Focus on Fundamentals

Be careful what you ask for. A lighting crew chief is the one who has to take whatever “rainbows and unicorns” vision a designer has plotted on paper and actually hang the corresponding, functioning rig. The first person that a lighting designer has to choose, once the rig has been confirmed, is the Lighting Crew Chief. This will be the person who is in charge of organizing, assembling and managing all of the logistics involved with the lighting rig. Here is a short list of the major qualities that a designer looks for when selecting a touring lighting crew chief.

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.

Memorandum
To: All Lighting Designers
From: Your local spotlight operator
Re: Calling the spotlights at a large arena show

Hi, I’m your local spotlight operator. You might not know my name, but I’d like to request that you please don’t use profane language if things don’t go exactly as planned during your performance. We try our best, honest. We want to make your act shine. So I’d like to take a minute to explain a few things from our side of the intercom line if you got a sec.

Whether “Tis Nobler” Is Not the Question. Here’s a Roundtable Discussion of When It’s the Answer.

For some, timecode is the auto tune of lighting designers — a lazy choice. Others insist that timecode is doing the job of the operator, freeing him or her up from being chained to just punching the “go” button for each and every cue. But the truth is that when properly implemented, it can be used for a show’s greater good.

I’m a firm believer that just about any light fixture is worth something to a show. I like old conventional fixtures, especially weird stuff that nobody else is using. I find big old 2K Lekos useful. I will still find uses for old moving lights that nobody else wants. Basically, I can often find a treasure chest of lighting fixtures that never get used — on a vendor’s shelf.

Take1 Insurance’s Scott Carroll talks about why liability insurance is critical for those in the live event business.

The collapse of the temporary structure erected for the Indiana State Fair on Aug. 13, 2011 was the rigging and staging industry’s own 9/11. It has become the point on the timeline that divides, irreversibly, that professional community into sharply different eras of before and after. The tragedy, during an outdoor concert by the country band Sugarland in which a wind gust from an approaching severe thunderstorm hit the stage structure, causing it to collapse, killed seven people and injured 58 others.

A few years ago, when Tour School co-founders Ed Wannebo and Dr. Susan Ullrich looked out on the state of staffing the production industry, what they saw concerned them. On-the-job training continues to be one of the primary methods of training new recruits, but the founders wondered what improvements could be made to the process.

We took a survey of our readers last month. We wanted to see what interests you the most as well as determine how resourceful this magazine is to you. Do you read it for the entertaining articles or for the technical jargon? And are we doing all right with our current curriculum? I have some facts, but as in all surveys, are they really facts, or are they figures that reflect a certain demographic?

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.

Who doesn’t appreciate the power of Art-Net?  Art-Net gives us the ability to manage massive amounts of DMX over a single cable with one controller?  In turn, we can control a ton of fixtures easily from one place which makes programming shows much easier.  However, while Art-Net is an amazingly cool method of control, it adds another hat to the lighting designer — Information technology administrator.  Now, we not only need to think about which gobos overlap best, but also how to make sure that our network of fixtures is running smoothly.

This article originally appeared in the PLSN’s sister publication, Stage Directions (April 2014), continuing a series of technical articles in that magazine including “Ethernet Demystified” (June 2013), “Perplexing Protocols” (Aug. 2013), “Know Your Nodes” (Oct. 2013) and “How Clean Are Your Pipes” (Dec. 2013).

In the past columns (see note above) I’ve written about various hardware options related to your lighting control network. These include nodes, switches, topologies and latencies. If you’ve missed these, be sure to check back in the back editions of Stage Directions (archived on stage-directions.com) for more information on the hardware required to create a modern and reliable network for your console. There is another important factor to consider when designing your system: the software configuration of the network itself. That is the topic I’m addressing below.