The sun will come out…
…because it’s Spring in New England! Also, because I just wrapped on a production of “Annie.” It’s a pickup gig that I do lighting for every year, with a small school theater that has little budget but a director whom I like working with a lot. Not every gig is with international rock stars and corporate brands. The sad reality is that with the smaller shows, no matter how much you like the people, you have to be able to turn them around quickly, due to budget concerns, but still maintain the quality you give the stars.
I’ve made working in this space easy on myself, having established a cue sheet, a patch list and drafting for the space, building on what I did 12 months ago for them. So when it came time to hang and focus, I was able to get to business quickly. Also, since their board is not something I want to use (Nirvana hadn’t blown up yet, let’s put it that way), it was another year of working with MagicQ, the desktop version of their lighting desk. They sent me a USB>DMX dongle a couple of years back for having the most horrifying tour story (that past Pain of Salvation story I hinted at last month).
MagicQ runs on a small PC that sits tucked away at my FoH position for a couple of weeks. Using remote login software Splashtop, I am able to give myself an RFU (remote focusing using) with my iPad/iPhone. Happy to report that it worked very well, and I used my iPad to follow along on my marked-up PDF of the script. (Longtime readers will recall my preference for digital prompt books, so that when I am working on several shows at once, I do not have to carry around binders of paper everywhere I go or risk losing them.) I could even make changes from home, using either the installation of MagicQ on my other computer, or just remoting in.
The end result was a super-fast execution, since I was able to prep much of my cue sheet on my first read-through of the script and then program my patch quickly and easily. More importantly, because of the streamlined workflow, I was able to get the minutea out of the way and just focus on a bigger, better design. Sadly, this version of MagicQ won’t work with outside protocols/triggers, so no Qlab this time around. But the sound engineer was new to using Qlab and wanted to try it, so I still got to share the joy of show programming and play around with it for him!
This month a much bigger lighting gig will be kicking into high gear, as I am Master Electrician for the Yale Baroque Opera. Pics to follow!
-brian
