Having completed years as a house lighting designer and working at several festivals around the globe, I have become streamlined when building punt shows. Rock ‘n’ Roll rarely sticks to a cue stack, so I decided to put together my 10 top priorities for a punt show. Here’s #1: Patching the show. This may seem silly, because you have to patch a rig to control it, but there are a few tricks that aren’t obvious. First, make sure that your fixtures are in basic mode. When you are building a punt show, time is precious. Patch your lights in basic or standard mode. You get the same impact. Second, patch your fixtures into layers with generic labels. I like to use 4 or 5 layers. Wash, Spot, Strobe, Beam, LED. Keeping your fixtures grouped by generic purpose allows you to change and clone them more easily when the fixture type or locations change. Third, keep your fixture profiles handy. Nothing worse than arriving on site and the fixture mode your show is programmed on does not appear in the console. KEEP your profiles. Save it to a stick and again to dropbox.
For the other nine of Chris Lose’s Top 10 Tips, see Focus on Fundamentals in the Aug. 2016 issue of PLSN.
