Hey, I thought we could share pictures of our shows...

[icewolf08]

Well folks, it is that time of year again. Our first show of the season is up and running. We are opening with the regional theatre premier of "In the Heights." Lighting by Paul Miller, sets and costumes by G.W. Mercier. Below are a couple photos from the invited dress rehearsal. The set was still a little unfinished but we got there. If you want to see more, just click any of the images to be taken to the gallery.

As always, questions, comments, and criticism are welcome!


"In the Heights"


"Respira (Breathe)"


"96,000"


"Sunrise"


"Carnaval del Barrio"

There are lots more if you want to see them.

 

[jlouisstahl]

My very first lighting design job at 15 years old. It was a basic choir show for my school but required 67 individual looks for the 67 different songs. Ended up with a total of 157 cues.
The pictures aren't fantastic but let me know what you think!

(Colors of the wind)

(I'll Make A Man Out Of You)

(Zero to Hero)

(Davy Crockett)

(Zorro)

(You'll be in my heart)

(house open)

(I'll make a man out of you scrim up)
This one was my favorite

 

[Aman121]

Looks good! Were you using any LEDS or other toys or was that all conventional? I wish we got some proper cyc lights for our main space at school, 2 colors worth of scoops only does so much!

 

[zmb]

Brilliant idea having the vertical strips and the other thing of fabric to add another dimension. I've designed two musical revues and those have easily been the toughest shows to design having come up with a color palette usable for the whole show and trying to avoid "white light on" and "white light off" for some numbers. And the cue numbers pile up quickly with revues, I got up to 141 this year

 

[lwinters630]

My very first lighting design .... let me know what you think!

I like your creativity! I bet you worked very hard at them. Some good work with creating mood and moving the audiences eye to what you want them to see. The foot lights are nice for your texture, consider less is more. If you used only two foot lights at less power your shadows would be clearer with more contrast. Also, when possible add back light, it helps reveal three dimension form with rounding and depth so people are not flat. Set it slightly behind but above the actors, about 60 deg. balance the look between front and back. IE try 70% front and full back, you will start to see a slight glow around the head and shoulders.

Looks like you have some LED pars. once I took a roll of aluminum screen material 30" wide, crumpled it and hung it vertical (like your white banners in your pic). put a LED above and below shooting straight up or a few at slight up angle. It will give you some really cool fx.

Keep posting your pics.

 

[jlouisstahl]

Looks good! Were you using any LEDS or other toys or was that all conventional? I wish we got some proper cyc lights for our main space at school, 2 colors worth of scoops only does so much!

Yikes that is tough! CYC cells are the best except they take up SO MUCH SPACE on your pipe and virtually suck up all your circuits.
Yes I had a down wash of LED PAR's. Very interesting to actually be in charge of for the first time instead of just hanging, powering, and addressing.

 

[jlouisstahl]

Brilliant idea having the vertical strips and the other thing of fabric to add another dimension. I've designed two musical revues and those have easily been the toughest shows to design having come up with a color palette usable for the whole show and trying to avoid "white light on" and "white light off" for some numbers. And the cue numbers pile up quickly with revues, I got up to 141 this year

The job definitely presents it's challenges but that's the fun! I love what I do and the beauty of it all is that there's always something new to be done, some new technology being invented (LED S4 Ellipsoidal is an example. To me, it's seems like cheating ) or some new color that you find that's just..... perfect! know the feeling?

 

[jlouisstahl]

I like your creativity! I bet you worked very hard at them. Some good work with creating mood and moving the audiences eye to what you want them to see. The foot lights are nice for your texture, consider less is more. If you used only two foot lights at less power your shadows would be clearer with more contrast. Also, when possible add back light, it helps reveal three dimension form with rounding and depth so people are not flat. Set it slightly behind but above the actors, about 60 deg. balance the look between front and back. IE try 70% front and full back, you will start to see a slight glow around the head and shoulders.

Looks like you have some LED pars. once I took a roll of aluminum screen material 30" wide, crumpled it and hung it vertical (like your white banners in your pic). put a LED above and below shooting straight up or a few at slight up angle. It will give you some really cool fx.

Keep posting your pics.

Thanks! The back light was in my original plot but got cut because of time restrictions which made me very sad, so I had to make do with what I had. But yes, the foots were a bit hot.

I will definitely post more pictures! I have a dance show; big huge thing our school does, needs to be HUGE in terms of lights. Lights make a dance show, and Oklahoma (also going to be massive), coming up and I can't wait!

Last year I worked with a designer on a show (Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog) and we did that LED thing you're talking about. We used window mesh and it was gorgeous. I loved the way it created texture.

 

[Aman121]

Yikes that is tough! CYC cells are the best except they take up SO MUCH SPACE on your pipe and virtually suck up all your circuits.
Yes I had a down wash of LED PAR's. Very interesting to actually be in charge of for the first time instead of just hanging, powering, and addressing.

Yeah our system is basically what they installed back in the 50s when they built the place. Only upgrade was taking out the original auto transformer control system and putting in a colortran i96 and an encore. All wiring ad outlet bars are 50 years old and original. It gets interesting when you only have 18 plug circuits spread out over 3 electrics to play with. We also have old border lights which we can change the roundels on. Got 6 of those, each is 3 channel and hard wired in. So a total of 36 tage channels but only 18 useable for additional lights. We also have some cove lights, but no side boxes. There are outlets in the stage floor on the dimming system that I can use for side booms, but their rather spread out and you end up running miles of cable to each boom. It's definitly taught me allot about being miniamlistic when designing. I'm also the only student who really cares for tech theatre (no tech program at the school) so I've been expirementing pretty freely since 7th grade. I've gotten some cool looks with what we have, and we also often rent scrollers and led washes and such for the musical to "jazz things up" Those definitly help allot!

 

[Aakburns]

I love the go pro setup Aakburns!

Thanks!

 

[Aakburns]

I did this show last night at Rooters. Took these pictures during sound check.

The light that is on the floor in front of the kick drum I made from scratch. I plan to make 4 more of them to hang from the back truss. They look pretty nice.

 

[Pie4Weebl]

So this shoulda been my 2,000th post if I was paying attention, but I wasn't so I guess 2,001 will have to do.

I had a gig this weekend with a "you can do whatever you want with what's in the shop, but no haze" for a college dance party. I don't get blank checks like that often so I tried to have some fun. MA2 Lite driving a hippo, two 12K projectors stacked, 40 iColors, 6 Color Reaches, 4 Color Blazes, 6 Atomics and 20 S4 Pars:

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[Amishplumber]

That looks awesome dude! How much time did you spend programming for it?

 

[Pie4Weebl]

That looks awesome dude! How much time did you spend programming for it?

All said and done I had a little less than 4 hours with the rig up, and I spent about 90 minutes in the shop before hand patching everything and laying out the bitmap for the iColors in the MA.

 

[StNic54]

Nice Work - gotta love the MA

 

[LampyTom]

Hi all,

So here are a few different images from different shows.

The first few are from an old church I lit for their Christmas services last year. It's nice to do a bit of architectural stuff now and again!

Interesting white comparisons! LED white on arches, fluorescent tube in the windows and then tungsten (sunstrips) just to the right spilling form the stage!

For anybody who wants to know about kit, there were 24 Chauvet Colorado Tri-Tour LED's lighting the arches and walls, 2 sunstrips lighting the main "stage" area and then 4 S4 PARs with Cascade Scrollers and 4 Robin 300 LED's doing the roof. Control was on a Titan Mobile.


After that there are some from a picture of "Oliver!" I lit at the the local theatre.

A load of generics (as in Patt 123, Patt 743, Cantata F - No S4's here!), Some PAR 64's, 4 x S4 PARs with scrollers and 4 x 250 Entours. Programmed on a Tiger Touch with around 200 cues - who said you can't do theatre on a rock 'n' roll desk.

EDIT: It's just occurred to me how large these images are appearing! Is there a way that on the forum the image appears smaller but when clicked it links to the original image at full size? I'm sure there's a clever way of doing it - I just copied the IMG code off photobucket!

 

[sk8rsdad]

"Mary's Wedding" just closed. Here are few pictures my wife, also the director, took at the first tech rehearsal.

 

[Pie4Weebl]

I normally don't like tree gobos used like that, but that was really well done!

 

[DHSLXOP]

From my Production of "RENT." We staged it as a rock concert. Plot included 7 mac 250s, 8 scrollers, 6 mac 101s, and about 100 conventionals...controlled from a hog 3.

 

[alyx92]

From my Production of "RENT."

Looks good!