manuallyfocused
Active Member
Hi everyone,
I'm about 3/4 of the the way through my first year as a part-timer on the faculty at a private high school in the San Fernando Valley near LA (and just received a contract for full-time next year), and driving myself a little crazy trying to get a crash course in lighting (and sound) and chart a development path to get us to the point of having a functional theater. My background is in set design and construction primarily. I played with lights a bit in college, but did very little design and (unfortunately) mostly smiled and nodded when my LD colleagues nerded out over the complexities of lighting control, dimming, and fixture specification. That said, I'm learning fast! I wanted to put all this out here in the hopes of getting some advice, and hopefully getting pointed in directions of things I haven't known to look for as of yet. Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, questions, and criticisms! Also, apologies in advance for this novel of a post! Feel free to skim and respond only to the parts that interest you, or have fun helping me re-imagine the whole system!
Here's our current situation and setup:
The school is relatively new (13 years old) and we just moved into a new-to-us facility last year. I am the first theater technical person on the faculty (the only other theater faculty is our director/musical director/choir director) and up until now we have employed independent contractors to design and execute our shows with little student involvement). Much of the impetus of my hiring was a desire on the part of the school to build a stagecraft program for the students, which was begun this year with an after-school 2-hour/wk class and next year will be a full-credit during-school elective class. The building was originally a community center, so the performance space is a multi-purpose auditorium with a small stage, and to accommodate performances with 30-40 person casts we usually build platforms out into the audience area. We are very limited in built-in lighting positions- we have one 32' pipe over the house with 6 two-fered circuits in a built-in Colortran raceway, and one 32' pipe over the stage with a similar raceway. Dimming is provided by a 12 x 2.4k Colortran 192 pack mounted on a wall backstage, and controlled via analog 0-5v control by a Pack Master 2-scene console in the booth at the back of the auditorium, plugged into a DB15 connector on the wall in the booth (for which, thankfully, I have the pinout).
Midway into the auditorium there is an Airwall track for splitting the room in two, though the wall is currently non-functional. The ceiling steps down quite severely as you move further away from the stage- the house pipe is deadhung from unistrut 21'-6" from the auditorium floor, and by the time you get to the booth at the back the roof is 10'-9" from the floor. I've attached a PDF of my section drawing of the auditorium, with the lighting positions and the roof heights notated.
We do one big musical every year in January or February, and a smaller production in May, as well as numerous lectures, orchestra concerts, dance concerts, and other events during the year. Currently, we have a production budget for the musical that is normally spent almost entirely on rental for lighting and sound (roughly $17-20k/yr) to essentially rent the entire system for each. It is unlikely that I will be able to get significant amounts of money from the school outside of the production budget in order to modernize our systems and begin to lessen our dependence and expenditure on rental gear. I know that grants are an option, and any advice you can give on where to look for grants that might apply to us would be greatly appreciated.
THE PLAN:
For lighting, I want to build our infrastructure to the point where we are only renting fixtures for our shows (and eventually, only specialized fixtures as necessary) and have our power distro, dimming, positions, and control provided in-house, both for our own events and also for other events as the space is sometimes used for rental as well.
This year we've already spent the vast majority of our production budget on our musical in February, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, some of which was due to our lighting designer going almost $2000 over budget. We have very little left for our second show, and precious little to try to begin spending on infrastructure, but I am determined to at least give us a start. Between the remainder of the production budget, money in the arts department budget for the theater and dance classes, and a generous donation by a parent of some of the theater students, I think I will be able to cobble together about $5-6k to spend immediately.
DIMMING- I have purchased a 24-channel DMX Decoder board from Northlight DMX (suggested by another ControlBooth thread, thank you!) and their DMX in/out connector board, and with the assistance of our robotics teacher I will be building a DMX--> analog converter so we can control our Colortran 192 pack with a DMX board. Beyond that, I am unsure of how best to proceed. We have plenty of power (100 amps 3 phase to cam-loks in a closet backstage, with open access to the dropped ceiling above the theater) but little in the way of wall-plug circuits in the auditorium itself. I had thought about purchasing several Elation 640B pipe-mounted dimmer packs to give me some flexibility so I could add lights along the airwall track and on booms onstage or in the house as necessary, but they will necessitate some long runs of edison extension cords and DMX control cable to get them powered. It was just suggested to me that we run lengths of socapex above the ceiling and drop it anywhere we think we'd need it, which is a fantastic idea and will just require the funds to purchase the 600' or so of SOCA we'd need to make it happen (and then to purchase the dimmers and/or power distro to energize them and the breakouts to get them to the lights, but baby steps!).
Possible steps-
Immediately- buy 2-4 Elation 640Bs and a bunch of 12/3 cable with connectors (most of our lights and all
the built-in raceways are L5-20s, in lovely bright colors of orange and yellow)
Future- Purchase 1 ETC Smartpack 6 x 2.4k or 12 x 1.2k dimmer pack per year and run socapex cable
"temporarily" through the dropped ceiling to the airwall track and other house and stage positions.
CONTROL- We normally rent in a control board as part of our rental package, usually an ETC board (this year it was an Ion) and if budget were not a factor I would purchase an Ion immediately. However, because of the limited budget right now I need to look elsewhere. We have occasional access to a number of intelligent fixtures for free or cheap rental, so whatever board we get needs to be able to handle both conventional intensity channels and multi-attribute fixtures and function as a memory console for our larger productions while allowing simple submasters to be set up for less intensive applications.
I've looked at the Elation Scenesetter 48 as an inexpensive option to get us through the end of the year, and a number of used and new options that would last us a bit longer (used Express, Hogs of various stripes, PC-based options like Nomad or Hog4PC, Pathway Cognito, etc). My current inclination is to go with the Strand 250ML, which gives us 2 universes of DMX control (split into 250 intensity channels and up to 30 40-attribute fixtures) as well as dedicated encoders for intelligent fixtures and essentially the most bang for our buck that I can find. Ideally, I'd get us an Ion, but right now we just can't afford it. The only downsides with the Strand board (aside from it being a Strand board, as my ETC purist friends have been joking) are that it is relatively new and not a ton of information is available on how well it actually performs, and if we're in a jam and need someone to come in and program it is very unlikely to have someone come in who will know how to program it. The only boards I've ever used were ETC (Express and Obsession II) and Leprecon (something 2-scene preset-ish in our college studio theater) so I'm definitely open to suggestion in this area. The fact that the Strand board can be had brand new for sub-$2k makes it extremely attractive for our immediate situation.
ACCESS- Right now we have no easy way of getting to the house lighting positions. We rent in a genie lift for our shows, and maintenance has an extension ladder that, when set on a platform (ssh, don't tell OSHA) can reach the lights for refocusing, cabling, and replacing lamps. The facilities department is purchasing a scissor lift for the fall, but generally speaking borrowing it from them will likely be a time-consuming and frustrating process. I am looking at purchasing an 18' adjustable multi-purpose rolling scaffold tower that could easily get us access to any of our positions over the house, both now and in the future, and would store pretty easily under the stage when not in use.
LIGHTING POSITIONS- Here's where we have a lot of options. I am planning to build a platform about 20' into the house for our upcoming show, which is going to necessitate some kind of frontlight position at or around the airwall track. Right now we have no boom bases and very little sch 40 pipe, so I'm planning to purchase a number of both (and eventually pipe threading and cutting apparatus so we can have some flexibility in the sizing of booms for use onstage and off). I was planning to purchase at least 5 of the Lightsource 4" Airwall Hangers to hang a pipe all the way across the Airwall track (roughly 50' long) and connect it to two vertical booms, one at either end, to give us flat and angled frontlight positions. In the future, I'll add taildowns from the ends of the existing house beam and connect them to the airwall track positions via another boom and 20' of I-beam truss along each side wall, giving us some decent sidelight positions and a spot to hang speakers.
Eventually, I want to go into the ceiling and drop some hanging points to build a pipe grid from the house beam to just in front of the proscenium. Then I want to build a wall behind the onstage pipe, turning the back part of the stage (with the angled roof) into a storage space, and giving us a placement for a cyc and making that onstage pipe into cyc light and backlight positions. Then I'll semi-permanently build the stage out into the house (with traps!) turning the space effectively into a 3-quarter thrust theater with the option for endstage configuration with a smaller audience. Once all that is accomplished, I'll work on getting them to raise the ceiling in the back of the house, and maybe by then they'll have raised the money to build us a real theater .
FIXTURES- Here is our current inventory (cue the laugh track) much of which I spent the better part of an afternoon having my stagecraft class clean off and test and we discovered, much to my surprise, that all but three of them have working lamps and seem in fairly decent functional shape.
-5 Colortran 15-30 degree zoom ellipsoidals (maybe 6, not sure)
-4 Altman 360 ellipsoidals (I think. there's no label on them. They have angled lamp housings)
-1 14" Scoop
-1 6" studio fresnel
-11 6" Lee Colortran fresnels
-11 silver DJ par46 cans
-8 575w Source4 ellipsoidals with 26 degree barrels
For these, I don't have a lot of direction. Right now the 11 Colortran fresnels live on the overstage pipe, and the Source4s live on the house pipe, and provide a reasonable stage wash for our basic events. I eventually want to do a house plot that is completely LED, replacing the onstage fixtures with ETC Colorsource Pars (maybe buying 1 or 2 per year) and replacing some of the Source4s with inexpensive LED moving lights (maybe Chauvet Rogue R1 spots). But mostly, what I'm missing right now is any kind of area lighting besides the fresnels, which aren't very bright (almost all of the fixtures use 500w or 600w lamps, and right now several are lamp-less and we have no replacements). I was thinking of building an inventory of some Source4 Pars to complement the Source4 lekos, but I'm not sure if it makes more sense just to go straight to LED.
Separately, we have had to rent in something to cover houselighting as well as stagelighting in the past because our house light system (which runs on a colortran dimmer even older than the 192 pack that runs the stage) was re-lamped with CFLs when the school took over the building. The facilities department has just committed to replacing them all with LED lamps and switching out the dimmers for a DMX-controllable system, likely something from Strand, but that's under their control. They've been generous enough to agree to give me a DMX control port in the booth (and hopefully a pass-through in the backstage lighting closet so I can run cable easily to onstage dimmers and fixtures), but that's about all I can expect to get from them.
If you've gotten through all that, I congratulate you and I very much welcome your thoughts and comments! As challenging as this space is, it's a lot of fun to play with ideas for the future and I've been very lucky to have gotten a lot of good advice thus far.
tl;dr- Here's what I think we'll be getting in the immediate future:
Northlight DMX-->analog converter $300
Strand 250ML control console $1900
An 18' multi-purpose rolling scaffold tower $900
2 boom bases $300
3 21' sch 40 pipes $150
4 Airwall hangers $400
2 Elation 640B dimmer packs $800
DMX and 12/3 cable with connectors $500
Pipe clamps and misc. hardware $250
Total: $5500
Hope everyone is having a good Passover/Easter/Spring Break/Weekend, looking forward to any responses you have!
I'm about 3/4 of the the way through my first year as a part-timer on the faculty at a private high school in the San Fernando Valley near LA (and just received a contract for full-time next year), and driving myself a little crazy trying to get a crash course in lighting (and sound) and chart a development path to get us to the point of having a functional theater. My background is in set design and construction primarily. I played with lights a bit in college, but did very little design and (unfortunately) mostly smiled and nodded when my LD colleagues nerded out over the complexities of lighting control, dimming, and fixture specification. That said, I'm learning fast! I wanted to put all this out here in the hopes of getting some advice, and hopefully getting pointed in directions of things I haven't known to look for as of yet. Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, questions, and criticisms! Also, apologies in advance for this novel of a post! Feel free to skim and respond only to the parts that interest you, or have fun helping me re-imagine the whole system!
Here's our current situation and setup:
The school is relatively new (13 years old) and we just moved into a new-to-us facility last year. I am the first theater technical person on the faculty (the only other theater faculty is our director/musical director/choir director) and up until now we have employed independent contractors to design and execute our shows with little student involvement). Much of the impetus of my hiring was a desire on the part of the school to build a stagecraft program for the students, which was begun this year with an after-school 2-hour/wk class and next year will be a full-credit during-school elective class. The building was originally a community center, so the performance space is a multi-purpose auditorium with a small stage, and to accommodate performances with 30-40 person casts we usually build platforms out into the audience area. We are very limited in built-in lighting positions- we have one 32' pipe over the house with 6 two-fered circuits in a built-in Colortran raceway, and one 32' pipe over the stage with a similar raceway. Dimming is provided by a 12 x 2.4k Colortran 192 pack mounted on a wall backstage, and controlled via analog 0-5v control by a Pack Master 2-scene console in the booth at the back of the auditorium, plugged into a DB15 connector on the wall in the booth (for which, thankfully, I have the pinout).
Midway into the auditorium there is an Airwall track for splitting the room in two, though the wall is currently non-functional. The ceiling steps down quite severely as you move further away from the stage- the house pipe is deadhung from unistrut 21'-6" from the auditorium floor, and by the time you get to the booth at the back the roof is 10'-9" from the floor. I've attached a PDF of my section drawing of the auditorium, with the lighting positions and the roof heights notated.
We do one big musical every year in January or February, and a smaller production in May, as well as numerous lectures, orchestra concerts, dance concerts, and other events during the year. Currently, we have a production budget for the musical that is normally spent almost entirely on rental for lighting and sound (roughly $17-20k/yr) to essentially rent the entire system for each. It is unlikely that I will be able to get significant amounts of money from the school outside of the production budget in order to modernize our systems and begin to lessen our dependence and expenditure on rental gear. I know that grants are an option, and any advice you can give on where to look for grants that might apply to us would be greatly appreciated.
THE PLAN:
For lighting, I want to build our infrastructure to the point where we are only renting fixtures for our shows (and eventually, only specialized fixtures as necessary) and have our power distro, dimming, positions, and control provided in-house, both for our own events and also for other events as the space is sometimes used for rental as well.
This year we've already spent the vast majority of our production budget on our musical in February, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, some of which was due to our lighting designer going almost $2000 over budget. We have very little left for our second show, and precious little to try to begin spending on infrastructure, but I am determined to at least give us a start. Between the remainder of the production budget, money in the arts department budget for the theater and dance classes, and a generous donation by a parent of some of the theater students, I think I will be able to cobble together about $5-6k to spend immediately.
DIMMING- I have purchased a 24-channel DMX Decoder board from Northlight DMX (suggested by another ControlBooth thread, thank you!) and their DMX in/out connector board, and with the assistance of our robotics teacher I will be building a DMX--> analog converter so we can control our Colortran 192 pack with a DMX board. Beyond that, I am unsure of how best to proceed. We have plenty of power (100 amps 3 phase to cam-loks in a closet backstage, with open access to the dropped ceiling above the theater) but little in the way of wall-plug circuits in the auditorium itself. I had thought about purchasing several Elation 640B pipe-mounted dimmer packs to give me some flexibility so I could add lights along the airwall track and on booms onstage or in the house as necessary, but they will necessitate some long runs of edison extension cords and DMX control cable to get them powered. It was just suggested to me that we run lengths of socapex above the ceiling and drop it anywhere we think we'd need it, which is a fantastic idea and will just require the funds to purchase the 600' or so of SOCA we'd need to make it happen (and then to purchase the dimmers and/or power distro to energize them and the breakouts to get them to the lights, but baby steps!).
Possible steps-
Immediately- buy 2-4 Elation 640Bs and a bunch of 12/3 cable with connectors (most of our lights and all
the built-in raceways are L5-20s, in lovely bright colors of orange and yellow)
Future- Purchase 1 ETC Smartpack 6 x 2.4k or 12 x 1.2k dimmer pack per year and run socapex cable
"temporarily" through the dropped ceiling to the airwall track and other house and stage positions.
CONTROL- We normally rent in a control board as part of our rental package, usually an ETC board (this year it was an Ion) and if budget were not a factor I would purchase an Ion immediately. However, because of the limited budget right now I need to look elsewhere. We have occasional access to a number of intelligent fixtures for free or cheap rental, so whatever board we get needs to be able to handle both conventional intensity channels and multi-attribute fixtures and function as a memory console for our larger productions while allowing simple submasters to be set up for less intensive applications.
I've looked at the Elation Scenesetter 48 as an inexpensive option to get us through the end of the year, and a number of used and new options that would last us a bit longer (used Express, Hogs of various stripes, PC-based options like Nomad or Hog4PC, Pathway Cognito, etc). My current inclination is to go with the Strand 250ML, which gives us 2 universes of DMX control (split into 250 intensity channels and up to 30 40-attribute fixtures) as well as dedicated encoders for intelligent fixtures and essentially the most bang for our buck that I can find. Ideally, I'd get us an Ion, but right now we just can't afford it. The only downsides with the Strand board (aside from it being a Strand board, as my ETC purist friends have been joking) are that it is relatively new and not a ton of information is available on how well it actually performs, and if we're in a jam and need someone to come in and program it is very unlikely to have someone come in who will know how to program it. The only boards I've ever used were ETC (Express and Obsession II) and Leprecon (something 2-scene preset-ish in our college studio theater) so I'm definitely open to suggestion in this area. The fact that the Strand board can be had brand new for sub-$2k makes it extremely attractive for our immediate situation.
ACCESS- Right now we have no easy way of getting to the house lighting positions. We rent in a genie lift for our shows, and maintenance has an extension ladder that, when set on a platform (ssh, don't tell OSHA) can reach the lights for refocusing, cabling, and replacing lamps. The facilities department is purchasing a scissor lift for the fall, but generally speaking borrowing it from them will likely be a time-consuming and frustrating process. I am looking at purchasing an 18' adjustable multi-purpose rolling scaffold tower that could easily get us access to any of our positions over the house, both now and in the future, and would store pretty easily under the stage when not in use.
LIGHTING POSITIONS- Here's where we have a lot of options. I am planning to build a platform about 20' into the house for our upcoming show, which is going to necessitate some kind of frontlight position at or around the airwall track. Right now we have no boom bases and very little sch 40 pipe, so I'm planning to purchase a number of both (and eventually pipe threading and cutting apparatus so we can have some flexibility in the sizing of booms for use onstage and off). I was planning to purchase at least 5 of the Lightsource 4" Airwall Hangers to hang a pipe all the way across the Airwall track (roughly 50' long) and connect it to two vertical booms, one at either end, to give us flat and angled frontlight positions. In the future, I'll add taildowns from the ends of the existing house beam and connect them to the airwall track positions via another boom and 20' of I-beam truss along each side wall, giving us some decent sidelight positions and a spot to hang speakers.
Eventually, I want to go into the ceiling and drop some hanging points to build a pipe grid from the house beam to just in front of the proscenium. Then I want to build a wall behind the onstage pipe, turning the back part of the stage (with the angled roof) into a storage space, and giving us a placement for a cyc and making that onstage pipe into cyc light and backlight positions. Then I'll semi-permanently build the stage out into the house (with traps!) turning the space effectively into a 3-quarter thrust theater with the option for endstage configuration with a smaller audience. Once all that is accomplished, I'll work on getting them to raise the ceiling in the back of the house, and maybe by then they'll have raised the money to build us a real theater .
FIXTURES- Here is our current inventory (cue the laugh track) much of which I spent the better part of an afternoon having my stagecraft class clean off and test and we discovered, much to my surprise, that all but three of them have working lamps and seem in fairly decent functional shape.
-5 Colortran 15-30 degree zoom ellipsoidals (maybe 6, not sure)
-4 Altman 360 ellipsoidals (I think. there's no label on them. They have angled lamp housings)
-1 14" Scoop
-1 6" studio fresnel
-11 6" Lee Colortran fresnels
-11 silver DJ par46 cans
-8 575w Source4 ellipsoidals with 26 degree barrels
For these, I don't have a lot of direction. Right now the 11 Colortran fresnels live on the overstage pipe, and the Source4s live on the house pipe, and provide a reasonable stage wash for our basic events. I eventually want to do a house plot that is completely LED, replacing the onstage fixtures with ETC Colorsource Pars (maybe buying 1 or 2 per year) and replacing some of the Source4s with inexpensive LED moving lights (maybe Chauvet Rogue R1 spots). But mostly, what I'm missing right now is any kind of area lighting besides the fresnels, which aren't very bright (almost all of the fixtures use 500w or 600w lamps, and right now several are lamp-less and we have no replacements). I was thinking of building an inventory of some Source4 Pars to complement the Source4 lekos, but I'm not sure if it makes more sense just to go straight to LED.
Separately, we have had to rent in something to cover houselighting as well as stagelighting in the past because our house light system (which runs on a colortran dimmer even older than the 192 pack that runs the stage) was re-lamped with CFLs when the school took over the building. The facilities department has just committed to replacing them all with LED lamps and switching out the dimmers for a DMX-controllable system, likely something from Strand, but that's under their control. They've been generous enough to agree to give me a DMX control port in the booth (and hopefully a pass-through in the backstage lighting closet so I can run cable easily to onstage dimmers and fixtures), but that's about all I can expect to get from them.
If you've gotten through all that, I congratulate you and I very much welcome your thoughts and comments! As challenging as this space is, it's a lot of fun to play with ideas for the future and I've been very lucky to have gotten a lot of good advice thus far.
tl;dr- Here's what I think we'll be getting in the immediate future:
Northlight DMX-->analog converter $300
Strand 250ML control console $1900
An 18' multi-purpose rolling scaffold tower $900
2 boom bases $300
3 21' sch 40 pipes $150
4 Airwall hangers $400
2 Elation 640B dimmer packs $800
DMX and 12/3 cable with connectors $500
Pipe clamps and misc. hardware $250
Total: $5500
Hope everyone is having a good Passover/Easter/Spring Break/Weekend, looking forward to any responses you have!