth buying. Visualizers can make your design much more clear to your client than just having a set of blueprints or pencil drawings.
Because of the amazing modeling that visualizers can do, they help to avoid having to build a model out of foam core, which can be a real pain in the fingers. I really like the fact that I can make sure that everyone on my crew all have the most up-to-date drawings in their e-mail in box with all of the renderings, line drawings, channel hook ups, weights, DMX layouts and rigging plot all in color well before we get to the show. My first visualizer experience was with a really early version of software that barely deserved the name sometime around 1994. It came on a few floppy disks and it was really clunky. I have been a fan of using visualizers ever since. However, Visualizers have a side that can suck the designer down a path much darker than Yoda ever saw coming.
If Not Careful, Down the Dark Path You Will Go
Yes, visualizers are awesome, but you have to control them. Don’t let them control you. As someone who had to learn to draft by hand before being allowed to use a visualizer, you learn to take your time and really think about placing fixtures in the right places. Erasing pencil marks completely and not leaving any indentations or smudges on the paper is an art form in and of itself. When drafting by hand, you choose your pencil strokes very carefully. With a visualizer, it is literally drag and drop onto your trussing. You can keep clicking until your index finger is exhausted. Because it is so fast, it is really easy to not think clearly about how all of this will go together when it is done. The next thing you know, you have designed something that looks more like the Death Star rather than the simple set you were first asked to design. Even the most conscientious designers can fall into this pit of temptation. Indeed, the dark side surrounds us. And it’s not just fixture counts that can trap us. When you get to the show and plug your visualized design into the control desk, you might find that some of your fixtures that you dropped in were hung backwards and are now moving really chaotically. Another possible problem is that the visualizer thinks the ballyhoo that you programmed should run at one speed, while the fixtures themselves might decide to move at another.
Forever Consume Your Client, It Will
So now that you have you Death Star set complete with enough lights to be seen clear from the Outer Rim in front of your client in the rendering, you will have blown their minds. They see, for the first time, this amazing set that you have designed. They see that every crevice of space has been taken up by some kind of light source and they see all of these really cool looks that can be created by the amazing design that you have produced. But if the next comment out of the person signing the check is, “Looks cool,” it’s usually followed by, “How much is this going to cost?” Your answer to that question could end your meeting pretty quickly if your number is way higher than what the client was thinking. This leads to another problem. You just showed them the dream show design, and now you have to “value engineer” the show back to reality. You have to start taking stuff out to make the budget or time frame work. Every cut you make is going to aggravate the client, because now you have to go from the dream you have shown them to something less.
Engineer From the Start, You Must
Dragging and dropping is great as long as you stop to think about exactly how each element will go together and how it will be rigged as you are doing it. The problem is that sometimes you get carried away with how cool something looks and not about how it will come together. If you are designing something that is a one-off, then you have to think about rental costs, availability of materials, how the soft goods will connect, etc. If you are designing a show that is going to be up and down several times, you have to think about how it will pack into boxes and travel. The visualizer can give you a false sense of security because you aren’t thinking about how it goes up, just that it looks amazing when it does. Complex rigging points can destroy your load in because it was not considered hard in the design phase. Because you are working in a virtual world when you are designing, You need to also be thinking about how your design will work in the real world.
Excitement, recognition, awards…A designer does not crave these things.
Yeah, right, whatever. Why else would we do this? The reality is that we all want to design great shows, more importantly, better shows than the last one that we did, and definitely better than the ones our buddies are designing. We are competitive by nature, and that is what makes us good at our jobs. But we can’t let our ego drive the mouse. For me, I fell into the visualizer trap while designing a show for a really important client. It was one of my first times moving from pencil to a visualizer, and I was just going to town, dropping in lights and trussing. What I failed to consider was build time. It was not that it was really an overly complex show, but the personnel resources were a little on the thin side. Therefore, the crew was working really long hours, and I ended up making cuts during the load in of the show in order to make the build possible. Obviously, this was not the ideal situation.
Conquer the Dark Side, You Will
The sooner you accept the fact that the visualizer is a tool and nothing more, the better off you will be. It is important to take the time to really think about how each point will be hung, each unit of scenery will be attached, and how each light will be used while you are designing the show. If you can’t think of a use for a light, don’t drop it in. Your client will appreciate it later when you give them the rental bill. Keep scale in mind and make sure that your instructions from the client are clear along the way. Take your time in designing. Rotate the views often so that you can see exactly what you are doing. If you give them what they ask for, you can’t go wrong.
Michael Graham, product development manager for Chauvet Professional, has also designed and installed entertainment and architectural lighting systems.
