#0013
The 39 steps had over one-hundred lighting cues. Improbable Fiction
have over three-hundred. Perhaps you can see where this is going.
I don’t believe I have ever been as deeply involved in a production as
this one. I was initially to be the lighting designer and technician for this
show which I did, but in the end I; took on the role of assistant director,
gave up a day of my university education to keep the show on track, learned an
entirely new type of digital lighting interface and got involved with other
areas of the production on a minor level, such as props.
I’ll start by recounting what I had to do for the lighting aspect of
the production.
First of all the venue we perform in had installed a new DMX lighting
system. This was new to me as I had been trained on an analogue system at
school. Now although the original lighting system was still in place I felt an
FX demanding show like Improbable Fiction could benefit from the versatility of
a DMX LED based system. So I had to learn how to use this and purchase the
relevant hardware required to interface a computer with this DMX system.
All in all with five different time/scene settings, lighting, spot
lights and suggestions of ‘off stage spaces’ through lighting, there were as
I’ve mentioned, over three-hundred lighting cues which is by far the most I’ve
ever attempted for any production. However this was just the beginning of the
challenges for this show.
On the day of out set-up we discovered that there would be three other
local organisations that wanted to use the venue at the same time as us. To
start with a dancing group wanted to use the venue for their performance thus
meaning that we couldn’t set up our lighting properly until the first night of
the production, which did render our technical rehearsal a bit of a frantic
nonsense.
We also discovered that a local primary school would be in during the
week and that they would want to set up lighting for their nativity play. In
the end the only way I could prevent this from disrupting our show was to take
a day off of university to stay at the venue all day to ensure that all of the
groups got the lighting they required in the morning and then spend the
afternoon re-configuring the entire lighting setup in time for the first
performance, that evening.
Thankfully I had the cooperation of all of most of the groups involved
and more importantly I had the support of several of my fellow members of the
amateur dramatics group who gave up their afternoon to help and support the
group, the others involved and me as well.
Now back to that new DMX system, the keyword in that sentence being
“new”. Three of the DMX fixtures were already broken in the few months since it
had been installed. These had to be bypassed to allow the rest of the system to
function properly.
What a frantic setup!
