I've found an empty plastic gallon milk jug on top of a 6'
mic stand makes a great
lighting dummy for ML focus.
Awesome, I've looking into making some recently, this is awesome. Thank you!
I seem to remember that Gilbert Hemsley had something like this in his class at Madison ( If anyone remembers the details - feel free to correct me). They would set up in the
black box theatre a hang with some known errors. Bad
gel color,
fixture in the wrong location, burned out lamp, incorrect patch, bad cable, twofered incorrectly
etc. Then one at a time, or in small groups, they turned the students loose to fix it.
I've heard this, and yes I do believe it was Hemsley, but I'm not positive. For those interested,
http://www.hemsleylightingprograms.com/ob/gvh/in_his_own_words/ld_interview.shtml,
http://www.hemsleylightingprograms.com/ob/gvh/remembrances/ are both great material about the man, he was a great teacher and some of why is in those articles. I've got another few articles on/with him buried in here somewhere, I'll put them up if I can find them.
Back to the original question, I have a few I do to keep things like, design, drafting, vis, programming,
etc fresh.
CAD Drafting: This year I started something new, so I will start with that. I've been, slowly, building my own set of symbols for VW: rigging, scenic, lighting. I started by making all of the
USITT ones, then moved on to more specialized ones: common
instrument symbols replacements for those I use often (for example to differentiate
altman and
strand 6x's for example), custom
instrument key
templates,
line weight scales, custom title blocks,
stock scenery that isn't in the
USITT standards.
Hand Drafting: I have been trying to keep up with my
hand drafting again, because I needed it once last year and it took me a lot longer becuase I was so out of practice. What I've been doing all season is
hand drafting
plot concepts before I put them into the computer, taking the time to ensure I do it as properly as I can. You never know when you'll need it.
Pre-Vis and Programming Practice: ESP
Vision for both, usually I'll
throw up simple rigs to
play with effects, test out gear I'll be working with, or just to
play around with alternate designs for a show. I also made up a small black box that is a 30' cube, with instruments every 4' from center. I can use it in
Vision if I'm gonna spend time in it, or just render out things in VW for quick work. I like it better than Virtual Light Lab for most things, but if I want to be really fast I will occasionally still go into VLL and just plop it down. Obviously I can only practice programming in
Vision.
Design: Best assignment I ever had was to try and light the painting
Nighthawks, not as simple as it looks to do correctly. Other than that, I have a lot of
house lamps (and some of those "
butt ugly" table lamps that are instruments, obligatory old thread reference) and what I do is move them around a lot. I might go for lots of coverage one week, and then very architecturally for a month, currently I'm rocking a lot of back and side lighting (which is driving the s/o crazy, not that my changing things constantly didn't already...). I also notice unique lighting in places, such as restaurants, or how the sun is casting shadows,
etc. Of course my favorite answer is, I like to find a light lab and just
play. Occasionally the lab is a real space, most often it's either VW or
Vision, but experimentation is key I believe. For instance I was working on projecting a sunset through the
stage and into the audience, I had some ideas for a simple way to do it, but it once everything else was taken care of with the design I went back to that sunset and tried a couple different things to get what I felt it should actually look like. After a few hours changing patterns,
gel and angles, I got pretty close to what I was going for, but I wish I would have changed some of the
gel around a little more, maybe next time I'll get even further. Lastly, look at some other peoples designs. A friend was researching Chris Parry a while ago and asked if I had any material on him, so I poured through my books and in Pilbrow's I found a few very interesting pictures of his work, one in particular that struck me was a picture from
The Plantagents it's this tiny little picture, but it just struck me as brilliant.
Sub-lastly, something I've been pondering on and off lately falls under this, though is fairly specific, as it stems from a show I designed earlier. I've been contemplating if it is possible to make a standard
house lamp appear to have the ability to turn on/off onstage without it being plugged in. Here's the catch: no
spill. The event takes place in a black box. The hose lamp cannot use any electricity and you cannot stick an
instrument inside it. The
house lamp must be independant of everything else. Taking it one step further, is it possible to make it so that it appears as though the
house lamp is the only light source in a room, in other words, if the
house lamp were sitting just off of center
stage, all the light must appear to come from there. Where do you start? Well a top light would kind of work as a start, but then you have this bright pool that catches the shade but looks unnatural. Lighting it from a just a few angles will look blotchy. The more you think about it the seemingly harder it becomes to perfectly replicate a
house lamp's lighting in a
theatre, even if you break the rules and use the reflective walls as additional sources. Then again I'm also rambling, and as it's my
vision, I may just be making it drastically harder than it actually is, but I wasn't able to
play with it too much. But it seems like a fun exercise to me.
