Invisible

Not a new thought.

But I was listening to radio coverage on yesterday's eclipse, and cicadas came up, and I found myself remembering the process of several sound designs.

Crickets and birdsong are part of that suite of sounds that tell the audience where a scene is taking place, indoor or outdoor, city or nature. They can describe a biome and an emotion; a peaceful meadow or a spooky jungle. And, of course, a time of day (excepting when those crickets or birds get confused by a solar eclipse).

But it is never so simple as just grabbing "birds chirping" from a free online sound library. Besides those little matters of audio quality and legal use, you need to particularize. Chickadees making a racket in a Soho pet shop are not the same as morning sparrows on a farmstead in Illinois. Not all library sounds are equal -- or equally appropriate.

Worse, most plays will have multiple locations, and multiple times of day. For something as simple as Bye, Bye Birdie I had three or four different cricket-and-night-insect backgrounds, depending on the time of day and the emotional mood I was going for; the background to the anticipatory twilight of a hot summer night prior to "Got a lot of living" is quite different from the one-AM still of the final tired chorus of "We love you Birdie."

But that's just primary selection. Then comes the next task.

Library recordings vary hugely in their equalization. Some of the birdsong I reach for frequently have huge (even oppressive) low-end rumble in them. So these need to be equalized and focused in to bring out the sounds you need without masking the stage action and dialog you need to preserve.

(A lot of them also have a huge white noise content. This comes with the territory; birdsong is outdoors sound and wind and background roar are always there. This is wide-spectrum noise, though, and pretty much impossible to edit out. You can only work around it).

Then you need enough so it covers the length of the scene. And starts and stops smoothly, without a jarring effect. Often the library samples you start with are too short. A little over a minute is typical for a library effect and ten minutes isn't unusual for a scene. And you don't want to simply loop (especially because the raw library effect will either start with a bang or will fade in and out leaving an obvious silence in addition to the obvious repetition.)

This is why I like layering several different tracks. I can duck them in and out and change how they line up to present an ever-changing picture that doesn't have so many obvious repetitions in it. (This also plays well with how I like to approach background sounds; to start them louder and more complex and drop them in volume and complexity as we move into the scene proper).

And we're still not done. Because birdsong, particularly, is pretty much defined as being stretches of silence separated by distinct calls. If you leave most library tracks alone, they will be too quiet to make a background track -- except at 1:03, when the bird nearest the microphone suddenly lets out a loud chirp.

I edit the sounds manually. I go into waveform view and "ride the fader" (as in adjust the amplitude moment-by-moment to smooth out the levels.) Audacity has a very nice "envelop" mode for doing this quickly and smoothly.

And here's the trick, and what ties back to the title of the post:

If I do all this, and do it well, no-one will ever realize I did it.



I've mentioned this before. It struck me, while I was listening to that radio program, that the majority of my creative work over the years has been exactly this sort of invisible work.

Hemingway famously tried to write so the words went away and all you perceived was the story. A fellow lighting designer shared with me the conundrum of the box set and the fireplace. The audience will notice a fireplace effect. But if you did your job right, a box set interior (a room in a castle, a hotel suite, whatever) will just look like a room. It will never cross their minds that giving the impression of light coming from chandelier and sconces and or the big bay window is really, really difficult to integrate with having everyone inside properly lit, easy to see, without too many distracting shadows.

(As my friend put it, you spend three days focusing that damned box set to try to control the shadows and the scoop shapes on the walls and so on. And then you plop a $15 fire log from Wallgreen's in the fireplace and plug it in and the audience goes "ooh" and "ahh.")

What little stabs I've taken in the direction of engineering is the same; a good engineering design does what it needs to do in the most direct way possible. A good design ends up looking simple and obvious -- a simplicity and obviousness that was not there when the design process was begun.

With a stretch, you could even include violin practice, since 90% of the job over your first couple of years is the not-making-obvious-mistakes part of it. Your skill is defined largely by how much someone doesn't notice how much (or, rather, how little) skill you have.



But, you know, it really sucks when it comes time to getting credit. For people to mention the sound design in reviews or in the big thank-you-everyone at the opening night party. For reviews, in particular, the only mention is when it went wrong. Never when it went right, because "right" for the bulk of the work is being invisible; the illusion that the singer and the orchestra just sort of showed up in perfect balance and clarity to every pair of ears in the house.

(And since your director and music director and producer and so forth have no freaking idea how much work went into achieving that illusion of transparency, and how fragile it is, they will go behind your back and change stuff and then blame you for when it "for no reason at all" suddenly sounds like shit.)

And it shows up when payday comes around, too.




(There's another example for the bucket; I've been listening to a bunch of archaeology podcasts, as well as the Writing Excuses podcast. The latter is properly engineered. If you just listen to the latter, there's nothing to hear; you just hear the people talking. Listen to the former and you get it; distracting background noises and huge level shifting that makes listening to a dialogue an exercise in daring and frustration as you keep racing to adjust the volume on your earbuds between "I don't know what he said" to "would she please stop blowing into the microphone!")

Moon Over Buffalo

Another old design.

This time I'm using Shotcut, a freeware video editor. Much nicer than iMovie for this sort of thing. It lacks the ability to do audio ducking or similar, but that's okay -- I would have spliced all the audio together  in Audacity or Reaper anyway, if I wasn't dealing with a bad mic and poor recording conditions anyhow.

Kudzu Plot

Just opened another show.

Actually, "kudzu" is used of literary plotting, and it means lots of bits left dangling. That's actually a good thing in a lighting hang. Learned that myself from a tech named Steve, who had been Production Manager at a regional theater I'd worked for, was getting stress-related illness and took time off from that, meeting me at a smaller community theater as the outgoing Master Electrician. He taught me the value in leaving tails (dangling cords) on any instrument that was in indeterminate state (to be moved, to be decided, not circuited, etc.)

What I found when I went in for this show (my first "Earnest," actually) was more like cruft. All wiring develops cruft. Under the time pressure of Tech Week, and later during the run, stuff that breaks or is changed gets fixed with a fast band-aid. Then in adherence to Joe Ragey's First Law, what you opened with, stays up for the run.

More than that, those unlabeled, poorly routed, barely dressed cable runs are still there when the show closes and get used again and again until no-one knows how power from here gets over there or which of two dozen identical dust-covered bits of wire in a huge tangle are actually carrying the audio to the house mains.

And it can be built on for a while. The story was told from the first Myst game that there were so many cables linking the computers of the render farm, when something died they'd just purchase a new piece of Cat-5 and drop it on top of the pile. Trouble is, in budget-strapped theater, if a free dimmer is showing up there, even if it is impossible to trace how it gets there, someone will grab another length of cable, plug it in to where the dimmer showed up, and run it out to where the new light needs to be. Eventually there are cable runs that literally circumnavigate the grid to come back two hundred feet of cable later to a couple of feet from where they started.

The term in software is Technical Debt. And it follows a similar path. Every now and then someone will spend the effort to trace one or two critical leads and will stick labels on them. But those break, change, are re-purposed, and in time there are layer upon layer of old falling-off obscurely written and mostly wrong labels as well.

And finally you just have to refactor. Which is what I did over about two weeks. Tore out almost everything and then hung from scratch. But I couldn't touch the giant tangle that is the primary run from booth to stage; a huge bundle that contains audio, DMX, power, Clear-com, and who knows what else that at one point someone put in and if we knew what it was would be very useful.



The other lesson from this particular show was how to handle a dishrag cyc. See, in some sets you will have a cyclorama, a big seamless usually pale blue piece of fabric stretched across the stage in front of the back wall. And they are a pain to light smoothly, with a variety of speciality instruments designed for that purpose that still don't do the job well.

Thing of it is, there's a big John Cage element here. If you don't light a cyc, it still has color. The color of all the stray light, bounce light, etc. Which means it usually looks like a dirty dishrag. And this is a problem if the act is set in, say, the interior of a flat in London. Because the back wall shouldn't be bright glowing daylight blue.

So what I tried this time was the same trick I've used on set walls where the coverage is spotty and the wall itself has wrinkles you are trying to hide. Stick patterns in. Unfortunately, I only had one 50-degree instrument to work with and even that was a little small. What I needed was a bank of four. But, still, throwing an intentional pattern on the cyc -- even if it is run low and pulled slightly out of focus to draw less attention -- looks vastly more intentional than the spill light which is also falling on it. So it looks better.

(I could get away with a lot of patterns on this show because the set concept was period posters and postcard art. The pattern I used most was GAM's "homespun." Which is now in my list of favorite patterns along with "Summer Leaves" and "Construction A, B, C, D.")



So the show is finally open. I begged off the gala and went home shortly after the Act II curtain, slept ten hours and spent a very quiet Saturday.

Now it is Sunday. I have hopes (but faint hopes) of getting a couple things done I've put off during this long show. Practice the violin (and post up another progress video), clean up the place a little, assemble holocrons (with more documentation photographs to go into the assembly instructions), complete and order the next run of PCBs, and do paperwork for some of my various jobs.

Reality is I'll probably take a short walk, listen to NPR, and read backlogs of archaeology blogs.

Do I hafta draw youse a diagram?

Making a sketch really helps. If you can draw well enough (I can't) you can use it to communicate with a client or a co-worker.

When you are using it to figure out something, though, all it needs to be is clear enough so you can read it yourself.

I made a few dozen sketches of Holocron ideas before I finally found the idea I was able to take through Inkscape, laser, and assembly of a prototype:

I made hundreds of sketches, mostly by hand but to-scale with the aid of graph paper, on how the thing assembled. But technical work is not the only place where a sketch is nice to clarify your thoughts:

The above is actually the only plan I had to organize the big fight in the Abbington Estate a chapter or two back in my current fanfic. I can pretty much puzzle out what I meant now...I think the lower left is Zip up in Lara's room searching for her guns, center right is Teal'c hiding Alister and the injured Winston behind the Tiger painting in the Blake Room, with the Hall of Armor on the right fork of the passage, and of course at center is the Great Hall which serves as hub for every game that lets you explore the mansion, and the more spectacular moments of the fight in the (first) Tomb Raider movie.

And then there's this:

This is me trying to make any sort of sense of the Deep Time of the setting. The vertical axis more-or-less corresponds to time (logarithmically) and depth in the Earth (for some parts of the diagram). Essentially, the first Ancient culture was on Earth in the 2-200 MYA range, and among their other activities built Core Taps (essentially using a volcanic vent as a power source) -- many along the Ring of Fire.

Following the Wraith War (not to be confused with the Unknown Entity summoned up by Amanda's "Wraith Stone") a small number of Ancient survivors, now called Lanteans, come back to Earth. This is canonically at 10 KYA, which is problematic as the first Goa'uld (who later calls himself the Sun God, Ra) also canonically arrives on Earth about that time. One of them tinkers up the Asterion at Thera, built on top of the Core Tap there. If you look closely you might be able to make out a bull's head and a "clue" of thread in my scratchy diagram.

If I had the space, the diagram might have indicated things like the Elder Dryas, the first human migrations into the Americas, the Toba eruption, etc. There are a lot of odd things going on around that period! Canonically (according to the games this time), the surviving Lantean "triumvirate" on Earth breaks up, with Natla imprisoned in a stasis tube and Qualopec and Tihocan going off on solo careers as, eventually, mad old gods to early Central Americans and some sort of (possibly Mycenean) proto-greco-romans.

Roll forward to 3,000 BCE; Ra is overthrown, and the first historical Egyptian dynasties start up (no word on what the Assyrians or Sumerians thought about all this). Horus remains and is still wandering the Earth up through the Bronze Age collapse (witnessing the Thera eruption close-hand), at last getting stuck in a canopic jar sometime around the Amarna period of the Egyptian New Dynasty.

Some Lanteans may still be hanging around, whispering into Plato's ear (or perhaps Solon's). And to Iron Age "Celts," as well, giving rise to some of the Arthurian legend as well. Plus donating Excalibur, and continuing to use the Ring Transporter-like Travel Dias system established in various remote corners of the world (and possibly on others as well...wherever it is that some of the events of Tomb Raider: Underworld actually take place!) Others are off Earth, eventually either dying off or Ascending, but before that join for a time in a great league with the Asgard, the Nox, and the Furlings. The last have never been heard of since.

In 1945 the Trinity test frees Natla, who in due time seeks out and is successful in finding the three parts of the Atlantean Scion. Which is lost when another of the Ancient core taps blows up as did Thera, taking out Lost Island (which the games do not give a clear location for -- and as it is clearly either analog to or part of lost Atlantis, can be defensibly placed anywhere that amusingly mobile island-slash-continent has been placed by writers since Plato).

About this time the Stargate is being moved from Giza (having been uncovered in 1938), and Ernest Littlefield uses it in the post-war years. It is seen in a Federal storage facility outside of Washington in 1968, and finally fetches up at Cheyenne Mountain when Ernest's fiancé gets the program restarted. Of course we know what happens then!

And, no; not all of that is in the diagram. Mostly I have Lara, who has joined with unknown reason with psuedo-archaeologist Commander Newberry in his Landmaster-like "Ark III," (the diagram wrongly shows it with the funky tri-wheel arrangement) who may be stumbling on something Amanda left for them to find that may have something to do with the Ancient core taps that either Horus or Natla or the Asgard were investigating...

I think I've worked out my current plotting woes to the point where Amanda wrote a "Hello, Sweetie" message in some extremely obscure ancient tongue (possibly late-period Lantean) on the back of an artifact with equally obscure markings, which Newberry found and which attracted Lara to his dig in New Mexico. Amanda's message points towards Mount Shasta but also leads Lara into focus range of the Green Sun concentrator solar power plant -- which Natla Industries built, on properly previously leased by a wildcat drilling operation she blatantly named "Qualopec Oil Prospectors."

I did make one big mistake choosing Roswell as my starting point for the "Lara in the Midwest" chapters, though. White Sands, and most specifically the Trinity site, are a little too far away to properly explain whatever it was that Natla has been digging for in the Roswell area.

HoloBOM

I finished the Stolen B prototype today and opened up the thread at the RPF to start taking orders.

(Top image is the completed "Stolen B," including a prototype assembly of the final lighting diffusor, support structure, and circuit with USB jack. Bottom image is a mock-up using borrowed "Temple" shell and the lighting module from the "Stolen B" to show off the combination of "Guardian" diffusion and "Gallifrey" circuit layers.)

The above is also why I spent a few minutes today developing a BOM with parts numbers just so I could keep track of all the pieces properly. Here's the BOM for the design I've been showing off in earlier posts:

20.1 “Stolen A," assembled

0.1.31 “Stolen” shell set

0.1.31.1 Top

0.1.31.2 Side (3 pieces)

0.1.31.3 USB Side

0.1.31.4 Bottom

0.1.41 “Counselor” diffusion set

0.1.41.1 Diffuse top

0.1.41.2 Diffuse side (3 pieces)

0.1.41.3 Diffuse side USB

0.1.41.4 Diffuse bottom

0.1.51 “Circuit 2” set (6 pieces)

0.1.61 “Standard” diffusion cube set

0.1.61.1 diffusion cube top

0.1.61.2 diffusion cube side (4 pieces)

0.1.62 Support set

0.1.62.1 support top

0.1.62.2 support side (4 pieces)

0.1.71 “Revision 3” electronics package

0.1.71.11 “Revision 2” neopixel board

0.1.71.21 USB jack

0.1.71.31 Standard LiPo

0.1.71.41 Capsense wire

0.1.81.1 Magnet (4 pieces)

Tomorrow I'll probably solder up another couple boards, and scrounge and adapt from my discards pile to complete the "Temple," "Stolen A," and "Imperial Archives" prototypes. I need two Holocron gifts so at least two of those are going away (I can't see those particular ones, as they don't quite meet my standards for shippable product.)

Yes...working at a company that makes precision audio equipment has tainted me. I think in terms of QA and Reliability Testing and BOMs and MAI's now. But I need to; despite my original intention of making the cheapest possible kit that was also as smooth and simple to assemble as I could make it, the realities of the core design elements of the "Stolen" fork has produced a design that has a lot of individual parts and requires a fair amount of finicky work to assemble.

Now all I need is to add a proper tracking system for revisions...

Holocron history

This prop took forever. But there is reason for it. Basically, it isn't "a" prop. There wasn't a straight-forward design process from a base idea through a directed iterative exploration.

I was handed a kit to assemble and paint. I'd just been introduced to laser cutting and engraving, though, and I thought I could pimp it up a little.

The experiments worked. Well enough I ended up documenting the project for Instructables. And that's where the trouble started.

Enough people at Instructables showed an interest that I made my files available. Since some of the parts weren't originally mine, I had to come up with designs for those, as well.


It was through Instructables that I was contacted by the master of a Jedi Temple, wanting a custom design made for his students. I agreed to work on it. Many emails and iterations and a full free kit shipped out no charge and I stopped being able to shake the feeling that he wasn't actually going to be good for the cost of the final kits. So I parted ways with that customer.

Since I now had a new and tested shell design I tried for a while to generate a new holocron based around it. But I didn't like (and still don't like) and of the results.

The holocron does not yet appear in any movie. It appears in some games and animations; one appearance being the best documented appearance I've been able to find. This natural goal was blocked, however, by the seeming impossibility of achieving it with the materials at hand. So I continued tinkering with other alternate designs, trying to fold in various motifs from the Star Wars universe.

It was at that juncture that I opened an interest thread at the Replica Props Forum. I got strong interest there, but still couldn't satisfy myself with the design.

Took a break to work on other projects. Did the Retro Raygun, some other things. My Croft necklace was also a hit, and I gave it away on long-term loan, which led me to starting the Wraith Stone project, and that looked to require some advanced electronics, so I picked up the holocron project again just to be able to work out the charge circuit and load sharing and surface-mount issues on a simpler board than what I intended for the Wraith Stone.

And when I returned to the holocron, what I had seen as an unsolvable problem turned out to be trivial. The critical insight might have been a function introduced on the new lasers just installed at TechShop; vector engraving. In any case, I immediately moved to front position a design much more closely based on that one animation.

It is just different enough from my first holocron, though, that the lighting didn't look right anymore. So back to some very basic development to rethink how the lighting circuit interacts.

And, of course, late in the day I realized there were possible ways to get it to look even more like my selected source. The very first holocron was a three-layer model; painted shell, solid diffusion layer, then the vector-cut "circuit" layer. I finally broke through this paradigm -- first through having to add a diffusor cube, then through realizing an inner "hypercube" might be an even closer match to what was seen on screen.

And that's where I am right now; cutting out yet more test pieces to see if this idea works out, while my growing list of confirmed customers are demanding I let them give me money...

Which is of course the absolutely perfect time for a major change at my day job.

I am not left-handed

I'm taking a day or two off work to let my injured thumb heal. I needed it anyhow -- got a cold to get over as well, and I could use some uninterrupted time for prop work.

Amazing, though, how many things one uses a right thumb for. I've even trained my left (I'm a self-taught touch-typist) to hit the spacebar instead, but it throws me off.

Anyhow.

I've three variant holocrons coming along. Still trying to problem-solve on the related lighting and USB issues.

I hacked up my prototype today to try several different arrangements of an external USB connector. The latest try is trying right now. I think the best lighting is going to come from a diffusion cube suspended inside, and the simplest way to attach the circuit board that maintains easy access to it is to come up with a platform that glues right to the bottom lid. That way, the USB connector travels with it, no dangling wires.

As clever as I've tried to be with the USB jack, it still seems to mean there is both a visible seam and an even more unsightly hole in the side. Hence the quick repair and paint job so I can put it all together and eyeball just how bad it really looks.

And...it works. The hole is a trifle ugly but small enough you can more-or-less ignore it. And there's no distressing light leak either.

The neopixels I want are still on back-order. Might end up hand-soldering raw "5050" LEDs (those are the RGB's with integrated WS2811 driver chip) -- they have a poor survival rate when reflowed. Would save $3-4 in parts, but also would make the diffusor cube mandatory.

The revised Eagle CAD is coming along. I've got everything in a 2" x 2" footprint now, even the user programming buttons, and it still looks routable (the auto-router digested it without issue). Pulling the USB jack off the board will make it even easier.



Drat. But that was two days off from work. Sick days, yes. And I did a little cleaning, laundry, etc. But there's still enough to do on the laser files I'm not sure I'll even have those done in time to do on the weekend. And I've a promise to run off more grenades and some 10mm caseless rounds as well...

That Moment...

...when inchoate purpose strikes the breakwater of complexity thrown up by the dark underwater shoals of the unknown unknowns. 

One of the things I emphasize in this journal and in the Instructables I have published is methods. By which I mean not the actual craft techniques, but the planning and problem-solving methods that tell you what you need to research, and more than anything else give you milestones and sanity checks to help tell you if the project is actually on track.

And in particular. You plan out tests, proofs of concept, rough models, massing sketches, sanity tests, all to see if an idea shows promise or not before you invest a lot of time and money in research and purchasing and construction.

The Holocron is fairly far down the development path. My plan called for three tests before I proceed into the details of the final design; a lighting test, attempts to solve a flaw in the previous iteration of the control circuit, and a scale check for the overall Holocron.

It failed the lighting test. By itself, the "Cree" 3 watt RGB won't smoothly light all six faces of the cube. This leaves me, well, floundering a little. The PCB design is all about driving a Cree. I have some ideas towards surface-mount or even neopixels, but I don't have ideas yet on how to wire them so as to achieve 180 degree coverage. All I can say at this point is that an internal "ping-pong ball" diffusor shows some promise.

Which means circuit design stops dead until I can come up with a new lighting scheme and then give that a test.

The Wraith Stone is faring worse at the moment. The assumption is that I'm casting something that will go over/around a circuit board that will provide an internal illumination. The problem here is in the nature of the material. The artist's renditions are rather unclear as to what this material really looks like. Are these quartzite veins? Nodules? Is the stone metallic or more like obsidian? How opaque is it?

The known unknown is that different casting (or printing) materials are going to behave very, very differently to internal illumination. Unfortunately, this is something that calls for extensive experimentation, and I have neither funds nor patience to try out every resin additive in the catalog.

What I hit today is lots of unexplored territory I didn't even know was out there. UV-sensitive additives to casting resin, for instance. The potential of "cold casting" (aka, mixing actual powdered metals into your cast). 

I keep edging at some sort of idea of creating spaces, either with a special mold or a lost wax method or something, pouring in a dark material, then following it up with a clearer one. Or maybe create little beads or appliqué and drill behind them? I don't know. I can't form any ideas in a concrete enough fashion to point at proper experiments.

Which means all I can really do is a scale check with a rough Sculpey, err, sculpt, and maybe try out some vague ideas I had towards a black stone base with the relief elements brought out with Rub 'n Buff. 

Sigh. A weekend isn't enough time to really do this. I look forward to my new job schedule. Spent much of this morning getting the latest M40's ready for shipment...only to discover the local branch of the Post Office has stopped having Saturday hours.

Scale

My full-time job just made an interesting offer. Long-term hourly at a 30 hour week. I wasn't expecting that; I thought it was full time or nothing (with perhaps some flex time, as I've been enjoying these past couple weeks with two shows opening at once).

If the pay and bennies are decent I might just take them up on it. Because while I'm doing better at not falling asleep on the couch the moment the work day ends, I could still use a few more hours of me time to pursue, well, all the stuff this blog has been about.

This for one. I've officially started a new run of Aliens M40 grenades at the Replica Props Forum. I have six complete ones, two bodies that need the spring-loaded button installed, and enough metal stock on hand for another four or so. I've got (unconfirmed) orders for ten already, so those should go pretty quickly -- and at $40 a pop, that makes up for some of the work hours I've been missing.

And it makes use of my existing TechShop membership. Regardless of what my work schedule turns out to be, running out to the City in the evening for a four-hour lathe session is (and has been) quite do-able.

I'm also moving on the Wraith Stone. Settled on the Title Movie version from Tomb Raider: Legend but I think I need to CAD it up to experiment with scale. I don't mind it being smaller than depicted; I want it to be wearable!

The internal electronics may not be appropriate for this design, but this is technology I want to explore. It's stuff I need to work on for my Holocron as well (and the DuckLight, for that matter). Something new to the mix is that Seeed Studio is offering PCB assembly at very, very, very reasonable rates (and with practically no minimum order). You have to base your BOM on their stock, but that isn't a huge problem. Besides, I can always solder a few parts myself after the board is shipped.

Big thing here is that this puts the SMD family of AVR chips a lot closer to my reach. ATmegas for more control channels, for instance. Or the USB-native family of AVRs for class-compliant USB devices. And smaller footprints -- but that goes without saying.

The biggest downside to my circuitry plans for the Wraith Stone is that, once again, I've taking a project away from the traditional methods. I would love to hand-sculpt this thing. But unless I add a 3d scanning step to the mix, how does this give me the ability to shape the inner surfaces to accommodate the circuitry? All of my electronic prop experience tells me this is best done in CAD, and that sort of implies that the stone itself gets 3d printed...

Far from lastly, the show I did these crazy improvisations for last year has come around again. At least this time I own two dimmer packs of my own (just arrived yesterday, not yet tested). But I don't own lighting instruments. I could afford to purchase some of my own fresnels, but where would I store them? I have enough trouble finding closet space for my rack of body mics (which is why I love it when they are out on rental, as they are right now).

Lighting the Stage

One really wants to have a few things. Enough time to do a proper design, hang the show, and rehearse the technical elements before you have to go in front of an audience. Enough lights and dimmers and consumables to accomplish something useful and pretty. A script is nice, too.

And then there's shows where you are already working three jobs, the script is still being written, and the rented hall is between management teams: coming off a long string of other productions, and everything is mis-labeled if not broken outright. The design I just completed was one of those.



Lighting for the stage has two tasks, two tasks which somewhat blend into each other. The first is functional; to put light on actor's faces. Live theater is all about being in the same room with a live human being who needs to express themselves through voice and features, and you need to see those features. (Or, in the case of dance, see their body, as that is the expressive organ there.)

This sounds simpler than it is. Unlike a portrait photography studio, a stage is large. You have to put those lumens across the width and into the depth of it, and evenly; so an actor in the back left is equally as visible as one in the front center. The angle needs to be low and straight enough so shadows are not cast across the face. The colors need to be neutral enough so they look reasonably human and in the appropriate health (yellow and green, as well as some of the lavender range, will make people look jaundiced, as well as bring out any blotchiness in their complexion).

And yet, there needs to be enough angle and color and complexity to reveal the planes of the face. A simple flat front in white light is like a bad flash photograph; all you get is a white oval, with no definition. No character.

Thus the complex variety of schemes -- and the large number of discrete lighting instruments with all the associated wiring, dimmer requirements, ladder access and time spent, documentation, and so forth to accomplish just this basic task. As a generic rule, unless you have huge surpluses available the majority of your lighting assets are going to go towards simply "putting light on faces." Even when you have the options for multiple systems, a majority of the lights will still have that as one of their tasks -- if not their primary task.



The second task is artistic. And that is to make use of the light as one of the tools to enhance mood, to indicate location and season and time of day, to underline enhance or provide certain specific items or events called for in the story, and more than anything else, to make distinctions. To make clear when a play is going on and when it has yet to start. To make clear when the action has moved from one location to another, or into a different emotional space, or gone through some other important change (such as an inner monologue or an audience aside). That is, light is also used to focus the audience's attention and make distinctions spatially and temporally.

This idea of differentiation is why one of the two major approaches I apply is to find these divisions, these changes, these axes of something that changes. They may be simple poles, or they may be a continuum; in the latter, think of Under Milkwood in which the period of the play covers a single day, with the changing of the hours, the sunset and moon and dawn, being of equal importance to the physical location within the town.

In, say, "Two Gents" (that is, Two Gentlemen of Verona) the major axis is town versus woods, as the action flips back and forth scene to scene from one to the other. Which leads us naturally to "Midsummer," in which the woods is a magical place and quite distinct from the town, but the thrust of the play is absolutely dependent on the difference between the woods during the day and the woods at night.

And you can often achieve these axes within your area plan; that is, within the same lights that give you that necessary and functional light-on-faces. A typical scheme is to cover the areas with three lights each. Say, one warm and one cool, matched against a neutral. By changing the relative levels or omitting one of the three, you change the look.

And if this is super-imposed on an area plot -- that is, on those banks of lights necessary to cover the width and depth of the stage -- you also have given yourself the ability to focus in on one specific part of the stage. That is, it allows you to isolate and separate to make it clear that the action stage left is taking place in a different country or time than the action simultaneously occupying stage right, or so it is clear the monolog's the thing, and the people moving around upstage are merely shifting scenery and should be ignored. And, of course, to focus the audience's attention more sharply on that corner of the stage where the most important action is taking place.

This degree of control pretty much happens whether you need it or not. And that is because it is extremely rare to be able to plug everything in to the same place. Theater instruments are power hogs; the standards are 750 and 1000 watts, plus the increasing number of energy-saving 575W lamps. The math rapidly becomes instinctive; two of the big ones, or four of the small ones, to any particular circuit. Anything more means wires on fire, breakers popping, expensive repairs to dimmer packs.

And why is this? Scale, again. Think of it this way; if you have a two-bedroom apartment, you could probably get away with plugging every wall lamp, chandelier, desk light and so forth into a single wall outlet. But these lights rarely top 250 watts; the faces they are trying to light are not much more than five feet away, and the total space is lucky to be twenty feet on a side.

Even a black box theater space is twice that dimension, meaning four times the area, meaning at a first approximation it would take four wall outlets to power those lights (regardless of what the lights actually were). Of course, theatrical lights are directional, not omnidirectional like most household lighting -- but theatrical lights also (for various reasons) need to push more lumens than the lights in your living room.

(As another comparison, insolation at the Equator is about a thousand watts per square meter. Out here in northern latitudes and with cloudy days the average is less, but basically think of a 500 watt light bulb pointing at every single square meter of ground when you are outside during the day. Theatrical lighting -- even movie lighting -- is a good magnitude less than that. And that's why theater lighting designers hate matinees.)

And, yes, you can light a scene with a single candle. I've done it. But it took half an hour of progressively dimmer cues to dark-adapt the audience to that moment. But back to circuiting. At the theater I just opened a show at, the built-in wiring over the stage -- and the rack-mount dimmers, dating from the 70's -- could handle up to four instruments on a channel.

Out in the house, all I had available were "Elation" portable dimmer packs. Very useful for small and traveling shows, these are four 5A dimmers in a little box that can be hung on a lighting batten or tucked behind scenery. And at 20A total, they can be (and often are) plugged into a standard wall outlet. At 5A a channel, though, that's one instrument. Period. And even if you could power more, the wiring is extension cords and cube taps, none of which are rated for more than 15-20 amps. And, yes, there's a very narrow window by which the Fire Department allows theaters to pull crap like this.

The point being, that I have individual control of each and every light just as a side effect of having to get power to them. So you leverage this by carefully planning the focus points in what most of us call an Area Plot. That is, you plan so when you turn off three and leave two up, those two define a part of the stage that, at some point in the action, you will find it useful to define.



When you have the inventory you cover the stage multiple times; each cover is with different angles, in different colors, and otherwise in different qualities of light. This allows you to make those changes that make it clear to the audience the story-telling point, "Here we are in the Forest of Arden" as well as the emotional point, "It's spooky here in the woods."

Covering from a multiplicity also brings the light around the face and body to clear up obscuring shadows, and provides a controlled contrast to reveal contours. This is why one of the most common area light schemes remains to this day the one developed by Stanley McCandless in 1932; two lights separated by a 45 degree angle, one of them gel'd "cool" and the other "warm," so that they mix together to white light. Many variations are possible.

And this brings me at last to my most recent design. A tale within a framing story within a prologue. The prologue is modern-day and was written to be performed in one, that is, in front of the main rag, that is, with the curtain closed. We couldn't get the curtain to work so this removed one of the options that would have otherwise made that distinction clear.

The other distinctions I wanted to make clear were the difference between framing story scenes -- taking place amongst the travelers on pilgrimage to Canterbury, aka the Canterbury Tales -- and within the tale being told; that of Arthurian legend. And within that legend, I wanted to be able to delineate between interior (Camelot) and exterior (the generic woods where knights-errant find adventure). And lastly, I wanted to be able to find a moonlight look both in support of specific dialog and also as an emotional underscore to Sir Gawain's journey (and, says the playwright, as a foreshadowing of the fall of Camelot -- which does not take place within this particular story).

And I didn't have the assets. An additional wrinkle (no pun intended) is that the minimal set design included a cyclorama. That is, a large seamless cloth that covers the entire back of the stage. The typical way to light a cyc is with specialized fixtures called variously strips, striplights, and cyc strips. These achieve the usually-desired even coverage of this flat plane by using a large number of individual lamps arranged in a line. Usually (but not always) grouped electrically by threes or fours, allowing you to put different colors in each set and thus produce various blended colors on the surface.

I had some old ones but the wiring was shot and would need to be re-done. Rental, upon investigation, was beyond our finances. That left an old trick; re-purpose a bunch of par cans. The original par light was basically an automobile headlight in a tin can. Newer ones are built around purpose-designed lamps, and the most recent designs omit the integrated lamp-reflector-diffusor assembly (aka a headlight) for standard theatrical lamps and interchangeable front lenses.

The very latest wrinkle is LEDs. The great attraction of these is real-time color changes within a single fixture, as they are built with red-blue-green, or that plus amber, or even plus amber and white. A second and not small advantage is they don't take up a dimmer, and also don't require much power; a whole bank of seven of these things could easily and safely be powered from a single extension cord. And since they take DMX-512 control, a single daisy-chained data cable is enough to control them all.

This left me with only fresnel lens fixtures in sufficient number to light the acting areas. That is; these are theatrical lights with a hemispherical reflector and a fresnel lens on the front, giving a soft-edged light that can only be gently shaped by means of barn doors; metal flaps that are attached to the front. I lit my areas flat and with a high angle, and gel'd them in x09; that is, I colored them by placing pieces of transparent polyester manufactured with carefully controlled tinting by high-temperature dyes. The Roscolux series number 9 is a warm, pleasing amber reminiscent of candle-light.

My intent was that this read as candles for the framing story, and as warm and somewhat old-fashioned (like the famous sepia tints of the Kansas segments of The Wizard of Oz) for the tale-within-the-tale. This was combined with a daylight blue -- x65 -- from the top back, standing in for the blue-ish light of a clear sky, and I had just enough instruments left to double this system with an additional set of back lights in x79; a deep green-blue for a moonlight effect.

I had a very small number of ellipsoidals. Also referred to by lighting people as ERS for Ellipsoidal Reflector Spotlights, these are in fact instruments with a stack of plano-convex lenses much like a camera or telescope, with the light focused into a theoretical point by an ellipsoidal reflector placed behind the lamp. This quality of being brought into a tiny focal point means you can produce a hard edge, shaping it with shutters that slide into this small gap. In addition, a piece of metal punched out with patterns can be slipped into this spot, and that pattern will be reproduced faithfully at the point where the beam is in focus.

One of these instruments I hung almost directly overhead to isolate (and, emotionally, to "crush down") Gawain at a particularly bad moment for him. And, more importantly, to allow the rest of the stage to go dark enough to permit a "dead" body to be dragged off without the audience seeing.

Another I gave a stock foliage pattern and threw that over the stage in an attempt to make the outdoors scenes seem more outdoors. This only partially worked; you need a lot more light, a lot more instruments to carry that trick off properly. It did however provide a nice bit of magic for one scene where I was able to reduce the rest of the front lights and let the foliage show up properly.

The last two provided a method to keep the framing story -- and the oft-present narrators from that story -- in the light without putting them in the world of Camelot. Gel'd in a distinctly different amber, they were additionally framed in gothic window shapes. Which were not available when I stopped by the lighting supply story, so I purchased a roll of blackwrap -- the manufacturer calls it Cinefoil -- and cut out the shapes I needed with an Xacto knife.

All in all, there is a lot less flexibility in the plot than I would like. I didn't have the sheer power to allow me to change intensities or bump at the end of songs. I didn't have the color choices to make different looks through the longer musical numbers (about all I could do was dial up different colors on the cyc). But I did manage to achieve good coverage and modeling that felt "right" for the environments I was describing, that gave some sense of evolving and changing through the changes of the story, and that provided some contrasts. And there was just enough left for a few "special" moments here and there.

Imperial Highway IV

The first four segments are done.

I'm not happy with the engineering. Basically, I had no real sense of the shape and how it would work (as in, how best to hook them together, how best to be self-supporting, how to mold, whether they would be stackable) until I'd built the masters, and at that point I was loathe to take the time to strike off in new directions.

Which means what I ended up with is casting the side pieces with a supporting ledge, and with both that ledge and the deck pieces having holes sized for the smallest readily available (aka could be bought by the packet at my local hardware store) supermagnet.

The ledge didn't mold well, and the material of the master wasn't well-suited for holes, so the magnets don't fit that well. And they sort of stick out, too. Which along with the ledge makes the things stack quite badly. And superglue is not as strong as supermagnet; it is unfortunately easy to tear a magnet out when dissembling a road segment.

I'm still not sure which alternatives would be strong enough to support themselves safely enough to permit figure miniatures to be placed on top. I think based on my Holocron experiments that snap-fit acrylic might be stable enough. It would be even better if I could design some simple bracing scheme. And I have a feeling I could come up with a way to transfer the detailed texture of the master to vacuum-formed shells that could then be glued to acrylic backing.

If someone asked for a lot more of these things, I'd definitely experiment. As it was, I made about two dozen casting attempts over most of a week just to achieve four complete sets. And painting, as crude as it was, took another three or four days.

When I have some fresh casting compound I'll try to run off a couple more. I'm also still planning to try to make both an access ramp and a tower, both of which it is my intention to make a simple shell mold and slush-cast (the poor man's roto-cast) in one piece. No more fumbling with magnets. Might also desire some of the pillar elements which are used in conjunction -- these I am assuming I can model and 3d-print easier than anything else (although possibly cast instead of wasting the print time making more than one).


Yeah; basically, the lesson of the raygun strikes home; I would have done better making a full CAD aka 3d model first. And possibly printed the master. Pity it seems so difficult to transfer out from CAD to a good EPS file for laser cutting. Working it out in 3d allows you to visualize, and get all the dimensions, and makes it a lot easier to make changes as your design evolves. It does take longer to start with, but the time-savings only get larger as you get further and further into the design and build cycle.

Dreamgirls III

Okay, the progress report would really be that this was the System Design phase. I read up on the manual for the sound board (Allen & Heath digital mix surface and two digital "snakes") and worked out potential system delay chains on paper for the idea of providing a coherent sound to the audience without a compromised monitor sound for pit orchestra and stage singers.

I also spent quite a while with emails and phone calls back and forth trying to arrange delivery of the key gear to the theater and schedule of when we would load in, when we'd tech, etc.

This went very frustratingly, with a lot of unclear "We might get to it sometime on Saturday but we might not have the speakers in the truck" replies. And my own car blew a water pump, and the radiator repair I'd just completed wiped out any funds I might rent a car from. And then I got a dental emergency that still has me in enough pain that long trips with or without a car are not worth contemplating (or 12-hour technical rehearsals, either.)

So I bailed. I waited for them to find someone, and they were actually able to, and we cut the gig there. My only remaining connection to the show is I will be lending free of charge my personal rack of wireless microphones.

And that concludes this attempt to document the complete design sequence of a show.

Dreamgirls II

This would normally be the time when I'd make a speaker plot, channel plot, and mic plot, meet with the director, and start creating sound cues. It is also the time when we'd have a Designer's Run-Through; a full-length rehearsal specifically so designers can get a sense of the whole flow of the show (really, really important for the Lighting Designer).

Not this show. It is more like a concert than a show, being practically through-composed. There may be one sound effect. A little vinyl record sound. Feh. I'll dial that up in Vinyl.vst during rehearsal if it turns out to be needed.

And there was no Designer Run. Heck...Sitzprobe isn't happening until the start of Tech Week (and we don't even get the drummer then(?!)) So there's not a lot the designer can see/hear before we are actually in tech. There was one Production Meeting but I managed to miss it. So I'm pretty much approaching this like it was a music performance; set out the mics in a day, and dial them in over sound check.

So of course the producer called me this morning demanding to know why I wasn't in the space "getting ready" today. Well, it could be because we're renting the gear and it doesn't show up until next weekend. But the deeper answer is that physical set-up is a very small part of my task.

Sure, I would get a lot out of being in rehearsal every day, learning the songs as well as the cast knows them, learning all the faces of the cast, and for that matter learning who sings where (I have a scene breakdown, but it doesn't say a single word about who is actually singing in each scene -- particularly a critical omission in terms of off-stage singers and vocal announcements). But that's a whole lot of hours, especially with a two hour commute each way. So I'm even less ashamed than usual to not be doing that.

(That too, and the last company I worked at, when you added up time doing plots and paperwork, time spent creating cues, time spent loading in and in repairs, and time spent during the actual run, my effective pay dropped down under $8 an hour. Adding tens of hours of rehearsal to that would be financial suicide).

I'm not saying I'm doing nothing. I am listening to the Broadway cast recording over and over, I am re-reading the script, I am roughing out a mic plot, and I am reading manuals on the unfamiliar gear I'll be working with. And doing a lot of emails and phone calls working out consumables, security, schedules, inventory, etc.

I'd say about 50% of this job happens before opening night, with the rest of the significant labor being nightly prepping, ongoing repairs, and the actual struggle to mix the show.  But of that 50%, only 10% is actually in the space. Pushing gear around is easy (or should be -- I have almost never had "helpers" competent enough to run cable to a mic). The tough part and the time consuming part is brainstorming it all out, problem-solving the audio issues and figuring out how to stretch channels and other inventory, and crawling through lots of poor documentation from rehearsals to try to figure out what will actually be happening on stage (most of which, they'll change during Tech Week anyhow).

Like a lot of this business, the visible work is the smaller part of it. And that causes other people to get wildly wrong understandings about just what it takes.

Dreamgirls I

I'm going to try again to document the entire design and production process of a show as an aid to others. I don't know how many shows I will be doing now that I'm working a full-time day job; this one is grandfathered in, as I accepted the new job under the assurance that I would be taking time off to honor that previous contract.

I've been slow starting this one. It is a new company and a new space and my time is limited so basically I'm going to play it by ear and make it all work during Tech Week. This wouldn't of course work if there were complex effects that needed to be created.

So what have I done? Read the script. Started watching the show on YouTube -- not always the best approach, as you want to be attuned to the unique production not copying what someone else did, but sometimes necessary if for nothing else than to get a feel for how the thing flows. Communicated with Director and Music Director and asked a few questions.

Saturday I made a site visit; met people, showed my face, inventoried equipment, looked at and listened to the space. Which is very challenging; the geometry there is not friendly and my assets are not generous. Not sure how I'm going to set up speakers that will actually work.

There's a fair bit of work to do before Tech Week. Some unfamiliar gear and I'll be reading a lot of manuals. Look at the cast breakdown and see if I can chart some of the microphone use and otherwise start marking up my script. Make a rough channel plan.

And oh yeah -- I've got two weeks to either repair my car enough to handle the long commute down south, or to come up with the bucks to rent one for at least tech week.

Raygun Postmortem

So what have I learned from this project? How did it go, overall?

In overview, the original commission was much simpler. I talked the client up to more than I should have asked them for, and brought it into new methods which I knew going in were untested. What I hadn't anticipated or evaluated properly is the constraints of grinding poverty through critical parts of the build; being unable to afford components or tools and having to spend weeks at a time unable to work on the project (either waiting on parts, waiting on money to get those parts, or working to earn that money).

Another Improvised Setup

Seems like a lot of theaters are asking for "A Sound Tech." I had one recently who asked for "A Light Board Operator," which was even more specific but just as wrong.

In the latter case, I got there only to find out I'd be setting the looks. Which is to say; I was the Lighting Designer on that show. Of course not getting the pay -- or the respect -- for designing the show, even if "designing" was constrained due to having to work within a Rep Plot.

Board Op is a trained monkey job. Literally; Ham the Space Chimp could handle sitting in a room with a headset on, pressing a single button over and over when told to.

Designing a show requires not just the expectations of being worth more or the mental preparation of having to do more than sit around doing crossword puzzles between cues, it requires being prepared. Packing a gear bag with such things as gel books and note paper, but also having the mental gear bag packed with the theater's inventory, manuals of the equipment, and oh yes, you probably should have read the script. Several times.

This is also true for sound.

Thing is, most of these groups just don't get it. They really think they can walk in, "plug a mic in" (because there must be a place to "plug mics in," right?) and then tell the tech (over headset!) how far to turn it up. Half the time, in these budget spaces, the gear is incomplete or broken anyway, and almost all the time it is so non-standard you are having to play archaeologist to figure out how it works.

Indeed. This latest gig, half the equipment was in storage and almost nothing was documented. With help from someone who did sound there last year I got it all set up and working. It sounded horrible. And fortunately I'd packed as Sound Engineer. Pack just full of cable testers, spare cable, adaptors, etc., etc. Even an RTA microphone. And, pretty much, everything else I could spare that wasn't being rented that same week to a graduation exercise across town.

So I got the system basically up, minimally acceptable, and hooked up the show needs as described. And with thirty minutes to go to rehearsal...the client finally found time to come back and tell me what they needed. Which was of course not what was on the paperwork, nor what the gear was set up for, or even what the gear supported.

For instance, they demanded an FOH position. I agreed, in principle...but the building wouldn't let us move the board. Fortunately (!) I just so happened to have anticipated something like this and had a Behringer baby board in my bags, along with an audio snake and a handful of turn-arounds.

Two shotguns. Four hand-helds. CD playback. And I had a Xenyx1002 with two mic preamps and 4 stereo ins. So right. Barely enough; use the stereo ins in mono mode -- fortunately the handhelds are Shure UR2's that can output at line level. Run the "CD" (rather, QLab on my laptop) direct, bypassing the board completely. The one single Aux bus sent up as monitor feed.

Ten minutes to go, and the client ambles back again and says, "So we need a lot of reverb for these dream moments we have." Err, right. The baby Behringer has internal FX but plugging into the Aux bypasses it. So...split the feed, with Left Main being "dry" and Right Main adding an arbitrary amount of monitor to the signal. So now I can control monitor level by panning my now mono output, and the FX bus is free. And the computer bypasses the Behringer so the backing tracks are still in stereo.

And, yes -- instead of the nice Allen&Heath I'm stuck with the ludicrous EQ options of the Xenyx, with no EQ at all on the handhelds. And no compression options either. Which could have been death. Fortunately, when we got into tech, it turned out the kind of vocal performance was okay with that. If they had been doing American Idol vocal stylings it would be impossible. But for relatively controlled spoken word it is working okay without any of the usual vocal conditioning tools.

So of course after rehearsal they drop a mention in a passing email that I need to come up with another stereo feed for the videographer.

Because all of these is nothing. You don't need any skill, you don't need to spend hours studying the manuals of weird vintage gear, and you certainly don't need to hump a pack of $2,000 of personal audio gear around on BART.

All you have to do is "plug in a mic" and then press a button when ordered to over headset. Ham the Space Chimp could do it easily. And you'd pay him in bananas.

Fusion Cooking

So I'm officially behind on the Raygun. My target was to start cutting metal this week. Work showed up instead, good work -- did one morning gig hanging lights (actually, spent most of the time driving the scissor lift around) for a clean $100 in cash.

From the money from the most recent grenade order I dropped fifty on a new tool holder from Grizzly. It looks good, all solid (and very oily!) metal, but I've experienced some unusually soft steel before. Such as the bench vise I got from OSH that has disabused me from ever buying a vise from that store again.

But even taking all this into account the CAD is going terribly slow. Part of that is learning the software. The greater part is having to solve so many design issues. Metal is a bit unforgiving. I can make a few adjustments for poor fit-up or other errors, but it is slow work correcting mistakes made in metal. Metal is hard, slow to shape and requiring power tools to do so. And expensive. I really need to anticipate as many issues as possible and solve them before I start cutting metal.



It is engineering. It is a balancing act. Trying to balance aesthetics, strength, and manufacturability. Out of the many things you have to do to engineer something properly is to compensate for various sources of error. You design in steps that will catch and correct (such as my current M40 lathing scheme, which holds 4/1000 in reserve for a finishing pass; this picks up and corrects various places where tools like the knurl or the parting tool deform the grenade, throwing up ridges of excess metal behind them).

A subtler one is how I run a de-burr tool around the edge of the hole before inserting the button; this produces an expansion space for the metal to flow into when I crush the plug in with the press. In previous grenades, this edge was forced into the button pin, pinching it.

The other major tool in dealing with the inevitable errors in measurement, tool wobble, manufacturing variance, etc., is to not design around perfection in the first place. I really had this demonstrated for me during discussions of the Apollo Program and the absurd suggestion that "the landings" were faked in a film studio. One of the claims the believers in a hoax make is that the necessary positional accuracy of the original launch is impossible to achieve. The slightest fraction of a degree off at launch, they argue, and the spacecraft would be multiple kilometers off target by the time it reaches the Moon.

Which is why the NASA engineers -- like any engineers -- did no such thing. They simply pointed the spacecraft "good enough" to get within the circle of error of the next designed-in correction stage. One equivalent in design for assembly is you use a slot or an over-sized hole on the upper piece, so the bolt will still go in and hold everything properly even if there is some slop in machining or alignment. You don't design so the holes must be perfectly aligned...unless there are other design goals requiring it.

But this has to be of course designed in. Even at the simplest level, design for manufacture means you have to solve endless "duck, wolf, bag of grain" problems, where part C is bolted over the bolt holding part A to part B -- fixing the assembly order and making it impossible to place bolt holes for C on the inside of A.

My raygun nozzle is currently there. The reflector dish is CNC'd out of plate stock, top and bottom pass (which themselves brings up the question of how good my alignment will be). On the final pass I'll machine a hole all the way through, and push a lathed spindle through that. The acrylic nozzle goes inside that spindle and all the way into the gun to reach the Cree that illuminates it, and ends up supporting the front assembly.

After working on it off and on for over a week, and covering several pages of graph paper with mechanical sketches, I've figured out the connections and assembly order. The spindle is one-way (it has a lip) and will have a tapped hole in the side behind the dish which holds a screw pressing into the acrylic. The dish is pushed against the spindle from the other side by the pressure of the 3d-printed insulator rings -- which also are floating freely on the rod -- and the whole Dagwood Sandwich is pinned together by a second screw at the gun end. Which, since the front end of the gun tapers, is on the outside of the shell, and since the insulator rings are there, is accessed for tightening by a hole in the insulator rings that you can fit an allen key through.

There are a lot of alternatives I had to reject, and a lot of secondary considerations. Could machine the spindle as part of the dish but it would look better lathed. And take a lot more metal to machine from a single block of material. The dish can't be lathed (wrong kind of curves) but it can be lathe-polished. Which means the assembly is designed so I can put both parts together and chuck that in the lathe before removing a metal central rod and putting the acrylic in. In addition, any error in the length of any of these parts is adjusted for at the gun end, where the final retainer is.

And, yes, the acrylic is a failure point. But if I added metal -- well, extending the spindle to the gun is possible but the thickness is determined by the aesthetics at the nozzle end, and still creates a potential weak point. Inserting a stainless steel tube strengthens it, but requires the acrylic nozzle have a step to cover the diameter change, and that becomes the point of failure. This way, replacing the nozzle in case of breakage is less onerous, and I'll simply have to put up with the fact that the reflector dish provides a good lever to put stress on it.

(And, yes, I could switch to polycarb, but it is tougher to machine and although stronger, more likely to leave dangerous edges when it fails under stress.)



I've more-or-less solved the front assembly, how the handle fits together, the fin assembly, the trigger guard. But I still have to finish designing the trigger assembly, the access plate/removeable power cell that will allow uncoiling the USB cable to recharge the internal LiPo, how to get the LED wired into the fin...and I haven't even touched the side panels with their switch, indicator lights, and swoosh.

And very few of these assembly details are reflected in the CAD as of yet -- which I fully expect is going to reveal other potential problems in fit-up and assembly, as well as mechanical weaknesses and structures which are un-machinable as they stand. (I'm not about to get into 4-axis CNC at this point, so I basically have to make shapes that can be attacked from two sides at a maximum, plus traditional machining -- milling and drilling -- at off-axis to these. And, yes; every threaded hole I add is a manual operation; hand-tapping.)



Oh and yeah. My cheap eats these days is a three-day curry; 1 "can" Coconut Milk (I like the "school-lunch milk" boxes from Kara; very rich and fatty), red curry paste (May Ploy brand; comes in a tub like miso paste), tofu and veggies to suit (I get locally-made extra-firm tofu sold bulk-style at Berkeley Bowl). Often Dynasty sliced water chestnuts, cut baby corn -- but I've also used carrots, broccoli florets, canned bamboo shoots, and fresh snow peas. Plus a can of Albacore tuna if I can afford it. Makes three servings...I brew up 1-2 cups of jasmine rice in the rice cooker and re-heat the curry for a meal. Goes nice with a rooibos chai (also bought in the bulk produce section).

A depressing lack of progress

The second attempt at an acrylic cast for the eyepieces was better, but still not clear enough. I don't know enough of what went wrong to know what to change, so I just went ahead with a third cast. At least the second mold is holding together well.

I chickened out on dropping forty bucks on a proper tubing bender...and destroyed ten bucks of tubing trying to get a smooth bend without.

The laser-cut side pieces for the mask sort of worked. I did have one clever moment; I cut the final set of paper templates out of graph paper, and by setting a grid in InkScape at the same spacing, I could do a point-by-point translation of the shape into software for the laser. Bending turned out to be a huge pain, although it did work. Except for one bend, which snapped and I had to fill it.

Plus, I decided the lumps and cracks on the PETG from the damaged buck were not really acceptable, so I used filler primer and Bondo spot putty to try to clean up the shape a little. And the primer crackled up when sprayed over the Krylon Fusion for Plastic undercoat. Sigh.

I start each day thinking there's so little left I should be able to finish before sunset. And that's been going on for a week now. Depressing the difference between what I think I should be able to accomplish, and what I actually accomplish.

And in the above, my estimation of what will work is obviously also off. I mean; I expect not everything to work. That is a given. But my expectation is towards a certain percentage of things working the first time, and that percentage has not born out at all recently.

Really, those, these are both facets of a basic problem. See if I can put it simply. If I can do something, I undervalue it. Things I know I can do (or think I can do) I don't give myself a lot of credit for, or ask enough money for, or allow enough time for. If I can do them, then they are too simple, too trivial for much excitement.

I reserve that for the things I can't do yet. Which, of course, as soon as I successfully do one (even in the most limited fashion) become translated instantly to the space of "things I already do." Lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, at least the holocron is moving forward again. I have some hope the Academy will actually order a few before the month is out. Not that I have made much of a breakthrough in the designs I mean to put up at the RPF. There, I am still caught on basically that same dilemma; the shapes I know how to realize, I don't feel are worth doing. The shapes that interest me are the ones that remain an unsolved challenge. And so it goes.

Lighting Lamps

This has been a challenging and sobering time for lighting.

I'm about to go into tech on a micro-budget show, and I've been up for four hours wrestling with drivers before I finally got the dimmer pack to talk to my laptop. Not fun. I did a lot of calling around and pulling favors and so forth, and I've managed to rent a pair of Elation 4x dimmer packs and several lighting instruments to go with them. The sole lighting equipment the company owns is an Enttec DMX512 interface.

Enttec is a good company. A lot of companies would chose to make their hardware proprietary and closed-doc and force you to use only their software. Not only does this company allow third parties to use their hardware, they also understand and accept that companies move on and they are making sure to make the hardware documented enough so it can still be used even when that line has been discontinued.

One wishes Apple would act that way sometimes. Instead of pretending that no other Mac existed prior to the one they are selling now (so much does Apple have this attitude, they make it difficult to even figure out if the model you have is actually different from the model they sell...little details like model number are made purposely obscure.)

Anyhow. There was a very nice project known as QLC, which forked and stuck around a little at SourceForge as QLC+. It is a Max/MSP flavored free-form open source lighting controller.

Apple's craziness with how they support FTDI drivers nearly did me in, but finally through either doing a manual uninstall (typing sudo stuff down at the UNIX core -- always a scary business) or running a nice little helper ap created by one of the Enttec programmers I finally got DMX flowing through the box.

What's also nice is the forensics are clear. Not just what failed, but how it passed the pre-test. Well before the dimmers arrived, I plugged in the interface to see if the software would see it. The software recognized it was connected to hardware and displayed the correct hardware name. I didn't see an issue until I (fortunately!) took the dimmer home with me last night in order to confirm it responded to the upstream hardware. Good thing I forgot my USB cable, eh? Otherwise I would have been at the theater all night struggling with it, instead of home where I have wifi and could look for help.

So what happened? Simple. Hardware name is in the basic USB stack. And the lighting software was only using that as a hardware check (it wasn't actually looking for through data.) The DMX functionality, however, has to pass through the FTDI drivers. And that's why the interface recognized and displayed okay but there was no DMX passing through it.




This is going to be a tough show on my computer. I'll be running video through QLab (or possibly just VLC), sound effects through QLab (likely triggered via MIDI so I don't have to lose focus from the lighting console), and of course lighting. Which meant I also had to juggle video cables, finally finding a mini-DVI to VGA adaptor (for far too much money) after being confused by both the existing DVI connector I had and the mini Firewire connectors I'd also purchased recently. Stupid Apple and their ever-changing connector types!

And what is the lighting? Turns out the lights that came with the rental package are a pair of Source-4's -- in 19 degrees. Oops. I think I can still use them as a long raking side light. Then there's two Source-4 PARS: thankfully with all the lenses still in the box, so with WFLs in them I should be able to get a decent backlight. That leaves two generic 6x9's I picked up at another place (and have to put Edison plugs on, still). And my own little 6" fresnel. With no better choices, those will have to do for all of my front light.

It is a very strangely-shaped space, with pillars in the way, and it is going to be pretty ugly no matter what I do. I do wish I'd managed to score the smart light I was asking for (a Studio Spot 250). Unfortunately, that fell afoul of politics. The theater that owns it would be happy to loan it to us, but the theater that currently has it upstairs and unused in their loft doesn't want to let it leave the building.

I did manage to hoosier another company around to loaning a scroller or two, but backed off when I realized I didn't have any five-pin DMX to spare. I also tried to talk them into letting me have one of their broken ones so I could see if I could repair it. I'll try that negotiation again another time.




One of the eye-openers in QLC+ is seeing just how many automated fixtures, color changers, LEDs, and so forth there are, and how much more evolved the software control of these has gotten since the old 2-scene preset days. But this was already underlined for me; I worked two lighting calls over the weekend, and both spaces had ETC Ions and wireless RFUs (both running on what looked to be Apple products). Even the RFU was confusing to me; it presented lights not just in dimmers and channels but in groups as well, and multiple universes were visible in a way that makes it obvious that multiple universes are expected as part of a standard plot.

I got to talking to one of the techs at the second house. Since I last designed sound there, they upgraded the sound board -- and added full digital snakes on Cat-5 to backstage and the pit. Plus finally installed the new speakers they'd been holding on to when my company was in there. I didn't see a hot controller for them, not even a Galileo (or, pasta forbid, a Drive Rack). But according to the tech they had gone for a full Dante system so maybe that was the controller. It looks like a hot system now, and I wish I was designing shows on it now. With, however, the budget to get some decent microphones!

(This was the company where I was babying a grab-bag of aging body mics, down to such horrible things as old Telex's -- built like a tank with a steel frame, and using a 9V battery -- and even a trio of Sampsons. Oddly enough, the least trustworthy of all these mics was the more recent and expensive Shure SLX. Shure? Unsure! And I'm not talking the T4f pulling out; we had solutions for that. I'm talking multiple RF issues.)

Raygun XII

Basic shape is in CAD now:

I used a picture of the rough model as reference, adjusted a few details in the direction of a sketch I showed the client...then after building most of it, went back and tweaked again.

I'd made the body a little fatter than the mock-up (as well as leaning the "bulge" forward towards the barrel more) but after I'd placed everything else it was just too much. So I re-scaled. Rather; deleted one half, scaled the remainder, re-aligned it along the drawing planes, and mirrored it. If you are careful, there's a lot of elements in the "stack" of operations in Fusion 360 that remain parametric quite late into the modeling process.

I'd like to try making the rings a little bigger, also the "sight" a little smaller. On the latter, though, it is just barely large enough to contain a 5mm LED.




In any case, the current task is figuring out how it will all assemble. I'm half-tempted to smooth the fins and grip into the body with nice gussets, but that would mean one massive machining pass for each side, and a larger billet. So it seems most sensible to break it into body, fin, handle, trigger guard, reflector dish, nozzle rings, front nozzle escutcheon.

In fact, I am thinking the escutcheon may be lathed out manually. And also possibly do the same for the "sight"; that would make a cleaner shape, and more importantly, save a lot of time in CNC machining. Plus, then, the fin might be made in a single piece instead of fitting two pieces together.

So this takes me deep into what they call "Design for Manufacture" (which includes as a subset "Design for Assembly.") Fortunately, again, I have a couple decades of theatrical scenery and props behind me in figuring out what order things have to happen in order to be able to reach the bolts for one part that will be later hidden by another part.

It doesn't make it easy, though. Especially in a basically new material and process. I have to keep in mind as I go the likely tolerances of the various processes -- high on the list, how well I'll be able to align the billet for top and bottom machining steps.




Plan that looks best is that most of the parts bolt into the main body; the fin, handle, and trigger guard can all have tabs that slot into the main body then are bolted into holes tapped in the main body. If I was more sure of my fit-up I would just use tabs and close fit, but I'm not and I don't want parts to wobble. The main body then slips together with a locking tab at the back (which will have to be manually milled) then a couple of bolts in front; these get hidden by the donut assembly, and that in turn gets held on by tightening the nozzle escutcheon down on a set of threads.

Already I have two problems with this scheme; getting a tight enough join at the rear, and the fact that the escutcheon doesn't have wrench flats...plus is hard to access due to being inset in the reflector dish.

The scheme I'm toying with for the "sight" is to lathe that separately, and have a tab from the fin go into a milled slot, where it will be retained by a threaded pin driven from one end of the sight. But this gets a lot more complicated with the LED and the turned acrylic "nose" (the part that gets illuminated) having to somehow be attached. At least for those, glue should be sufficient (and well allow access later if necessary -- an important part of any assembly plan).