A Flicker of Light

"Birds" is closed. Here's what I learned about remote lighting effects:

This is one of the effects modules. Off-the-shelf, no custom PCB, and all purchased at Adafruit:

Feather MO/RFM69 board: Arduino-compatible with an ARM Cortex processor, hosting a 900mHz packet radio (as well as power regulation, LiPo charge management, and native USB capability)

NeoPixel Jewel; seven 5050 RGBW LEDs with internal controllers so the whole thing can be run from a single data line.

And a 3xAAA battery pack with switch and "JST" connector.

These are two of the "lamps" -- rather, incense holders. After fumbling around with a couple different ideas for diffusion the final choice was surprisingly low-tech; I stuffed bubble wrap inside.

And this is the setting. A little neighborhood church, minimal lighting setup. The transmitter (all the RFM69 chips are transceivers) is wired to a matrixed keypad and, to get just a little more power, a proper antenna also sourced from Adafruit. That's one of our musicians down there; the actors were doing photos before the house opened.



Radio performance? Fine. This is the lower power version of the chip and I've verified free-air transmission of half a block. I did have problems with one of the units when it was inside a brass ball; on the final weekend I stuck the wire antenna outside the lamp and it worked flawlessly after that. I also found they dropped connection when the batteries got low.

Battery? I didn't try to program sleep mode on either CPU or radio. One unit I turned off between performances and it lasted part-way into the second weekend. Another I left on night and day and it made it through two performances. A self-test and battery monitoring (which is quite possible with the transceivers) would be a good idea moving forward.

Intensity? Not spectacular. I only had eight standard theatrical fixtures (500W range) in the show, and even with all of them on the illuminated diffusor was quite visible. But they were incapable of putting useful face light into the acting area, at least in this configuration. I'm coming around to 3-5W as the minimum for a practical lantern or flashlight prop.

Software? This was a thrown-together mess, using a combination of library examples and repurposed Holocron software.

The most successful "look" I had programmed was a flickering lamp (since these are warm-white RGBW's, green+red to get an amber and a little white to make it brighter). It is a surprisingly good flicker considering it's simplicity:

At the heart of the program is a little function that compares a target value with the old value (for each channel of the LEDs), then divides the result by a rate, giving a float value of the difference per program cycle.

Then it cycles through, again by the rate, adding or subtracting this float, arriving at a new float (aka a fractional value), and temporarily converting it to the nearing integer to send it to the LEDs.

This allows me to fade up, down, or cross-fade between static looks. It also allows animation; for that, at each completion it will fetch a new number. In the case of the lamp flicker, this number is a random(constrained) intensity and rate. So sometimes it will quickly make a small change, sometimes it will slowly make a large change, etc., etc. The result is surprisingly realistic.

    By the way. I gave the musician one of my old Arduinos to play around with.

Feathers of a Birds

I got talked into doing lights on "Conference of the Birds." And the way the timing worked out, hit just when BOTH a big project at work and a nasty cold did.

I wanted a remote controlled lighting effect and had no time...but you know, the existing Feather RFM69 board is pretty nice. USB native both for programming and HID/USB-MIDI devices. Hosted 915mHz (unlicensed band) packet radio with a hundred-meter free air range -- and ten bucks more gets you to LoRa radio chip that will get a couple kilometers with good antenna.

And went for another Adafruit product, a NeoPixel "Jewel" sporting a cluster of seven RGBW LEDs. These are those small form-factor LEDs with WS8212 chips included under the plastic so they handle stand-alone PWM, current limiting, and serial communication all by their lonesome. Even running two color channels full out, though, the full Jewel is a bit shy of the 350mA a single "1 watt" Cree will do. Still, since human perception is more-or-less power law, you'd have to throw at least 3 watts to notice an appreciable increase in brightness over what the Jewel can do.

Programming, however, has been slow. Not that it is easy to program through a sinus headache, anyhow.

First task was getting the Feather board to talk to the Arduino IDE. Patched the board definitions in no problem. Was a little slower picking the right board, as the literature wasn't always clear which was the 34u and which was the "MO" board. Exacerbated by the fact that there was in the current version some deep-buried call to a different library.

I finally figured it out by running the programmer in verbose mode and picking through the error logs, then searching archives to find the missing library.

Second task was getting the lights to light. There's an increasingly common problem with Arduino compatibles. The pin definitions in the IDE were written around the ATMega chips. When you translate to a different chip, and that different chip is on a different breakout board, you have chip pin, board pin, port number, and IO pin and they don't line up in any logical way with IDE pin. So there's a fair amount of trying out different pin numbers until the connected hardware finally responds.

And then there was testing the radios. Pretty much installed the library, loaded the demo sketches, and they seemed to run.



The next session was...slower.

I raided my parts box and I just don't have enough buttons. And Radio Shack is no more (with tech this weekend, Digikey was not an option). Fortunately I had an old matrix keypad lying around, and I found a library for it (I could roll my own software and it might have, as it ended up, taken less time).

Thing is, some of the pins are reserved for the RFM69 module, some for USB, plus some available IO pins lack the internal pull-up resistors. Meaning I was back to the soldering iron two or three times changing which pins I was using. And lots of commenting out lines and re-uploading software until I'd found what was causing it to lock up on me.

With that done, into the radio to try to get it to pass on the button ID. And that was a horrible hassle. I miss the XBee modules, even if you did have to roll out a special programer and speak AT code at them. I kept commenting out sections of code that shouldn't have done anything -- like serial print calls which just print status reports to screen -- and then finding the radio wouldn't run.

So it's a big cludge now for the radio stuff, and I really don't have time or patience to clean all that up. I still have yet to write the different "looks" I'll be switching to. Hopefully, though, I'll be able to cut and paste my own software from the Holocron and similar for that.

Brother, can you paradigm?

Dracula drained me.

First rehearsal at the actual space and I only went because we were going to use that time to figure out the basics of lighting and sound.

Lighting was software on a Mac. ETC "Eon Family." Which is a Mac port of a stand-alone application of the offline programming software for the Eon board. Which is at least one generation, perhaps two, past the last ETC board I was comfortable with.

So a lot of changed paradigms to deal with. First challenge; this is so much the now-accepted way of doing things, there's no introductory text to the software. There's no overview in the manual, no quick-start guide, no introductory tutorial (at least, none that aren't a three-hour training video). All the resources I was able to quickly Google up on my phone jumped right in. And as this was the latest version of a popular software offshoot of a popular board, pretty much everything I turned up was detailed lists of what had changed since the last version.

I had to figure out the underlying concepts sideways. With a fair amount of trial and error. Mac port of an offline version of a hardware board, remember? So OS GUI standards are absolutely no guide (so much so; when you invoke the "save file as..." command, it pops up a virtual keyboard you navigate with the arrow keys. No, this was not written for the computer. It was ported from hardware.

Thing is, lighting controllers -- all the lighting controllers I grew up with and used through the years -- were at the bottom of it all riffs on the paradigm of the two-scene preset. Think of it this way; for each light/control channel you had a knob. Set each knob to a different value to achieve a particular blend of lights.

Now make an exact copy of that row of knobs and add an A/B switch to switch from one set of knobs to the other. Actually, a pair of knobs, one reversed from the other; turn them one way to turn all the settings from one set of knobs all the way down and all the settings from the other set of knobs all the way up. Reverse for the opposite effect.

This was effective enough and fast enough. On the old manual boards (such as at my high school) one "scene" (one set of knob settings) would be on stage while someone quickly twisted the offline set of knobs into the next desired look. Cross-fade (as the process was called) from A to B and now A is offline and can be programmed for the upcoming look.

Boards evolved from direct physical control via rheostats to electronically controlled dimmers with the knobs -- that is, faders -- now operating on a 0-10 volt control voltage, to digital controls; at which point, all the settings could now be stored in RAM and read out with software.

But through all of this, the A/B paradigm, the so-called "Two Scene Preset," was maintained as a useful way to organize the data.

ETC began to change this back at least with the Express and Expression consoles. Since the desired position of the actual dimmers -- the big triac choppers delivering power to the actual lights -- had long since been decoupled from any direct physical control, the first big shift in paradigm is to think of a "scene" not as a collection of absolute values, but as a set of changes to whatever was the current status.

This was already a de-facto way of viewing the data, as even back in ProStar the console went out of its way to indicate which values had changed, with the values being continued from a previous cue being left in the original color.

ETC implicitly (as I read when I eventually found a more useful manual) converted to looking at all commands to the dimmer packs as being changes. Like an engine room telegraph, the dimmers (as indeed so all the new arsenal of digital fixtures, from LED pars to moving-head lights) will in the absence of new commands maintain the last directive.

Well, that's enough on that particular change. Suffice to say there are other old models which have also gone the way of the dial tone (cell phones have no need and no place for that). The only vestige still there is that the Eon series still has the default characteristic of bringing the previous commands OUT simultaneous to bringing the new commands IN.

(Another major uncoupling from the old two-scene preset paradigm is that "analog dimmers" -- aka devices that put out a varying and significant wattage that is generally poured into a variety of incandescent bulbs -- is a smaller and smaller part of what is connected to the console. Most of the light is coming from various digital fixtures, which require only digital information and which almost without exception use multiple channels of information. The analog dimmers still have a one-to-one correspondence -- or, rather, can -- but as a single LED par uses at least three control channels they are organized instead into "fixtures." The latest crop of ETC boards no longer pretend that a channel can be mapped directly to a circuit, with the rare exception of the analog dimmers, which are treated as a special case. Basically, analog dimmers are fixtures that only have one channel each.)




In any case, it wasn't the stress or the mental exercise, both of which I found invigorating. The mystery illness is back again, pretty much on schedule, and I've been barely dragging to work this week. (Work hours are still not helped by having to put in long unpaid lunches to work on my friend's project).

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!")

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.

Blackout : the 4'33" of lighting design

Most plays are presented as if they take place in several different physical settings and over a span of time longer than that which the audience has actually been sitting in their seats. The last line of Act I, scene 3 is said, and the first line of Act I, scene 4 is spoken by a different person, in the following Summer, in a different part of the forest.

The solution too many Directors reach for to cover while the actors change places, the furniture is moved, set pieces are shifted, etc., is to turn off the lights and then turn them back on when everything is ready.

I would swear that some Directors actually believe this is like making a cut in a film. The lights go out, then come back on and magically we are somewhere else.

Reality is that there is no such thing as a blank, a void. You don't present "nothing" by turning out the lights. You present something different. Usually (and especially in the smaller, less professionally-experienced theaters) what you get is several long minutes of shadowy figures visibly fumbling around in the blackness, cursing quietly as they try to find their spike marks.

John Cage's point was that the "silence" of a concert hall was filled with the sounds of rustling paper, air conditioning, coughing, shuffling feet. And to him this was on equal musical footing with a piano concerto. Perhaps. What is certain is that the activity of scene change has a specific character -- and it may not be in keeping with the character of the play.

The more charitable interpretation of what is expected to take place in the minds of the audience during a theatrical blackout is that it is akin to a commercial on radio or television. The audience skips over it, edits it out of the experience of the play in the same way they don't include intermission as part of the world of the play.

I still find it distracting. Watching a scene change, especially a difficult scene change, takes me out of the play. Intermission only happens once, and it happens at a dramatic point that practically demands you sit back and take stock of the situation before heading back into the action. Scene changes break the flow. A slightly better argument is that scene changes, like the velvet seats and the proscenium arch and so forth are part of the total experience of live theater. One watches certain shows (Phantom comes to mind) for the moments of "How did they do that?"

But other shows -- many, many shows -- the Directorial intent is to distract as little as possible. To keep the audience immersed in the story and the world of the play. And I have to say to these Directors -- I have said, and more than once -- that a blackout fails to accomplish this.

Because especially when you've got an awkward set and less-skilled crew people, the actual experience of a blackout is the discomfort of watching dimly-lit people struggling. 

Better, in my opinion, to light it. Put enough light on it -- I like the term "Change Blues" because Directors get what I'm after almost immediately -- so the crew can find their spikes and move with grace and surety instead of fumbling and trying to hide their flashlights. And take the time to work out the changes, to choreograph them a little.

And, depending on the show and the design, you may be able to do the change au vis. When we did Shrek not long ago we pushed the rolling units out in full lights. And more than that; I made sounds for them so a tower would grind on with a sound of stone against stone, and Shrek's house would pop up like a mushroom sprouting with squelching leafy noises.

This is, for some shows, going too far in the other direction. And I have no problem with a blackout if you can make the necessary changes in under thirty seconds and without a lot of noise. But otherwise: it is my strong opinion that you are going to see it anyway, so instead of pretending you are hiding it and achieving nothing but hazard for the crew, discomfort for the audience, and a less-than-stunning visual image, you should light it enough to make it pretty. And make the whole thing go faster and smoother so you can get on with the play.

The Internet of (Theater) Things

I was at Maker Faire this weekend, and like so many other parts of the inter-tubes it was all IOT, IOT, IOT. And I'm wondering if it is time to rethink the usual objection to using Wifi in a performance context.

The old assumptions were that wifi wasn't reliable enough for performance. But then, we used to assume computers weren't reliable enough. I have seen the pleasant glow of the Blue Screen of Death from a sound booth or two, but I ran into many, many more people over the years who insisted on using tape, cassettes, or (eventually) CD's for effects playback because they didn't trust that a computer wouldn't break on them.

Well, I think most people have moved past that. Computers have become the default for sound playback as well as video playback. Crashes still occur but they tend to get ironed out in Tech; the show-stopper failures I have personally observed have been due to the batteries running dry on a production laptop.

I've seen a slow movement towards acceptance of iPad links to sound boards. I remember when the Yamaha board was iffy at best, but now that Wifi link is considered reliable enough for use in the time-critical environment of Tech and Sound Check on a professional-level show.

(On the other side of the technology-adoption bell curve, I've personally run numerous productions with laptop and software tools due to not having the budget for rack-mount equipment. Sub-mixed drums for one musical on the laptop, and that worked well enough that on a later production I few all of the sound reinforcement through it, using freeware plug-ins within Reaper to achieve a graphic equalizer for the house speakers. My last show, I was running sound effects, projections, and even running lights from the one laptop. And I've seen a lot of this sort of exercise in similar improvised micro-budget shows.)

After all, some of the oldest documented theater technology was borrowed and adopted methods from Elizabethan-era sailors; rope rigging, counterweights, whistle codes. It's a natural path from there to modern techs using cell phones to communicate to back stage (instead of trying to come up with the money for the old-school hardwired headset systems). And a lot of people are using DAWs for sound manipulation or MIDI hosts for live keyboards, or (again on the other side of the technological bell curve) personal music players or similar software like iTunes for backing track and effects playback.

In fact, at some levels of theater it is considered ordinary and natural to plug an MP3 player into the sound board and hit one of those little fiddly buttons at the exact instant called for in the script. (Putting the sounds on the hard disk of a computer with sound playback software that was specifically written for performance use is the more reliable alternative now!)



Which brings us to a segue. Effects -- or more broadly, all the possibilities of both the established ideas of theatrical lighting properties and scenery, and the less widely accepted ideas of interactive technology -- are not exactly called for in the script. One even suspects that in the golden age of musicals and old chestnut standards, the Annie and the You Can't Take it With You, the writer brought the same awareness of what could be practically done with multiple settings in scenery and quick-changes in costumes to what could be achieved in the way of on-stage telephone calls and so forth.

Which is to say, most shows don't require really clever technology to get a sound or lighting effect to happen in the right spot. Between the way the script makes the timing of the effect non-critical, and the way the presentational aspect of the box set with the missing fourth wall et al makes playing a telephone sound out of a speaker appropriate and sufficient (or at least sufficiently appropriate), there isn't a need for something more elaborate.

At least, not there. When you get to more modern works, and better yet, to those experimental works that straddle worlds of dance, improvisation, performance art, et al, there are plenty of spaces to explore more complex interactions than "play back a sound effect at a specific moment in the dialogue."

Of course, these also tend to get worked out in development. Sometimes I have had a performer or a puppeteer or a musician or whatever come up to me and ask, "I'd like to have this happen when I do this; is it possible?" But mostly, a choreographer or a props person or someone sees something interesting that's already out there in the world, and the performance is designed around how that existing thing functions; designed to accommodate the existing advantages and the existing flaws.

(Specific case in point; in a production of Wizard of Oz we used light-up globes extensively. Each time these were brought out, there was specific choreography to allow each performer to turn their back to the audience and page through all the available colors in these off-the-shelf devices until they got to the desired effect for that moment in the show.)

So it seems to me that the process of using the kind of effect modern electronics makes possible starts from the Designer. Instead of problem-solving something that the rest of the design team would like to happen, you become the one to suggest an effect. Which means you are effectively working out of what already exists or is known to be possible, rather than working from something that wants to happen on stage and developing a solution to it.



For that reason among others, I'm not that interested in the experimental end -- in the kind of process that puts accelerometer-controlled LED strings on a dancer, or whatever. Because as I pointed out above, this is more a process of adoption than design. You more or less start with available consumer products, and you develop a way to use them over rehearsal.

My interest from pretty much when I started using electronics in theater (where the height of my technological output was sticking leaf switches around a motor-driven cam to create a hardware string light chaser), is to, well, I'd call it "sweetening."

Here's a conceptual framework from another industry. A movie is more-or-less filmed MOS. In the older days this was a technical necessity, these days it is an artistic choice. Dialog may be taken from the shoot, but the totality of the sound environment in the finished product is a created thing. This is for focus and nuance; the noise is stripped away, and the only sounds still there are those that tell the story -- and they are pushed, too, for artistic nuance and emotional effect.

And this process has already begun in theater. We can't pan, zoom, or cut; we don't have that control over what the play-goer watches. But we do control lighting and we build and even paint scenery to place the eyes and the attention where we want it and to make essential story-telling and emotional points.

And artificial sound has entered. Even in smaller spaces, even in opera, subtle reinforcement and other acoustic shaping is already taking place. In larger houses and in the musical dialog is already passed through processing to make it larger than life in the same way Hollywood takes the best the boom mics and hidden lapel mics can carry back from the live stage, marries those with ADR done in the studio, and presents the final honed and processed mix to the audience.

At the very simplest level, I think we can now have the sound issue naturally from an on-stage walkie-talkie or phonograph or bugle (or appear to), and we can have the light from a television or cell phone (or the lights of other items of technology) doing what seems natural for them to do. The history of technical theater is full of examples of sticking colored lights in empty TV cabinets and sticking speakers under chairs and otherwise producing these illusions. Well, we can do them better now -- even if that means just pushing actual video out through a length of VGA.

But at the more complex level, I think we can have a gunshot sound "right." I think we can have a sword fight with the exiting (and thoroughly fake) sword sounds of a movie. And more subtly, I think we can treat voices and footsteps so the actors sound like they are walking a marble hall instead of wooden platforming.




But many of these require wireless control. Props move. Actors move even more. Cheap wireless is one of the necessary parts to make it possible to bring this sort of realized environment, this sort of naturalistic (or hyper-naturalistic) stage environment. And it may be that Wifi and the IOT has reached a point of maturity where it can be trusted in a production context. And not just on experimental theater pieces with fourteen people in the audience, but in staid professional theaters where your equipment breakdown is seen not by mostly your own circle of friends, but by hundreds of people paying thirty-five bucks a seat.

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.

More Mini-Shows

Doing a school tour right now. We go around to different Bay Area K-12's; arrive at eight in the morning, unpack the van, do a one-hour performance at nine, pack it back in the van and out of there by 11 or so.

My sound set-up is minimal, considering I have wireless, floor mics, pre-recorded backing tracks, sound effects, special effects processing, foldback speakers, and we bring our own mains.

Yamaha MSR100's (self-powered 8" cabs pushing 100W ea) on 6' speaker stands for front of house. Jolly5a's (self-powered 5" wedges pushing 80W in a bi-amp configuration) as foldbacks from the edges of the apron facing back towards the actors. A pair of CAD CM217's (mini cardiod condensers) on the lip of the apron.

All that runs back towards a rolling rack via a 100' stage snake. At the rack I have a Behringer mixer (sigh) of which I'm leveraging the onboard effects for a cavern scene. And the rack-mount receivers for eight channels of wireless microphone (Sennheiser G3's, of course). Since I'm pushing channels on the poor Behringer I have an outboard pre-amp with phantom power for the two stage mics.

Backing tracks and effects are on laptop, coming in via a Behringer USB adaptor, and QLab is being triggered/controlled in performance by a Korg nano-key using the optional MIDI license from Figure 53.

The set-up will cover a house of 100+ children and 100' of depth but I'm very close to unity gain everywhere; the mic inputs are just barely seated in the on-board compressor, the output faders are a hair below unity, and the Yamaha inputs are turned all the way up (but Yahama inputs tend to run cold).




The lighting rig is also minimalist. Manual 16 channel board, two Elation 4x5A dimmer packs, each one feeding a fresnel with barn door set to flood most of the acting area, and a Source-4 with drop-in iris on a swivel mount, which is used as a follow-spot. Since the packs pull a maximum of 20 amps they can be plugged into ordinary wall outlets. In fact, with only four instruments (all lamped at 575W) and since I never have to open up my speakers, we can (and have) run the entire show on a single wall outlet, stringing daisy-chains of extension cords all over the cafetorium.

(A lot of schools have these; they are a large-ish rectangular hall with linoleum floor adjoining the school kitchen, outfitted with folding tables for the school lunch hour. One end has a raised area that is, oddly enough, often outfitted quite well for a small stage, with main rag, wing space, speakers and lights, even a fly system (although none of them actually have the height to fly scenery properly).

Topology and Gender

Opened a show Thursday. Started ten minutes late due to an electrical problem -- a problem I had seen coming but wasn't in a position to do more than try to correct after the fact. And that's made me think about the problem-solving toolkit. And further; it is possible this is a chicken-and-egg problem? Does the toolkit come out of domain knowledge, or can the toolkit be learned and applied by someone without that domain knowledge?

Right. Definitions first. When I have a microphone fail on stage, I have several problem-solving steps I can go through. I also have several prophylactic problem-solving steps that I try to do when setting up that microphone in the first place.

Simple example. This last show I strung cables for a house speaker and a foldback speaker across the front of the stage. Taped them down, then went to the stage snake. Potential problem here; which cable is which? They are under scenery and tape and can't be easily traced. Solution? A long time ago, I started putting ID bands on all my microphone cable. The cable to the foldback had "114" labeled on both ends. Problem solved.

A similar situation arises when I ran the cables from another speaker and a microphone (now, really, a smart tech labels all the cables with tape flags before running them, but even that is no panacea.) This was never a problem, however; the gender on each cable end is different, making it obvious which is which.

And this opens up into two of the most basic tools for keeping cabling from getting confused; gender and topology. In a sound system, particularly, most of your cabling has gender. Sound sources are male. Places where sound goes are female. With some exceptions, you can follow the arrow of male cable ends from the microphones on stage through all the snakes and mixers and processors and finally end up at a speaker.

Which means you know the purpose of any cable on the floor by the gender you see.

Topology is a similar and related problem-solving method (both prophylactic and after-the-fact.) MIDI cables, for instance, are a daisy-chain topology. You can string MIDI from one item to another, but they must go from an OUT (or THRU) to an IN. Follow the MIDI signal chain from the master (a keyboard, say), all the way out to the last slave (usually a sound module). Anything else is a mistake.

USB is a hub topology. You can never take USB out of a slave. It always starts with a host and goes to either a peripheral or a hub. And, yes; I've had musicians come up to me asking for a "USB A to USB A" cable. Nope. There can be only one (host). Everything else is in USB B, Micro, etc., etc.

Most people, I have found, run power to an orchestra pit by taking every object that needs to be plugged in and stretching it to whatever outlet is nearest. This means you have cords running every which way, and when the guitarist needs to move his amp over a foot to make room for the bass player the cord doesn't stretch and the only other outlet nearby is already filled up with music stand lights. And when someone trips on a cord in the dark things across the pit go mysteriously dead with no-one able to figure out where they need to plug in to get power back.

My method is to first determine the likely needs, then to provision outlet spaces; start from the smallest number of clearly defined sources of power, tape those cords down well, then break out in a star topology to power hubs placed in strategic parts of the pit. The thing is; you can always expand the star; plug an additional power strip into an existing power strip. And this means you always know where to look when the power fails to a trumpet player's stand light.




So what started this train of thought?

In this show, we have a blacklight effect. Several UV fluorescent strips are arrayed across the front edge of the stage. Their power cords are all gathered together into a power strip, which gets power from an extension cord which runs all the way back to the lighting table in the back of the auditorium. There, it is plugged into another power strip so that the switch on the strip can be used to toggle the effect on and off. The power for this strip comes from a nearby wall outlet.

I describe it this way because this was not in the minds of the people who were responsible for quickly loading in the show to make the morning performance. They weren't using a systemic understanding of the system, which meant they had no diagnostic toolkit to know when they were putting it together wrong -- or how to fix it with the audience already filing in and the show about to begin.

I've mentioned a previous workplace a couple of times. This was a place where magic spells were paramount. Instructions didn't just substitute for understanding; they trumped it. A case in point was when the institutional philosophy crashed into a simple light switch and was stumped by it.

There was a set of back-stage work lights, dim and blue so they didn't shine out and distract the audience during the show. One of the pre-show checks was to make sure these were turned on.

How did this institution train to achieve this goal? By substituting the goal of making sure the switch was turned on. They carefully labeled the switch (which sits, incidentally, right under one of the blue lights so that blue light clearly shines down on it when it is on), as to which direction it needed to be in.

Yes; the instruction had filtered itself to be not to turn on the lights, not even to turn on the switch, but to set the switch in the correct direction as per instruction.

And this actually worked okay (well, except for the frequent times someone read the checklist too fast and forgot to flip the switch, and the crew literally sat in the dark all show without thinking of mentioning it to anyone). But this just happened to be a two-way switch, with the other end of the switch down a rarely-used hallway.

And one day someone flipped the other switch to get the lights on.

Shock! Horror! The label is wrong now, and there is no way in heaven or hell to get the switch set to the right direction!

So they moved the label. This lasted until the (presumably) same helpful person flipped the hallway switch again.

Electricians were called about the mysterious broken switch. This was an emergency; they could not open the show without those backstage running lights, and there was no way to achieve backstage running lights if they couldn't tell which way the switch needed to be.

Eventually some kind soul explained about the two-way switch. Ah. Light dawns. Well, no. The other switch was firmly taped over with a big threatening notice to never, ever mess with it again. The label was restored on the remaining switch and it was back to business as usual. (Which is to say, forgetting to hit the switch and never, ever, ever thinking to look if the lights themselves were on.)



So my present theater company (aka the ones with the blacklight effect) haven't quite achieved this rabbit hole of mistaking the map for the territory. Their problem is more that that can't read a map and have never seen the territory.

There's this thing called theater sense. I don't know exactly how to put it, but it is a combination of knowing theater traditions, how things are usually done, and knowing exactly where you are. Theater sense tells you who to talk to when you have a costume problem. It also teaches you when to bring up a costume problem (or more importantly, when not.)

Our lighting volunteers are wonderful people but they don't have it. They aren't tuned to the flow of problem-solving going on between Director, Stage Manager, and other departments, and thus have no idea whether we are about to re-take a scene or are going on with the rehearsal. Heck; they don't seem to be able to figure out when we are actually doing a scene and when we aren't!

More apropos to this essay, however, is lack of any appropriate tool to figure out how the lights plug in. It seems to be a collection of fragments of instruction and bits of memory; the "boxes" need to have things in "1 and 3" and "the green cord" was one of the ones that comes from the lights.

Actually, I do have to give them credit. They correctly constructed the dimmer system, which requires that the Dimmer Packs get power (from a wall) and the Lighting Instruments then cascade down from the Dimmer Packs.

But the blacklight effect. When it was tested and failed, what we found was a power strip with three orange extension cords plugged into it and plugged in itself to another, all of them vanishing into a giant pile of twisted cords.

So, this is wrong at first glance; there's only one blacklight.

I took out my Chicken Stick and verified there was no power reaching the power strip itself. So, whatever it was plugged into was extraneous to the operation. I unplugged that.

Shock and horror. "That has to be plugged in; it's the cord going to the stage!"

Um, no. Not unless someone has been blatantly violating UL code on our extension cords. Remember gender? The stage is the lights. Whatever comes from stage will be male.

So I needed power to figure out which if any of the various male ends actually ran to the blacklights. Took the obviously superfluous extension cord and wriggled it out of the pile. It was far, far, under chairs, around lighting poles, back under more chairs.....until it plugged into the very same power strip it had purported to be powering.

Yeah. A perfect Ouroboros. Took that male end out of the power strip, plugged it into the wall, and the blacklights worked again. No need to figure out which was the real cord and which was another remaining error -- we needed to open the show.




But the question I started with is, how can we prevent this from happening? My method, as I showed above, is to have firmly fixed ideas of gender and topology. When I run cables, I have a sense of what each cable does and thus I am alerted immediately if something is wrong. If I'm hooking up a mic and I end up with a female XLR in my hands, I stop because I know I messed up somewhere and I need to fix it now rather than try to problem-solve it later.  (I always work backwards from stage end for exactly this reason. Also, it means I can dress the excess a the live end so if we have to move the mic, we can do so without having to pull up a bunch of tape).

But can this method -- can these kinds of methods -- be divorced from the body of domain knowledge I constructed them out of? Can you have a rule of thumb if you lack even the ability to define when it should be used -- and when it should not?

Are simplified models, arbitrary labels, "lies told to children" acceptable alternatives? Or are we going to require every volunteer we use to spend the necessary time in study to get enough grounding in the subject to where they can apply their own rules of thumb?

Myself, I can't imagine not wanting to learn. That was the biggest disconnect I had with the theater of the two-way light switch; for many of the people there, "Tell me the absolute minimum of what I need to complete this job" was their oft-stated desire. They literally rejected learning more.

In most other theaters, learning is embraced. But to people coming to the more technical end with essentially no technical background -- without even the ability to put the cords back on their home PC after dusting around it -- this appears as a monolithic, entirely daunting task. It is like someone asking if you'd like to learn to rock climb then dumping you at the foot of Half-Dome.

And I simply don't know.

Like moving stuff in an attic

In the past I've compared hanging lights in a theater to moving stuff around in an old attic. It is cramped, dusty, and hot.

After four days of lighting hang I think I can improve on the analogy. Lighting instruments range from 20 pounds up, but as bad as the weight is that they are awkward. They are weird shapes that are hard to get a good hold on, have lots of parts (and sharp edges) that stick out, and have a nasty habit of unfolding or swiveling on you as you are trying to move them. Lighting cable is similar; it is remarkably heavy, stiff, long, and just slippery enough that when you have half of it where you want it it will suddenly slip down the other side of the pipe and yank at you with the weight of forty, fifty pounds in sudden free-fall.

So it is like trying to store bicycles in a dusty attic.

Lots of bicycles. More than will comfortably fit. So when you are trying to carry a bicycle up the ladder and stuff it into the hatch, there are already a bunch of bicycles in the way. And if you aren't careful some of the older ones start to slip and move on you as you are trying to wriggle your way through them.

And the ladder to the attic is thirty feet tall and rickety as hell and there are no handrails.

And the bicycles are hot to the touch; parts of them hot enough to burn you!



It is hard to explain just how the geometry conspires in a theater to make the work exhausting. The places where you can stick a ladder or even a manlift are afterthoughts to the primary purpose of having lights where they need to be to paint the stage picture. So in the vast majority of cases, it isn't like going up one of those bookcase ladders with the book you want in front of you and in comfortable reach of your arm. Instead you have to twist around on the ladder like a yoga exercise and stretch out as far as you can and then shove twenty to forty pounds of metal against rusty fasteners to get it in the right direction.

Your arms are all at bad angles for trying to apply leverage, the focus target is usually behind your head where you can barely see out of the corner of your eye if you twist around uncomfortably, your knees and elbows are in the way, and because your feet are still on the ladder your whole body is twisted around painfully. And all of this conspires against your strong desire to keep at least one foot on the ladder which is saving you from a potentially fatal fall. In practical terms, you often end up with only the friction of your forearm against a piece of gouged-up metal somewhere keeping your body from sliding off the top of the ladder, only your fingertips supporting the full weight of the lighting instrument, and your non-dominant hand turned the wrong way to try to jam a wrench into position to force a rusted, damaged fastener to where it will take the malevolently swiveling load off your fingers.

Repeat this over and over. In the dark. In sweltering heat. Covered in dust. With live wires that sometimes give you nasty shocks and of course the aforementioned bits that are hot enough to burn you in a fraction of a second (one of the gobos I took out last night was orange-hot; glowing so hot you could see the light it was casting projected on to the stage through the optics.


The base rate for lighting technicians in the Bay Area is $15 an hour. Some theaters still offer $10.

Micro-Budget Show

I thought a detailed description of the setup for our micro-budget show might be of use to other technicians and designers who are having to make due on a bare minimum.

The place is a 1914 church turned neighborhood community center. The previous Lighting Designer had left 1" pipes and heavy-duty extension cords already routed into a selection of hanging positions.

We borrowed (for a nominal fee) seven instruments; two Source-4's with 19' lenses (which I frosted to open up), two Source-4 PARs, two 6x9's (so weak I ended up using them for back light) and my personal 6" fresnel as a center spot.

It's no use detailing the specifics as every space is different. It is enough to say I organized my tiny inventory into two acting areas US and DS, using the longer-throw instruments for US of course, crossing the beams for the largest coverage and gelling in that old combination Rosco 02 "Bastard Amber" and Rosco 53 pale lavender.

Same borrowing got us two "Elation" dimmer packs, here sitting on a chair and plugged into two different 15 amp breakers via more long extension cords to various outlets around the building.

That's part of the fun of doing shows in hotel lobbies and general-purpose rooms; identifying which of the rows of outlets are actually served by distinct breakers, so you don't end up plugging 50 amps of stuff into a single 15 amp service.

Chairs also did for the speakers -- used for sound effects playback, the music for several dances, and the sound on several videos we played. There was a lot of space up on the mezzanine level behind the audience, and the sound wasn't bad at all.

These are my terribly useful Jolly 5A's; tiny but powerful bi-amped powered speakers with an extra-wide patterns.

And of course one of the short plays also needed some projections. Because the booth is so high above the stage, I came up with this somewhat scary-looking contraption to hold the projector safely at the right angle.

You can also see the baby Behringer mixer that made it possible to plug in two different laptops for sound effects plus a third laptop downstairs during the movies...and not have to keep yanking live cables in and out of my poor speakers.

And here's the final booth; my laptop has no ports free, what with DMX512 interface, video connector, audio connector, and MIDI keyboard.

The second laptop only played back sound effects on one of the plays (the most complicated one for sound, and the one that included the video playback).

And here is all the controller information. Top is the QLC+ window, with a Virtual Light Board layout I created for the show.

Below is a shrunken view of the QLab window. QLab 1, actually. Which is playing back video (complete with video fade in and out), music/effects for the various plays, and...light cues.


Let me unpack that a little further! Okay, first off, a little trick with the projector was to create a solid black image in Gimp and assign that as the desktop image. That means that there is no distracting light or image when the video isn't playing -- even if QLab is shut down.

I always set up QLab for MIDI control. This means I can trigger cues whether QLab is focused or not. It is simple to do; connect any MIDI device, go into the Preferences screen, and capture your selected MIDI events. Remember, if you are using a velocity keyboard, you will have to go back and type in "any" for the velocity. Otherwise the cue will only fire once in every 128 attempts!

QLC+ is a little tricky. It has a simple light board mode, but you'd have to individually click on and move each channel. Not a good way to take a smooth lighting change. Fortunately you can also memorize channel settings into a "Scene," and assign the scene in various ways.

Such as the buttons above. Each of those is a basic useful look. The identical scene is also assigned to the faders directly below, allowing me to roll up groups of lights at a desired level.

QLC+ does recognize MIDI, so you can also assign MIDI events to trigger those buttons. This is the next level; my battered little Korg Nanokey is assigned to control several of these scene buttons, letting me go to several looks from the keyboard (and hit several different things, like back lights and center special, simultaneously). Something like a Korg NanoKontrol or the Behringer B-Control would allow you real-time fader control this way.

But the complicated show was, well, too complicated for buttons. So the next level. QLab can create MIDI events on command. Unfortunately to get QLC+ to see QLab I had to go, once again, through MidiPipe (a lovely freeware application that solves so many of your MIDI hookup needs). In this case, the Korg Nanokey sends a note event to QLab's Remote Control function, causing it to play the next cue. QLab spits out sound, video, or a MIDI note event -- the latter is sent via MidiPipe to the IAC bus, along with a hijacked copy of the MIDI output of the Korg.

According to the manual QLC+ supports cue lists. I couldn't get that to work in the time I had. So for the complicated show, every QLab cue toggles on the next scene button in line, and toggles OFF the scene button prior to it. Not smooth. Fortunately, the other shows were a lot simpler and I could run them from the scene buttons and faders.




Each day started at around noon as I transferred and cleaned up notes from two dozen short plays, then took all the expensive gear out of a locked closet and set up. And ended at midnight. Especially tonight, when I had to strike the whole show.

The borrowed gear is stacked all over my tiny apartment now, and tomorrow, I'll cart it back and finally be done with this show.

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.)

White and gold dress...on an airplane on a treadmill

There's a picture going around now of a dress. And there's a surprisingly firm split in how people perceive it. Some say the dress is "obviously" white and gold, others say it is "obviously" blue and black.

I think, like the airplane-on-a-treadmill one, the problem lies not with esoterics of color perception, but in definitions. Do you mean the colors that are in the picture, or the color the real object is likely to be?

The latter is, of course, not possible of derivation from the image supplied. It is obviously taken in strong backlight, the lighting and tones are strongly suggestive of outdoors in sunlight on a clear day, and the trim appears at the least of a satin finish, possibly even shinier.

But you don't know the response curve of the CCD or what adjustments the image has been through. So, based on what evidence is available, the conservative hypothesis is white or off-white with a trim that is somewhere between gold, metallic copper, down to a light coppery-brown with a slight sheen to it.

But that doesn't mean that "is" the color of the dress. Like so many things, it depends on image steps and local effects (the gamma and color balance of the computer screen you are viewing on, the lighting environment you are sitting in while viewing it, etc.) Given these, a wide range of individual colors is possible. Up to and including black trim if you define "black" as a satin finish with a surprising amount of yellow sneaking in.

It's like the problem of the color of the Martian sky. To what color perception? Your eyes naturally gray-card in every environment they are in (up to a certain range; they can't compensate all the way down to candle light, and strongly saturated color environments -- like viewing the world through rose-colored glasses -- will retain a tint even after an hour of adjustment.) If you were transported instantly to Mars, you might see the sky as one color. If you were standing out there all day, adjusted to the sunlight there, you'd see another.

And it is absurd that people who work every day on computers, people who often are involved in art and image as part of their jobs, don't even see the need to point this out when discussing the dress.

This underlies one again this lacunae that much of my profession hits over and over again. When I do lighting or sound I have no choice but to grapple with what is actually there. And to do my best to shape the audience perception in the directions I want.

The vast majority of the people I work for and around can only work on the level of what they perceive, and conversation stops dead on that bottleneck. Because I am well aware it looks dark or sounds soft, and I am taking steps to ameliorate this, but those steps have little or nothing to do with turning up the lights or the microphone feeds.

Another Opening, Another Show

Well, feh.

The design basically failed. The show looks okay, though, and the client is happy.



What I had to work with is under thirty instruments, and about twenty channels of underpowered dimmers. The stage is narrow yet oddly shallow, with the cyclorama placed too close upstage of the scenery, and the borders and proscenium are low enough to prevent anything upstage of the Second House Electric from shooting very far anyhow.

The most important emotional idea I was trying to get across is dirt farming in the Texas Panhandle; hot, dry, big cloudless sky and unshaded sunlight. The play takes place over the 1930's drought and resulting Dust Bowl, thus I also wanted to show the darkened sky and near black-out conditions of the height of the dust storms, the increasing desperation and poverty, and as well several scenes that take place indoors, pre-electrification...plus a couple of scenes at night or in a romantic sunset.

What I chose as an overall scheme was a key light, angled slightly from House Left, in a pale gold; this represents direct sunlight, and is paired with a couple of gobos in the same direction and color; one with foliage for early in the play when there are still growing things around the farmhouse, and one with a window opening for interior scenes in a church lit by natural light. (If I had the instruments, the latter would be two systems, one in Auction House/Courthouse windows across the front of the stage, the other in a central Church window).

The second system was a flat front of fresnels in a neutral lavender; this takes over progressively in all scenes when direct sunlight is presumed blocked. A third system is a backlight in a warm amber.

This latter is the first real problem. I intended it to represent generically the heat of the day, and it does suggest that. But it is also so bright and amber it feels like direct sunlight in those scenes when I'm pretending the sun is down or occluded. It is also just a bit too romantic-looking; any scene with that back light up feels too "nice" for the grimmer portions of the play.

My flat front also has the issues alluded to earlier; I can't push coverage up into the upstage corners of the set due to not being able to make the shallow angles required. Late in the day, I've been side-arming several of the fresnels down so they can reach further under the proscenium, but this just brings them into another problem area; they hit the cyclorama, casting shadows of scenery and actors against what is supposed to be the distant sky.

Fortunately, the lack of decent hanging positions for the flat front system left me with extra instruments, so I was able to re-purpose those towards a minimal but sufficient cool back instead -- using Rosco 65, "Daylight Blue," which is not that saturated or, in this context at least, romantic looking.

Also experimental in this hang was the Cyc Lights. In theater parlance, a Cyclorama is a seamless sheet of white or pale blue that extends across and masks the back wall. The cyc was important to this show because in the reference photographs of Dorothea Lange the near-cloudless sky is a dominating presence over the "Okies" she followed into California.

In any case, the usual Cyc Strips (long multi-element instruments) are not available. So we stuck five LED Par-Cans behind the ground row, with silk to try to diffuse and spread them a little. They don't blend wonderfully, but I've seen worse streaks on a cyc. The big downside to them turns out to be that, unlike my own software, they don't have a decent "gamma" map. So instead of being able to fade them softly down to black, they hop from dark to fairly bright -- and because each color channel responds slightly differently, they do so through several colors rather more saturated than desired.

There's at least one scene where I leave the cyc off completely because the "pop" of it coming on would distract from the slow cross-fade I've got going. But they work...and because they are DMX controlled, they don't use up any of my precious dimmers.




I did my homework. I went through the script collating every reference to location, time of day, time of year, and notated each scene as to what it was supposed to suggest. And then essentially ignored that work; the look of each scene is much more dictated by getting light on faces, and setting up the required contrasts with other scenes.

Particularly because this is such a small stage, isolation gets lost in most scenes. Which is a problem because it has a Classical arrangement of General Store on one side, Farmhouse on the other. The thing is, these two buildings are not supposed to share physical space. There is a good mile between them, at least. But when a scene that is supposed to take place in a dining room or auction hall expands to use the entire width of the stage, I end up with light on the two buildings and it looks like the scene is happening in a studio backlot sort of small-scale town.

This is also inevitable when my area plot is essentially three across, and one or two deep. I can set up a scene as taking place only around the Stage Right porch, but inevitably an actor will cross just one foot too far, and I'll have to add the rest of the stage.




My proof-of-concept DuckLight is in another show now; stuck inside a vintage radio we're using as prop in a couple of scenes. The LED is attached behind the dial with double-stick tape, which might not be technically accurate but motivates the lines about "So what if we can't hear anything; it has a real pretty light."

And, yes -- forget the nuisance of programming a color by progressively tweaking code and uploading it, this board has no ICSP header so I had to pry the chip out every time I put new code into it. That made for a rather long development cycle just to get a color that looks sort of like vacuum tube glow and comes up slowly over about ten seconds.

I also had a cold solder joint somewhere. Eventually I gave up trying to track it down, and soldered up a new version on Adafruit perma-proto. This time with an ICSP header!



Oh, of course. Not even thirty instruments, and one has to fail on opening night. A front light. Down Stage Center.