The Caesars Forum Shops have two animatronic fountain shows that involve talking statues. The larger of the shows is rather involved, with water, fire, video effects and more. They recently decided to update the installation with brand new, brighter fixtures, and I was brought in to handle the change over…I have hand-copied many shows in my time, and there are always errors that can occur. Some data just does not translate from one fixture type to another; particularly when using an older console. Most modern consoles have very sophisticated “change type” features that allow programmers to easily and instantly change from one fixture type to another while retaining all data. Since this console was from the mid-1990s, it did not have such a feature. After the data copying, I was left with spinning color wheels and invalid rotating gobo information throughout. When hand-copying, I always leave the original fixtures in the show file so that I can refer back to the original data to see what they were doing compared to the newly cloned fixture. This proved invaluable, as I was able to easily look back and understand what color or gobo was originally selected.
—Brad Schiller, from “Feeding the Machines,” PLSN, May 2011
