Automated Fixtures Advice on Purchasing Inteligent lighting for an educational theater.

[Footer]

Sorry, Kyle, but I disagree. It seems like you had a bad experience with moving lights in your venue and that has left a sour taste in your mouth. You're right, for someone getting out of high school/college going straight to work for a large theatre or production company there will certainly be on the job training. But not everyone goes that route and I'm not sure why you don't think it would benefit someone to get a skill set that will set that person aside from the competition. Like I said, I don't know GrandMA and so I don't get calls to work on them. A carpenter that doesn't know how to use a table saw will be at a huge disadvantage to one who does. Remember, we're working with tools here, not toys. Moving lights and consoles are tools to fulfill a job, would you really want to limit a carpenter to a handsaw?

I think it really boils down to what is the education trying to achieve? In a scene shop a moving light is not a table saw, its a CNC machine. If you have CNC, know how to operate one, and have built stuff with one that is great. However, most shops don't have them. A table saw is more like a par can or a leko. Its assumed knowledge.

2. I am looking to train both electricians and designers. I work at a liberal arts college so the students will hopefully get a good introduction and grasp of basic electrical and design skills. Even my most committed students will need additional experience after they leave me if they want to be competitive in "the industry." I want them to form a good foundation that they can build on.

This is really the key statement here. Liberal arts educations are designed to be prep for post graduate studies. The college in town here is a hard core liberal arts school. They produce extremely well rounded students who have a good grasp on what they want but are not at all specialized in what they want to do. When they go off to grad school, they really dive head first into their chosen field. Being able to touch moving lights would be great, however, if you don't have any pieces of the gafftaper method might be time to look at that first.

It really is a different way of teaching at a liberal arts school. I did not attend one. When I go out to do something at the local college it takes me a bit to adjust to how the students there are being taught and why they are being the way they are. They are not being prepared to leap out into the industry, they are being prepared to specialize down the line.

 

[mstaylor]

Once again though, I don't think you have to have movers to teach lighting in the college environment. Regional theatre (what 99% of most college are aimed towards) use a few movers and a ton of scrollers and that type of thing. I have been out of college 4 years now. I have one classmate that just finished up an equity national tour as a ML tech and is now taking out her 4th show as head elec. Another one of my classmates is the head elec for one of the non-vegas circ installs. Both work with moving lights every day. Both learned 0 about them in college beyond a one week "heres some wiggle lights and a hog II". Its great stuff to know, however, its also pretty easy to pick up after you have the basics down. Both of the above people learned GrandMA by getting put on a show with one. I learned Chamsys because I had a show to do and had some time on my hands. I never programmed a moving light beyond an elipscan until after I left college. Its not necesary. If you can do it, do, however, unless you can do it right don't do it at all. If you teach good fundementals, and it sounds like thats the type of school you are at, don't worry about the movers. Would you rather spend 2 weeks teaching moving lights or would you rather spend 2 more weeks having students work in a light lab working on their eye? Unless your program ends with Mellon or Arts, odds are your students won't touch moving lights for several years after graduation. If they do touch them, its going to be in a shop setting where what you will teach them will not apply.

When I taught at a high school a few years back, I had 8 moving lights. They were the most useless things I could have had in the inventory. I had a crappy color inventory, few source fours, hardly any SO cable, and old consoles. However, I did have 8 lights that were pretty useless. Unfortunately, my students liked them and based entire designs around them. The faculty knew we had them so they had to be used for every show. Nothing annoyed me more then those lights. So, before you dive in, really consider if it is going to help your students. It will give them some real world training, however, the real world does a pretty good job of doing that training. When they need it, they will learn it. Teach them common sense, instill a good work ethic, teach good design, and teach how to be a good technician.

Buying movers and renting them are two different things. I agree with Kyle, using them because you have is a terrible reason to add anything to a production. We have many interesting technologies in our business, movers, LEDs, video, right arms, scrollers and other things. Chosing to use any of it, or to stay with conventionals, should be a choice for each production. I have seen many shows and concerts that actually suffer because of using devices that would have been better without them. I did a concert last year with all conventionals, analog dimmers and a very old Leprecaun board. It was an excellent show and a fun throwback for me. Sayen used movers and touring style boards but they were rentals, which better sense.

 

[sk8rsdad]

I'm going to take a contrary stance to mstaylor, et al. It's easy to say "don't buy a mover" when you know what they do but how do you learn what they will do if you never get the chance to use one? Not having any movers in your inventory means you will never rent them because the whole venture is a gamble with too many unknowns, like will they work with my rig, can I connect them, how do I get my console to drive them, what can I do with them now that I have them. There is a great deal of reluctance to add the learning time to the cost of the rental, or to gamble that they work at all without the benefit of experience.

 

[mstaylor]

I'm going to take a contrary stance to mstaylor, et al. It's easy to say "don't buy a mover" when you know what they do but how do you learn what they will do if you never get the chance to use one? Not having any movers in your inventory means you will never rent them because the whole venture is a gamble with too many unknowns, like will they work with my rig, can I connect them, how do I get my console to drive them, what can I do with them now that I have them. There is a great deal of reluctance to add the learning time to the cost of the rental, or to gamble that they work at all without the benefit of experience.

I don't know how it is in your area but in my area we have a good relationship with several rental houses. There are different ways to handle rentals. When I rent movers I get them to address them in the shop and mark the boxes so I know where to hang them. I always get at least one spare if not two. Before you buy or rent anything you need to teach them the basics behind movers. How to patch them, how to build profiles, how the encoders work, how DMX itself works, common problems and how to fix them. Then when you actually get some lights you can be more confident that you will be able to run them

 

[Pie4Weebl]

I'm going to join the pro-mover bandwagon. Arguably I've benefited dramatically from my moving light experience and more so my console experience since graduating. The thing I think you (and most of academia) is missing is that these days less and less lighting folks are training to be proper regional theatre folks. People are getting jobs more often in places like cruise ships which have movers and things like that. In the year since I graduated I've done a national concert tour and a national theatre tour, both of which I used my moving light experience on. Next month I'm being flown to China to program a rig of 60 moving lights for a production of fame on an MA, all just out side of a year of graduating. If I didn't have the strong moving light experience I did, I wouldn't be able to get any of these gigs.

Now, I'm aware my experiences are not going to be typical, but let's look at the smaller example of the gig I am working on this weekend. On the crew there is another young guy, I think he's two years older than me, (so out of school for three years instead of one). We both came to this he company about the same time and both wanted to run consoles(he started in feb and I started in may). But, I came in, and didn't need to be trained on the MA to program a show so they were willing to phase me in faster, and he is still waiting for them to find the time to train him. He might be waiting a while.

While there are places who will train people in movers and bring them up through the ranks, I've found all of my bigger "jumps" in the type of jobs I get have been people who need a guy in a pinch and don't have time to train, so being able to say you have that experience is a competitive advantage over the guy who hasn't. Even for smaller gigs with only a small amount of movers, I think if a potential employer is looking at two resumes, I think the guy with a little mover experience will win over the guy with none.

I agree with soundlight, 4 Mac 700's are a great starting point for students to learn with, and just because you have them doesn't mean the kids have to be able to use them in every show. You can still teach good conventional practice when you own movers, and capital purchases are easier than having to get extra budget to do a mover rental a few times a year.

 

[soundlight]

I think that one of the most important things here is rental budget vs. capital purchases. That rental budget may not always be there in the long run. Also, I think that the repair & maintenance budget is a bit off. You should budget for lamps, yes, but with a lot of higher end movers - MAC700 profiles especially - as long as you clean the fixture out as specified in the maintenance chart, don't fill it up with haze oil, and keep it powered on for 10 minutes after lamping it off, you should have years not months between repairs. I work in a rental house right now and our inventory of MAC700 Profiles get beat up bad from time to time. They are our most reliable moving light by leaps and bounds. Very much moreso than V*Ls.

I also agree with Pie4Weebl on two important points: 1) Yes, you can get the experience on the job in the future, but that may block your career path at some points. 2) A lot of jobs that folks are getting right out of college now ask for moving light experience as a qualifying point. And if it's not a qualifying point it can be a very strong point in your favor. With many regional theaters renting or purchasing movers these days, I think that even the regional theater argument begins to fall apart - between two otherwise equal candidates, both recently out of college, the theater is probably going to hire the one with moving light experience if the theater has moving lights.

Let me be clear - I think that a couple of I-Cues, rotators, scrollers, &c are an important part of a college theater inventory and I think that there should also be a sufficient conventional inventory and a good console in place before movers - however, you don't need an army of gear that fails just as easily the parts of a moving light that they replace. Scrollers and i-cues and rotators all have motors, too, and they do go bad. Power supplies and motor control boards and seachangers all have control electronics in them too, and they do go bad. I was lucky to get experience on just about everything in college. Movers, scrollers, i-cues, right arms, rotators, filmfx units, LED fixtures, a couple different breeds of console and more than enough conventionals. Our dance plot had about 400 fixtures in it at one point including the 6 Intellabeams, 2 Martin 518s I grabbed from another source, and the 4 rented VL3000s.

 

[mstaylor]

I agree that it is important to learn all aspects of lighting while in school. If you are going to be a designer then owning or renting makes no difference. If you are learning to program or to be a more generalized technician then the argument can be different. All the major boards have OLEs than can be downloaded and practiced on before ever touching a real board. To me it makes better sense to have an Ion or Eos for the theatre productions, then rent a MA or Hog for dance troups or talent shows to give experience in both worlds. I don't think anyone is saying you shouldn't learn movers in school, just buying is not always a good idea.

 

[LXPlot]

I also agree with Pie4Weebl on two important points: 1) Yes, you can get the experience on the job in the future, but that may block your career path at some points. 2) A lot of jobs that folks are getting right out of college now ask for moving light experience as a qualifying point. And if it's not a qualifying point it can be a very strong point in your favor. With many regional theaters renting or purchasing movers these days, I think that even the regional theater argument begins to fall apart - between two otherwise equal candidates, both recently out of college, the theater is probably going to hire the one with moving light experience if the theater has moving lights.

Even though this may very well be true, I'd like to point out that most liberal arts schools are training their students to know a lot of things about a lot of things and go to grad school. Chances are, the students that are touching the movers will be applying to a school with nice big moving light inventories after they graduate from this school, and if they aren't, they should have probably chosen somewhere else.

 

[Footer]

I think that one of the most important things here is rental budget vs. capital purchases. That rental budget may not always be there in the long run. Also, I think that the repair & maintenance budget is a bit off. You should budget for lamps, yes, but with a lot of higher end movers - MAC700 profiles especially - as long as you clean the fixture out as specified in the maintenance chart, don't fill it up with haze oil, and keep it powered on for 10 minutes after lamping it off, you should have years not months between repairs. I work in a rental house right now and our inventory of MAC700 Profiles get beat up bad from time to time. They are our most reliable moving light by leaps and bounds. Very much moreso than V*Ls.

I also agree with Pie4Weebl on two important points: 1) Yes, you can get the experience on the job in the future, but that may block your career path at some points. 2) A lot of jobs that folks are getting right out of college now ask for moving light experience as a qualifying point. And if it's not a qualifying point it can be a very strong point in your favor. With many regional theaters renting or purchasing movers these days, I think that even the regional theater argument begins to fall apart - between two otherwise equal candidates, both recently out of college, the theater is probably going to hire the one with moving light experience if the theater has moving lights.

Let me be clear - I think that a couple of I-Cues, rotators, scrollers, &c are an important part of a college theater inventory and I think that there should also be a sufficient conventional inventory and a good console in place before movers - however, you don't need an army of gear that fails just as easily the parts of a moving light that they replace. Scrollers and i-cues and rotators all have motors, too, and they do go bad. Power supplies and motor control boards and seachangers all have control electronics in them too, and they do go bad. I was lucky to get experience on just about everything in college. Movers, scrollers, i-cues, right arms, rotators, filmfx units, LED fixtures, a couple different breeds of console and more than enough conventionals. Our dance plot had about 400 fixtures in it at one point including the 6 Intellabeams, 2 Martin 518s I grabbed from another source, and the 4 rented VL3000s.

Both of you guys attended BFA training programs designed to produce people that can go out and work. The OPs program is not that way. Its designed for strong fundamentals that will later be built on.

 

[Esoteric]

I'm going to join the pro-mover bandwagon. Arguably I've benefited dramatically from my moving light experience and more so my console experience since graduating. The thing I think you (and most of academia) is missing is that these days less and less lighting folks are training to be proper regional theatre folks. People are getting jobs more often in places like cruise ships which have movers and things like that. In the year since I graduated I've done a national concert tour and a national theatre tour, both of which I used my moving light experience on. Next month I'm being flown to China to program a rig of 60 moving lights for a production of fame on an MA, all just out side of a year of graduating. If I didn't have the strong moving light experience I did, I wouldn't be able to get any of these gigs.

Now, I'm aware my experiences are not going to be typical, but let's look at the smaller example of the gig I am working on this weekend. On the crew there is another young guy, I think he's two years older than me, (so out of school for three years instead of one). We both came to this he company about the same time and both wanted to run consoles(he started in feb and I started in may). But, I came in, and didn't need to be trained on the MA to program a show so they were willing to phase me in faster, and he is still waiting for them to find the time to train him. He might be waiting a while.

While there are places who will train people in movers and bring them up through the ranks, I've found all of my bigger "jumps" in the type of jobs I get have been people who need a guy in a pinch and don't have time to train, so being able to say you have that experience is a competitive advantage over the guy who hasn't. Even for smaller gigs with only a small amount of movers, I think if a potential employer is looking at two resumes, I think the guy with a little mover experience will win over the guy with none.

I agree with soundlight, 4 Mac 700's are a great starting point for students to learn with, and just because you have them doesn't mean the kids have to be able to use them in every show. You can still teach good conventional practice when you own movers, and capital purchases are easier than having to get extra budget to do a mover rental a few times a year.

This was my experience as well. My first tour as a LD came from being on a previous tour and the LD getting sick on some bad food, and the production manager asking if anyone knew how to program a HOGII before calling in a local guy. I did, I took over for a little while, and on the next tour I got on I got on as a programmer/LD. And I was in a Liberal Arts BA program, not a BFA.