Lightable

Dolphin Design Site

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:57:00 +0000

So, for the past couple weeks I've been gathering preliminary research imagery for Parade, mostly through Flickr and related sites. Today, I started posting material on the Dolphin design website, a collaborative project hosted on Google Sites the help us communicate over the course of the design process. Since the Site was essentially just a welcome page as of this morning, I started inventing my own hierarchy as I went along. First, a 'research images' home page, with subpages for individual scenes/motifs/songs/etc. Then a seperate section to hold Scott's design concept.

I'm mentioning this now so I remember to come back to it later and evaluate just how much we actually ended up using the site when this is all over.

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Flick Flickr Flickest

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:40:00 +0000

I've been pulling images off of Flickr as research for Parade recently. And before you get your twist-locks in a twist, yes, they're all Creative Commons licensed images. The Creative Commons license comes in many forms, but at their heart, all are variations on a copyleft theme; that is, they allow the producer of the media to distribute the work and allow others to use it for noncommercial purposes as long as the work is not modified and is attributed to the creator. The reasons for using CC works as a designer, and licensing our own media as CC, is twofold:

First, the creative commons license helps encourage the free flow of creative ideas and products. It allows art, reproductions of art, photographs of art, etc. to be shared within a creative community without fear of repercussion from the producing body. Publishing a CC photograph, for example, says "I don't care if you see this on Flickr, on your home computer, on the nightly news or on your wall at home. Let everyone see it, just let them know it's mine." It means that the artist is more concerned about the form of their artwork and not about the format in which it's presented. By licensing our own photographs and designs under the Creative Commons license, we help our work spread and inspire others.

And more practically? Flickr won't let you save to disk any image that's not licensed under the Creative Commons. All you get is a little <1kb file called "spaceball.gif". Go figure. And go Creative Commons!

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Another Spring Schedule Update

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:38:00 +0000

Just to have my thoughts down on paper (pixels?), here's what Spring looks like so far, in terms of shows and board stuff:

Week 1: Shell rehearsal, Grafitti pre-programming
Week 2: Shell tech/opening, Grafitti tech
Week 3: StuCo board petitions
Week 4: StuCo producer petitions Waa-Mu crew view Friday
Week 5: Waa-Mu tech/opening
Week 6: StuCo director petitions
Week 7: Cuckoo's Nest (Sit & Spin)
Week 8: Clean House tech
Week 9: Wrestlepocalypse tech, Dillo Day
Week 10 (reading week): Griffin's Tale Jones Show tech/performances
Week 11 (finals week): Nothing

And my list of jobs of all of the above:

How Can you Run with a Shell on Your Back: Assistant Director
Grafitti Dancers: Lighting Designer (2 songs)
Waa-Mu: Assistant Lighting Designer
Cuckoo's Nest: Sit & Spinning in some capacity
Clean House: Co-Master Electrician with Dan Lazar
Wrestlepocalypse III: Co-Lighting Designer with Juliette Rapala
StuCo stuff: Current Sit & Spin board member
Griffin's Tale: Performer

I love this school.

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Spring Schedule

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:45:00 +0000

So here's what Spring's looking like so far:

Week 1: Shell Rehearsal
Week 2: Shell Tech/Open/Close
Week 3: Nothing
Week 4: Nothing
Week 5: Waa-Mu Tech
Week 6: Nothing / Waa-Mu Strike on Sunday
Week 7: Cuckoo's Nest Tech
Week 8: Nothing
Week 9: Wrestlepocalypse
Reading Week: Nothing
Finals Week

Awesome.

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Gel Box, V.2

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 04:34:00 +0000

Thought I should take a moment to update the listing of what I've got stashed in my gel box. It's got a few new additions since last time, and I find it useful to have a reference list of my stash online. When Rett was picking colors for Food for Fish, for example, it was nice to have a list on hand of what we didn't have to shell out cash for. Currently, the list is:

CUTS:

R02: Bastard Amber
R07: Pale Yellow
R316: Gallo Gold
R21: Golden Amber
R22: Deep Amber
R51: Surprise Pink
R53: Pale Lavender
R51: Surprise Pink
R53: Pale Lavender
R60: No Color Blue
R360: Clearwater
R362: Tipton Blue
R80: Primary Blue
R119: Light Hamburg Frost
R132: Quarter Hamburg Frost
L202/R3203: Quarter CTB, all jumbled together between the two brands

FULL OR PARTIAL SHEETS:

R02: Bastard Amber
R302: Pale Bastard Amber
R07: Pale Yellow
R13: Straw Tint
R316: Gallo Gold
R21: Golden Amber
R321: Soft Golden Amber
R22: Deep Amber
R53: Pale Lavender
R51: Surprise Pink
R53: Pale Lavender
R60: No Color Blue
R360: Clearwater
R64: Light Steel Blue
R69: Brilliant Blue
R71: Sea Blue
R80: Primary Blue
R119: Light Hamburg Frost

MAC 550 Strangeness

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:46:00 +0000

I sat in on the last three or so hours of cueing for Peter Pan on Saturday. It was really quite interesting - the minimalist/modernist design ethic for the show means that the programming was somehow a cross between theatrical deisgn and a rock show. Lee has a lot of technology in the air: 24 Forerunners, 2 VL2000s, 4 MAC 550s, 4 I-Cues. Granted, it's not a lot of technology, but for the size of the space and the usual minimalism of such things in TI shows, it felt like a lot.

The MAC 550s were behaving very strangely. Here's the setup: in cue 55.5, the MAC's have a move order from home to a preset look where they're all focused center stage. Thing is, every time we ran 55.5, all 4 MACs reset themselves (closed the shutter, recallibrated their pan and tilt in both directions) then executed the move order. We looked at the preset, but none of it's parameters where anywhere near the reset values for the fixture - Shutter/Strobe was at 35% (reset is 82-85%, DMX 208-217). My only thought is that for some reason, the Ion was using the in the 86-89% shutter open range instead of one of the lower ones, and in fading down to another state it brushed through the reset range and caused the fixture to reset.

The kicker? When Peter went up to the grid to turnoff DMX reset, two of the fixtures already had it turned off. Funny old thing, life.

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Dolphin's Done, Now Twice Told

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:24:00 +0000

Dolphin openned this weekend with nary a hitch. The lights are all up and lovingly focused, all the practicals installed and wired, both crystal balls now light up, and there are 30-odd lightbulbs hanging in space that now do too.

What I've said about Dolphin as a process recently (and I think it's true) is that three weeks is exactly the right amount of time to the the show, if we work 8 hours a day every day. Those days have more of a rehearsal energy than a StuCo tech energy; there's work to be done, but let's not drive ourselves crazy with our work load. More than ever, though, there needs to be a strong spirit of collaboration between the designers, director, and other creative team members. The scale of the beast that is Dolphin means that even deviating slightly from where the rest of the group's mindset is can put a designer noticably off track, which I'd posit is what happened with this year's Dolphin Show in places. It's a massive undertaking, and requires a similarly massive ammount of communication.

Twice Told goes into tech tomorrow. I've been working with Sally and Emily Schaeffer on renting scrollers, both from Chicago Spotlight and Arts Alliance, plus all the ancillary schmazz that goes with them: DMX, P&D, a PSU, that sort of thing. I'm gonna see if I can call in a couple favors today to get people there for hang tomorrow, but even if I can't we'll have at least 2 run crew to work on lights while the other three tackle the set. Sally rocks, by the way. She's tackling lights, set, and props for this show, and doing it in style.

Starting to think about Mee-Ow now. Scribblings on that later.

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DMX Bits

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:16:00 +0000

I got my two male 5-pin XLR connectors the other day. I'm planning to solder a couple 120-ohm resistors to one and make it a DMX terminator, and perhaps try wiring in a 2-way LED into the other to make it a combination terminator/tester. We'll see how that goes.

Dolphin's still chugging along. We're still on schedule, and everything's gonig just fine, but the long hours are starting to wear on all of us. The show, however, will be all the better for it, and of that I'm proud.

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Hi I-Cue

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:43:00 +0000

Apparently, you need a special mounting bracket to attach an I-Cue to the front of a scroller. It makes sense: the front of a Forerunner 7" is a 7.5" 'female' mouting recepticle, and the I-Cues are designed to slot into the 6.25" accessory slot on a Source Four. The only catch is, no lighting rental houses in the greater Chicagoland area seem to carry the darn things, and TI's in the process of ordering them now. So no fake movers for Dolphin this year, just open white beams dancing around. Still, that'll be fun.

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PS. Tested the scrollers yesterday - the Ion performs exactly as advertised, it knows what colors are in the scroll and can jump to them in two keypresses. Most excellent!

Dolphin, Day 7

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:53:00 +0000

Everything's up and cabled by this point. We've spent the past two days focusing, and on that front all the hard stuff is done. We just have to find a time when it's safe to bring in the electrics to focus the top light, then deal with the cyc/groundrow at some point. After that, it's just the understage practicals and the hanging light bulbs and I'm scott free.

A shipment of scrollers and atmospherics is arriving at Cahn tomorrow morning courtesy of ILC. That'll be another fun time, inserting, addressing, and patching all those. Thank god for the ion.

Sorry for the terse posts of late, but as you may have guessed, life's a little busy. This week, we spent 52 hours in Cahn. That's 8 hours a day all week, plus six both Saturday and Sunday. It's like a full time job, really, but without pay. It comes with loads of really great experience, though, and I'm telling myself that makes up the difference. =)

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Dolphin, Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:27:00 +0000

Today was a long day. My back aches. Tech was 12-8. But we got a lot done:

Hung all the onstage insturments
Cabled all the onstage instruments, which included inventing a new fifth electric using multi, twofers, and muscle
Hung the first and second box booms
Hung the cove lights
Set aside instruments for the ladders and pro-booms
Cables/plugged in all hung lights
Rocked it

We're officially working in Cahn from 8-11am and 6-11pm tomorrow, but Jason and I are taking the Uhaul to pick up the dimmers and board from Norris at 12:30, then returning the Uhaul, so we'll have even more bonus time. Woohoo!

Props to Tracy MacKenzie for all her hard work on this show. I know everyone on the team has been putting loads of work in, but as Artistic Producer I've seen a lot of Tracy's effort first hand, and she rocks.

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Scheduling Bonanza

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:30:00 +0000

Since my last big scheduling post, a few things have shifted around in my Winter schedule. Therefore, in the interests of completeness (and mostly for my own personal reference), here's roughly what my Winter looks like:

Week 1: Dolphin load-in/hang
Week 2: Dolphin cueing/tweaking
Week 3: Dolphin tech/opening
Week 4: Twice Told Load-In
Week 5: Dolphin strike (1 day), Food for Fishes tech (Sit & Spin), Twice Told
Week 6: None
Week 7: Shell Rehearsals Start
Week 8: Mee-ow Louis Tech, Shell Rehearsal
Week 9: Shell Rehearsal, DM setup, DM Friday-Sunday
Week 10: Tentative Shell Rehearsal (reading week)
Week 11: None (finals week)

I've just now realized that Mee-Ow conflicts with the second week of Shell rehearsals, instead of the first. Now to pen an e-mail to Rives in haste, to make sure this isn't a major issue.

Speaking on Mee-Ow, I had a brainwave the other day: Rives didnt' seem to have a problem with me missing a monday-of-load-in rehearsal. I had been planning to find a way to train somebody else to busk the show and then just run all of them. However, if it would be acceptable for me to miss the Thursday rehearsal as well (or anything after the first hour), I could run all the shows myself! A definite possibility. Perhaps I should just call Rives and run both of these things past him at once.

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Weddings in the Hills

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 03:36:00 +0000

I'm in between NATTI calls at the moment: had a load-in from 1:00-4:30, and I'm back at midnight for the load out. Nothing particularly fancy: a couple trees with two S4's each, each with a rotator to wash the dance floor. A couple pin spots on the cake, an M20 on the happy couple's table, and a bunch of LED cans for the walls. Cute.

The floral centerpieces were terrifyingly top-heavy, I'm interested to see how many have broken when we go back. The things had vases about 18" tall, with another couple feet of shrubbery on top, with candles hung from the shrubbery. Yes, that's right, candles hung inches below dried tree branches. Again, we'll see how that turned out. They were lovely, yes, but would the fire marshall approve?

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[EDIT: 12/21/08] I was right! When I came back for load out, one of the centerpieces had indeed caught fire at some point in the night, and two had fallen over.

Cheap Blacklight Tube

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Just found this listing on Blacklight.com: a 24" blacklight fixutre with tube for $22.49 plus shipping, purportedly from American DJ. Not a bad deal, really, might have to scoop one of those up for our next party (or for Mee-Ow.... hmmm...)

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EDIT: Just for kicks, I did a search for 'blacklight' on Amazon, and it came up with some even more amazingness: the same 24" fixture (with tube) for $14.93 and a 48" fixture (with tube) for $29.93. I must have a use for these somewhere in my life. If only they were in stock...

A Special Mee-Ow Challenge This Year

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Exciting News: I'm going to be assistant directing How Can you Run with a Shell on Your Back?, the Northwestern Spring mainstage that'll be touring around Chicago.

Tricky Challenge Created By Exciting News: Mee-Ow. Here's why.

By the nature of the show itself, lighting the Mee-Ow show isn't really like lighting anything else. The show is billed as "1/3 Improv, 1/3 Sketch Comedy, 1/3 Rock and Roll," though really the 'Rock and Roll' more like a dance club than performers on stage. This alone would not be too difficult to implement, however, it would just require a fair amount of equipment to serve the needs of all three moods of the show. However, the show itself changes every night: the cast chooses which sketches and games they'll do before each show, then mix those up with their chosen songs and pick an order for everything.

Traditionally, the LD for Mee-Ow is also the board-op for the show. Since you're essentially busking the show each night, and possibly running each song live, it's just easier to have the LD run the show than try to train another person to op it. However, it turns out that Mee-Ow tech week is the same week that Shell starts rehearsing. While I'm sure I can get out of rehearsal on a few days (esp. Monday), I probably can't get away with missing rehearsal for the whole week. Which means that I have to find a way to set up the show/cues/subs(?) so that someone else can run the darn thing. And do it foolproofly. We'll have the Ion, so I might put everything into palletes (like A&J did last year for DM), or cue-lists (like we'll do this year for DM). We don't have any faders for the Ion yet, so subs isn't really an option unless ILC gets ETC fader wings in stock, and there's no telling when that will be.

I'm sure there's a way to make this work, it'll just take a little time to figure out what that it.

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Bluecoat Holiday Party

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:45:00 +0000

I'm finally back in California for Winter Break, and what do I do? Work a gig for NATTI, of course. Actually, Saturday's event at the Computer History Museum was the whole reason I zipped home the same day as my last final. I would have preffered to wait around a couple of days, just to relax and tidy up after a long and busy quarter, but a weekend of good hard work (and pay) tempted me to do otherwise.

Worked a five-and-a-half hour load in on Saturday, from 1:00 to 6:30 when the doors opened for the event. The event itself was Bluecoat's annual holiday party, a shindig that I gather NATTI has been tasked with for the past several years. The party took up the entire upstairs of the museum, including the Hahn auditorium space (which became the dance floor), the main conference center (a combination dinner/gambling arena), and the walkways in between (which became a casino), as well as much of the downstairs, in and among the exhibits. The party was safari themed, which was evident from the bamboo chairs, the tiki fabric on the walls, the giant elephants, giraffes, and tropical birds that were used as center pieces and, of course, the wide variety of tropical alchohol.

I was tasked with:

Wiring the six 'bungalows,' little straw-topped shacks that the scenic decoration company had brought in. Each had little yellow lights under the roof, so we had to find ways to run power to each of them that didn't totally block any vital paths.
Setting up Dot-Its, little LED press-on lights to uplight the centerpieces. We had six or seven on the elephant alone. A fun, easy, and fast way of getting just enough light onto the pieces. They also looked great hidden in the bases of some of the folliage, uplighting the leaves.
Downstairs. My biggest personal job, it was relatively simple. We had three 50-degree source-fours with gobo-rotators washing a few of the walls with fun swirling-goodness. Then we tacked on two LED PARs along the back wall for extra color. The appetizer buffet area got four stands made of metal piping, each with two little birdies on it. And finally, a little strand of color-changing LED lanterns over the bar.

Sunday I was back from 10:00-3:00, basically undoing and loading out everything we had set up the previous day. Not a terribly difficult or complicated gig overall, though there were a few surprises (a new archway over the main entrance, extra casino tables). Not bad for a weekends work, really.

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ILC Customer Appreciation Party

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:43:00 +0000

Tonight I went with Alec and Julz to ILC's annual customer appreciation event. It was your typical corporate function: little tables and chairs and couches, catered nibbles and deserts and coffee and a bar, people in various forms of formalwear. The lighting, of course, was very tasteful. They'd strung up a truss diagonally across the showroom floor and mounted lots of S4s with scrollers and zooms with gobos on it, plus some little par-38 bars for accent lighting. Then they threw three or four movers (of what kind we couldn't tell) on the far side of the truss and hung semi-transparent curtain across the length of the room, and backlit the whole shebang with fun colors and gobos and things. They filled the curtain wash with a line of modular LED bars along the floor, and washed the walls with plain old S4-PARs with blue gels.

The rediculous part, though, was the exterior lighting. There were Source-4s set up along along the gutterline with gobos illuminating the ground. There were a S4-PARs every ten feet along the sides of the building, washing it with blue light, plus a dozen or so S4-PARs on front of the building just illumuninating the folliage. The silly part, though, was the three or four Source-4s with custom gobos that said "ILC Event Parking," each with an arrow leading guests around the back of the building. All very tasteful, and for any other event it would have seemed extravagent, but for a lighting rental and installation company it made a lot of sense.

The event it self was fine, mostly just chatted with Alec and Julz about DM, Grafitti, the new Martin III (yum!), and various other fun things. Talked with Ryan Bundy and Jeremy Getz for awhile about old times at NU and good ol' Shanley. Alec probed Ryan for some advice on Pre-Vis software, then we slouched off for the evening. Good times all around, I hope to be back next year.

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Gel Box

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:38:00 +0000

Finally got around to organizing my gel box. The nice thing about student theatre is that none of the production boards keep track of their gel (well, Arts Alliance sorta), so the designers generally just hang onto them. Or, in the case of a first time designer, someone from the board hangs onto them. So it turns out I know have cuts of:

R02: Bastard Ambera
R07: Pale Yellow
R316: Gallo Gold
R21: Golden Amber
R22: Deep Amber
R51: Surprise Pink
R53: Pale Lavender
R51: Surprise Pink
R53: Pale Lavender
R60: No Color Blue
R360: Clearwater
R362: Tipton Blue
R80: Primary Blue
R119: Light Hamburg Frost
R132: Quarter Hamburg Frost
L202/R3203: Quarter CTB, all jumbled together between the two brands

Plus full or partial sheets of a lot of those, especially the frost. Looking at that list, it seems my typical color palette is pretty limited. I should probably make an effort to branch out in future. Couldn't hurt, for academic purposes at least.

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The Complete Cahn, Pt. 3: Renovations

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:19:00 +0000

Pete's currently having another 96 dimmers installed in the electrical hive of cahn (another two Sensor 48 Installation Racks), and running out the outputs to various useful places in the theater. The pin rail's getting the bulk of the upgrade, with another 54 outputs going up there, since the stage electrics are the ones that most often steal power from other positions. The remaining outputs are being scattered around: another dozen on the balcony rail, another six on each side of the cove, a few more upstage of the proscenium on each side, a few in each box boom, and so forth. Nowhere is getting outputs that there weren't any before, but the ones that are there are getting reinforced. Maybe in future we'll be able to mount shows without jumping 32+ cables up from the floor pockets.

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Marriott Magic

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:38:00 +0000

I worked the strike/rehang call at the Mariott Lincolnshire yesterday. The Mariott Theater is just a small part part of the massive complex that is the Mariott Lincolnshire, a spralling collection of hotel buildings, spas, a golf course, shopping center, wooded trails... this place has everything. Including, I was told, the largest subscriber base of any theater in the United States.

The Mariott closed its last resident production of All Shook Up on Saturday night, and their upcoming production of Bowry Boys opens on Wednesday. In order to have the entire production turned around in four days, the carpentry/scenic team (~15 people) loaded in first thing on Sunday morning started their changeover process: striking the old set, refacing the stage, and erecting the new set. I came in with the electrics team (~27 people) at 1:00 to affect the lighting changeover. We broke into six or seven teams, namely:

Team Color, in charge of cutting all needed gel, fitting the cuts into frame, sealing the frames with brads, and organizing templates
Team Scrollers, in charge of pulling all the old strings out of the scrollers that had been struck, cleaning the scrollers, fitting new strings, and profiling and addressing each scroller
Team FOH, in charge of striking/hanging all instruments not in the coves or on the catwalks
Team Coves, in charge of striking/hanging all instruments in the coves
Team Catwalks (x3), in charge of striking/hanging all instruments in their respective sections of the grid
Team Varilites, in charge of hanging the hoists/truss for the VL2500s and VL3000s in the grid, changing out their gobos and animation wheels, then flying the VLs and troubleshooting them.

I was on Team FOH, along with Adam Grant, Jake _____, and Chris Gates (son of Linda Gates, the NU voice professor). Chris and I took one side of the house, Adam and Jake took the other. Our tasks included:

Striking all color/templates/scrollers. It was important that this was our first task, since the color and scorller teams needed frames/scrollers to work with.
Striking all cable from the previous show, coiling it, and storing it in the ceiling
Repositioning/Hanging the new plot from the instruments we had, plus those we could steal from other areas or ceiling storage.
Dropping color/templates/scrollers into the appropriate lights.

There's an entirely seperate crew coming in tomorrow to handle all the cabling, since that's another task entirely. But since the FOH and Cove crews got done so early, we ended up running all the 4-pin P&D to the scrollers and power supplies, so the cable team will have a slightly easier day tomorrow. On a side note, the head of the scroller team was former Sit & Spin TD Aaron Weissman, recently lauded for his "sepulchural" lighting of The Building Stage's Dracula. It was fun to run into him again and hear what a recently graduating lighting designer is up to.

All in all, a great day, good experience, and not too overwhelmingly exhausting. I hope to be out there again soon.

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Smartfade, Dumb Dumb

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:14:00 +0000

I just found out that one of Alec's assignments when he was working at ETC a couple summers ago was to work out how to effectively use show control with the SmartFade system. Man, exactly the right person, just a few days too late. Ultimately, I'm happier that our stage manager Sica is now running the lights instead of us trying to run the show off a MIDI foot pedal in addition to everything else we're doing (live music, live foley, mixing, pre-show, and lighting design). It would have been fun, though.

Assuming he gets it signed off by the dean of the department, Alec's doing an independent study in the winter on Pre-Vis and Show Control software, with an eye toward using it to pre-program some pieces for Grafitti in the Spring. Now that we're getting the Ion, we could do a fair ammount of programming before/during/just after spring break and not have to drive ourselves crazy the week of.

Speaking of the Ion, the StuCo co-sponsorship account was re-activated today! We should get the funds in tomorrow, have the invoice processed tomorrow, and get the Ion on its way. It's doubtful whether it would actually be here by the end of next week, but it'll definitely come in over winter break and be ready for Dolphin. Huzzah! Auto-paging scrollers!

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Smartfade Schmartfade

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:07:00 +0000

Dan and I have been trying to wrestle our heads around the smartfade 1296 console in Annie May Swift the past few days. It's not really designed as a theatrical board in any way shape or form. Though it can be used as a 24-channel two-scene preset board, it's really meant to be used live. It has 48-faders which, in two modes, can control up to 96 channels, each individually patchable (though it's kind of a pain to do so). It can record up to 4 chase sequences, and 48 memories or cue states in each of 12 memory pages, which can be any combination of channels. There's also something called 'the stack,' which can hold up to 199 cue states and timed transitions between them, which is about as close as the SF comes to having cues. The trick is, you can't write elements of the stack non-sequentially (i.e. 1, 3, 5) or insert new elements, so once a cue is in, it's in.

Since we're planning on doing MIDI show control for the whole show, we're hoping we can control the memory channels instead of having to use the stack. In other words, we'd like to be writing cues as "Memory 5 at %0 in 3 seconds, and Memory 6 at %75 in 5 seconds" instead of just "Stack increment." We'd only be able to have 48 cue states (up to scaling), but that should be plenty for this particular show. I'll have to talk to Alec soon to see how that may break down, both in terms of MIDI control and using the smartfade.

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A Smidge of Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:15:00 +0000

While trying to look up information on the L14-30 connectors that the StuCo dimmer rack has for 208V moving light power, I discovered that Wikipedia had no entry for "Socapex." Now it does. I've been trying to contribute to Wikiproject Stagecraft a little more recently, just to better the general state of online information about theatrical lighting. After all, I get so much information from the web that it's only fair that I give back what I can.

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Ion Offline

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 06:31:00 +0000

I'm playing with the Offline version of Ion software, which is freely downloadable from the ETC website. While it's a bit frustrating to work with sans the actual keypad, and while it gets confused as to whether I want to enter text commands or simulated key-presses on the console, I've never seen an easier patch interface. To be fair, I've been working with the Annie May Swift Smartfade for the past few days, and I'm just generally used to the Express 24/48, so my standards are pretty low, but still...

To take an example (which will probably come up for Dolphin). Say I want to patch a MAC700 fixture with extended profile into the Ion. Firstly, the ion lets each fixture be its own "channel," whereas individual DMX-addressed commands are called "outputs." So, to patch a MAC700 addressed at 107 into channel 10, I hit [Chan] [1] [0] [TYPE], scroll through the manufacturers to find "Martin," and click "MAC700 Extended". Then I click (or type on a qwerty keyboard) "Address" [1] [0] [7]. Done. It knows the MAC needs 31 channels, which ones are coarse and fine, color, intensity, everything. Fantastic!

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[Edit, 1:07am:] Made it though the first seven chapters of the manual tonight, so that takes care of basic setup, patching, and understanding the interface. That'll have to be enough for one night. I wouldn't call the system perfectly intuitive, but boy do I hope we have it in time for Dolphin.

Simultaneous Ouch

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff "JeffGlass" Glass) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 18:07:00 +0000

The Shantytown lights now have color! In brief, we have:

Angled front light from stage right: R02
Angled front light from stage left: R62
Front wash: R52
Side light from stage right: R65
Side light form stage left: R01
Top light: R62

We had a really fun moment when we were picking colors for the front-light washes. Originally we were thinking of R62 and R08, the latter being a much yellower straw color than R02 ("light amber"). But when we put the R08 next to the blue R62, the R62 drove the R08 into a very green world that just looked disgusting. The blue of the R62 was (a warm blue) was pushing out the red in the R08 and just leaving the green. It was terribly exciting, since this is exactly what we've been talking about in Intro to LD all quarter. To have it happen organically by chance was fantastic.

73