Wraith Stone

I had an idea to replace the Lara Necklace I was wearing for a while (until I loaned it to my sister). And that is the Wraith Stone worn by Amanda Evert in TRL and TRU.

Well, maybe.

I did some general research. It hasn't shown up on the Replica Props forum, but there have been a few Amanda cosplayers here and there (including an excellent Young Amanda cosplay I spotted at DeviantArt. She must have hand-embroidered the shirt -- it looks perfect.) There haven't been, to my eye, any decent recreations of the Wraith Stone.

It has been illustrated by several fans (there's a surprising amount of Amanda fanfic out there. I didn't realize so many people would find themselves leaping to her defense and trying to show she wasn't really the whiny, self-centered, back-stabbing brat depicted in the games). But these depictions have such a range, it is hard to look at them as building upon what was revealed in the games.

So to the source. I viewed every minute of cutscene from both "Legend" and "Underworld." (There's no use viewing gameplay; you don't play Amanda directly, and as Lara you rarely get close enough to her to see the Wraith Stone properly). And as is far too typical for Tomb Raider, the prop is inconsistent.

As far as I can tell, there are at least two in-game models in "Legend." Possibly three, and you might or might not count the one she wears, as that is probably part of the character mesh. And they don't look particularly similar. However; they look more like each other than either looks like the in-game model visible in "Underworld."

In Amanda's character model and in all but the close-up model, the Wraith Stone is just a teardrop-shaped black rock with an elongated white skull pattern on it that looks bas-relief. In the close-up model, it is a purplish stone with a slightly more complex carving. (In the "Underworld" in-game model, it appears to be a clear turnip-shaped stone with a skull appliqué on one face.)

What attracted me to this prop is, in fact, only realized in one place; in the opening movie of "Legend" there is what appears to be the Wraith Stone -- rendered in the same style as the Excalibur prop central to that particular game, as if it might be an artifact of the same culture.

The Excalibur Fragment depiction is of a dark grey-and-black material with strong isotropy; it catches the light in complex ways as it moves, like certain polished minerals. It is speckled, as well, with well-defined blobs of green. Now, this may be an artifact of the limitations of the in-game render engine and intended to depict greenish glow issuing along veins/flaws in the stone. Or it may be intended literally, as actual gemstone-like green nodules.

In any case, despite the almost completely unique nature of this single reference, I am prepared to argue the limitations of in-game models and, more importantly, that this is a heck of a lot more interesting to look upon (and to sculpt), and, thus, this is the version I am going to take a shot at.

Of course me being me, one of the things that excites me (and this may not be the prop for it) is the challenge of doing those greenish glows not just with LEDs, not just with individual surface-mount LEDs, but with a self-contained driver circuit that will flicker them in an interesting and deliberate way. Of course that may mean interpreting the depiction more as flecks of light along full-length crystalline inclusions in the base matrix, but...hey, that's interesting enough to look at and way challenging to model and cast that I think it is a worthwhile direction to go.

Wrong Soapbox

I've gone and written myself into a corner again on my TR/SG1 fanfic.

Well, sort of. The plot will proceed just fine. But I may have made it impossible to indulge in the polemics I had planned.

I've got Lara somewhere between the midwestern states and northern California; somewhere where I can preferably look at relics of the Mississippian culture. And I was going to go off a little on hyperdiffusionism; I originally created "Colonel" Newberry to not just be arguing that Vikings or Egyptians or one of the lost tribes of Israel were responsible for the creation of the spectacular burial mounds, but to wander even further afield into Giants, Nephilim, bits of biblical literalism and even some Young-Earth Creationism.

Two problems, though. One is that the Colonel's character is rapidly evolving on me; he is turning into someone more intelligent and competent and perhaps a nicer person as well. The other is that at this juncture Lara is undercover (or, rather, she thinks she is) and not in position to make the scientific and rationalist arguments. Worse, though, is this; when you think about it, her whole career has been based on the reality of some kind of hyperdiffusionism. In her world, there were gods/aliens who gave gifts of advanced technologies to primitive cultures. She's held the real relic -- an alien weapon -- that gave rise to the legend of Excalibur. She's met at least one of the rulers of Atlantis (and shot her in the face...but Natla got better).

On the other side of the pond, I'm sending Daniel Jackson to Croft Manor so Alister can let him know Atlantis was real and start him on the right track to bring all my mice up to the right spot for the climax. Thing is, Daniel is hardly one to harp on the obvious problems with the Atlantis myths. He spent his career arguing that the Egyptian gods were aliens from space, and has very, very good proof that he was right. Those very "gods" shot him in the face (Daniel also got better). And later in the official SG1 canon he not only searches for Atlantis on his own impetus, he finds it.

About the biggest wriggle room I've got here is that Alister could chose to put one on, and bring up the counter-arguments. Also, of course, the one he knows is not the one Daniel later finds (or so they think...I'm not sure anyone but Lara is actually going to realize over the course of this particular story just what the Ancients/Lanteans have been up to).



Well, losing polemics is probably good. Although without the chance to talk about the Mad Hatter logic that led from a Mayan codex to the continent of Mu, or the social trends that disinherit people from the accomplishments of their own culture, I may have to work harder to fill my 8,000 words.

Well, I did just do a little reading on climate cycles, and I am very, very tempted to do another long aside -- similar to the Ariadne vignette -- of Seh and her family, early agriculturalists in that moment where even their god can't project them from a shift (some 8,000 years ago) in the flood patterns of the Nile....

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).

Amazon is like Chinese Food

As soon as your order arrives and you unpack it, you go, "Is this all? I was expecting a lot more stuff." And before you know it you are putting together another order.

Schedule Conflict

I suspect it is surprising to outsiders that theater people end up with things scheduled right on top of each other, resulting in having to juggle substitutes, re-work rehearsals, and of course do lots of terrible crunches -- ten hour days in tech on one show and going home to work on drawings for another that has to go to the shop by Friday.

There's two reasons it happens more often than you would hope.

First is that seasons overlap. The summer stock season starts building before the regular season is over, and is still in performance when the first shows of the next regular season are already in rehearsal. Theaters also overlap; if there are two theaters sharing an audience they often try to stagger their shows so one opens on one weekend, the other opens two weekends later. And individual theaters also overlap, even those that only have one stage to work on; since rehearsals and build go back five or six weeks, and run is five or six weeks, you will be in the middle of prepping one show long before the previous one closes.

The second is that schedules change. Opening night is a given -- perhaps the only given. But performances change; shows get extended, the "optional" Thursdays get added or cut, extra shows are crammed in. And sometimes a big group calls and a special performance is set up for them on a Wednesday or something...something that didn't come close to appearing in the original schedule.

And practically all of the key days fluctuate. When you are talking a musical, and you are in Sound, then there's first orchestra rehearsal, sitzprobe, first dress, the first full dress with orchestra...and all of these dates remain in the great unknown until access to the venue, progress in rehearsal, musician's schedules, the availability of the leads, etc., etc., etc., gets hammered out.

Which means, in short, you sign a contract saying, "I will be there on that day" many months before anyone knows what day that may be. Do that for two different productions...and you've got a problem.



Sunday I worked two performances plus load-in and load-out and a long drive in the rain back from the venue de jour. Then across town to watch as much rehearsal (on another show) as I could keep my eyes open for.

Today called in at my regular work and spent twelve hours hanging lights then watching rehearsal, without, of course, a meal break. At seven tomorrow morning I head out to another load-in and performance of Sunday's show, then probably back across town to try to get in as many hours of hanging lights as I can before rehearsal starts.

Then I really need to show up at my full-time job before that description becomes a misnomer. So a full day Wednesday, then run out to pull another 4-6 hours of hanging lights and with luck will be ready to write cues...until 11 PM at night. And back up at 7 AM to once again follow the truck out to load in and perform that other show. (Then back to my day job for as many hours as I can cram into the afternoon before racing out to do the final tweaks before preview night).

Oh, and I'm still trying to shake a cold. I'm spending eight hours in bed, but I'm sleeping as little as four. Things are getting better -- at least I got the car fixed, and the fire alarm hasn't gone off again, but....!


(I type this as I'm trying to wolf down some basmati and something out of a packet before I fall into bed).

Holo promises

I just got a message through the RPF, reminding me there are still people interested in the idea of a cheap-and-simple Holocron kit.

The first one I built, I extensively modified a kit I'd purchased. I documented the build on my Instructables page. I got enough expressions of interest to start an INT thread over a the RPF.

Besides the ideas I'd already tested, like using the laser engraver to frost the inner walls with a pattern, I knew I could improve on the assemble-ability of the kit. It took quite a few weeks of tinkering but I at last had a set of shell parts that would snap together and make for quite a bit less time spent in trying to line up everything so it could be glued together, and patch it up once the glue was set.

Another element was boiling down the somewhat baroque electronics package of the first attempt into a simpler board suitable for a more typical end-user; based of course on my LED driver board in progress:

But then problems surfaced. I spent way too much time working with one prospective client on a design with proprietary elements. He never did quite get to the point of actually paying anything for this work, and as this dragged on I lost all trust in him as well as desire to continue the relationship. He got a complete holocron kit out of me for free (minus the majority of the electronics, though):

All this time meant a lot of the design elements had evolved along a path towards adaptations that simply didn't exist anymore. I wasted more time trying to pick up from that point, but at last have accepted I need to throw away the most developed designs, go back multiple generations, and work from design elements that are more suitable.

I would say "canonical," but there is sadly little canon yet on holocrons. The best-documented holocron comes from one of the 3d animations, and is the so-called "stolen" holocron:

This design however is difficult to realize in the materials I've chosen to work with. The frosting pattern simply doesn't work, the groove interferes with the mechanical structure, and worse yet, one of the keys of the thing in the canonical (well, Extended Universe!) depiction is that the corners rotate.

At least it is easier to realize in laser-cut acrylic then this over-sized prop made entirely for an advertising photograph:

So this leaves me without really clear directions to go in order to find a design that really speaks Star Wars. That looks like it could be canon.

This was as far as I got before I decided that the "shapes surrounding a central engraved image" approach was the wrong one. And believe me, there were a lot more shapes that never got past the Illustrator file stage (but there were still more than this example that got as far as the laser).

I am stalled here by the inescapable understanding that even limiting myself to this particular technology (aka laser-cut acrylic) I should be able to make a very deep and interesting shape (aka using multiple layers, diffuse elements, etc.)

But also by the realization that problem-solving how this can be assembled without glue stains and fiddling around and so forth is an ongoing challenge and whatever I dream up is going to have to go through more rounds of materials and time-expensive test cuts.

Probably all this would sort out if I could come up with a vision that I really liked. Some kind of a look for the thing that uses the strengths of the materials I have available but that is exciting (or, at least, as exciting as the original proved to be).

And then hopefully that would give me enough impetus to struggle through solving how to make an electronics package that is cheap and flexible and is easy enough for the end-user to work with.