masterelectrician2112
Active Member
Anyhow... I just opened the package from amazon today! Can't wait to start reading it!
A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting, Second Edition
- Thread starterdvsDave
- Start date
MrTemplate
Member
Hi folks;
Steve Shelley here. First, Derek, i **think** you're absolutely correct. i say **think** only because i'd have to read huge chunks of the text again to figure out where i got crossed up; in the first edition, the house console was an Expression 1. in the beginnings of the second edition, the idea was to keep some of the movers after the cuts in chapter 6, so i changed the house console to an expression 3 to more easily dea with that programming--but after i submitted the manuscript 6 months late, they told me i was 150 pages over. in the melee [and without a hard editor] that anomaly fell through the cracks until it was caught by you. i'll mark it for correction in the next reprint. whenever that is....
and by all means, please let me know if you spot any other anomalies, misspellings, or just general bad grammar/concepts/whatever. without a hard editor, i was stuck putting this together by myself. and no matter what you think, after you have read the same thing five times, it all looks like mush.
to rochem, aka michael; the masking snafu was based off an ill-fated load-in into the Doolittle Theatre in LA, trying to put Patrick Stewart back onstage in his one-man Christmas Carol in four hours less time than we had at the Broadhurst in New York. and if you can tell me how to more quickly determine how to jenga the wrong masking in the right place in less than 30 minutes, while they're trying to lay the dance floor and you're trying to spike the stage, please let me know.
as i state in the beginning of the book, what's included in the book isn't necessarily the best or smartest way to do any of this stuff. it's just the fastest way that i could figure out how to deal with the challenges placed in front of me at any particular time. in this second edition, i decided to include at least one real story of the load-in going south, in order to provide one way to deal with an immediate challenge. sorry if it didn't meet your needs.
yep, i wish i could have kept some of the more intelligent gear as well. but having to cut over a hundred pages, i had to make some hard choices. with luck, there will be the third edition to address all of this.
finally, sorry i commited the sin of listing both vw and autocad as "Computer Lighting Design Software". it seemed like a more elegant way of mentioning them, as opposed to "Place the Pillow Against the Brick Wall Before Using These Programs" topic listing.
please do post any other thoughts or comments you have. while i can't do much about the current edition, as i said, with luck there will be another edition. maybe then i can put the rest of the gear back into the final plot.
all the best,
shelley
Steve Shelley here. First, Derek, i **think** you're absolutely correct. i say **think** only because i'd have to read huge chunks of the text again to figure out where i got crossed up; in the first edition, the house console was an Expression 1. in the beginnings of the second edition, the idea was to keep some of the movers after the cuts in chapter 6, so i changed the house console to an expression 3 to more easily dea with that programming--but after i submitted the manuscript 6 months late, they told me i was 150 pages over. in the melee [and without a hard editor] that anomaly fell through the cracks until it was caught by you. i'll mark it for correction in the next reprint. whenever that is....
and by all means, please let me know if you spot any other anomalies, misspellings, or just general bad grammar/concepts/whatever. without a hard editor, i was stuck putting this together by myself. and no matter what you think, after you have read the same thing five times, it all looks like mush.
to rochem, aka michael; the masking snafu was based off an ill-fated load-in into the Doolittle Theatre in LA, trying to put Patrick Stewart back onstage in his one-man Christmas Carol in four hours less time than we had at the Broadhurst in New York. and if you can tell me how to more quickly determine how to jenga the wrong masking in the right place in less than 30 minutes, while they're trying to lay the dance floor and you're trying to spike the stage, please let me know.
as i state in the beginning of the book, what's included in the book isn't necessarily the best or smartest way to do any of this stuff. it's just the fastest way that i could figure out how to deal with the challenges placed in front of me at any particular time. in this second edition, i decided to include at least one real story of the load-in going south, in order to provide one way to deal with an immediate challenge. sorry if it didn't meet your needs.
yep, i wish i could have kept some of the more intelligent gear as well. but having to cut over a hundred pages, i had to make some hard choices. with luck, there will be the third edition to address all of this.
finally, sorry i commited the sin of listing both vw and autocad as "Computer Lighting Design Software". it seemed like a more elegant way of mentioning them, as opposed to "Place the Pillow Against the Brick Wall Before Using These Programs" topic listing.
please do post any other thoughts or comments you have. while i can't do much about the current edition, as i said, with luck there will be another edition. maybe then i can put the rest of the gear back into the final plot.
all the best,
shelley
Having had the pleasure of working with Steve on 2 occasions, I can testify that this is Steve's style. "Why make it simple" might well be his motto.
He's one of those rare individuals who's constantly asking WHY ? and is always seeking to be more efficient and better at what he does. His ability to create paperwork also been refered to as one of the reasons for the rapid decline of the Amazon Rain forest.
MrTemplate
Member
hi dan;
initially the thought of an online download seemed like an viable idea. until i started editiing. sadly, the 150 pages are not contiguous; i cut chunks from research, chunks from the advance section, chunks from creating the prelim section and light plot, and so on and so on. even worse, i did it in two phases. at that point time was so short that it turned into triage. recreating what i started with is going to be daunting if they ever want to go for another edition. thanks for the thought, though. i'll keep it in mind when i run out of things to do. right now that's not very likely though.
all the best,
shelley
shiben
Well-Known Member
Hey now. As a young person round here (college level), I have been using AutoCAD since my freshman year of HS, for me, using a paper and pencil to draft is a much more difficult and time consuming task. Although I can do it, given the choice I will be behind a keyboard to do most drafting. Hell, I can sketch on my computer using Sketchup about as fast as I can make things by hand (for similar quality).
Overall, I have liked the book. As was mentioned above, it is useful to learn about the things that I dont learn in class, like what happens when the show is overbudget and you need to start cutting things, or how a shop might want a request to come in (as opposed to walking over to the meat rack and looking at what I have to work with), and other things like that. I have to ask tho, is it common practice in the industry to print everything multiple times? I tend to use paper as little as possible, and have dual 500GB backup hard drives running at all times for redundancy. It seems silly to me to try and wrestle with thousands of pages of paper when I can pull up every version I have ever created in whatever program I am using for paperwork.
Also, the musical actually sounds like one I might want to see... Any chance of that being produced?
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