Thanks Colin! I live about 45 minutes west of Boston. I've looked into several local theaters and so far I've been told that they're looking for someone at least 18 years old. I guess I need to keep looking and reaching out until I find the right one.
Thanks for the tip on equipment. I'm currently working on convincing the school to replace our lighting board which only works ~50% of the time, but we do have a decent audio board and I'm trying to teach myself how to EQ.
Is it safe/possible/reasonable to disassemble and
play around with old lighting fixtures? I haven't tried anything yet because there aren't any adults that know anything and I don't want to hurt myself or the equipment. The school has a couple dozen lekos spots and
par cans, several of which don't work.
Okay we're not far apart. I'll PM you, and you should definitely take Ethan up on his offer.
Yes, good, learn about EQ. Are you solid on what's "upstream" of that already though? It's a crap in, crap out kind of thing, so got to start with correct
microphone use and
gain structure on the way to the EQ
stage. The basic concepts are easy to learn online, and then need lots of real world experience to master. If you want to be competent at live audio, perhaps the most useful skill to master in the realm of EQ is frequency recognition. You want to be able to identify by ear a frequency that you hear too much of (either as screaming
feedback or more subtly when shaping the sound) and also be able to identify by ear a frequency that you're not hearing enough of. Do an internet search for something like "EQ frequency training" and you'll get lots of results with websites and apps that will test you by playing back random frequencies while you try to cut them out on a graphic EQ. That, plus sending good quality recorded music through your
console's EQ and listening to what frequencies sound like boosted and cut will get you as prepared as you can be to start doing it for real.
It is definitely reasonable to disassemble lighting fixtures to a degree. I'd say don't do so with the electrical components if you don't have competent instruction and supervision by a human in charge of that at your school, but that's easy to set aside and still do some good things with the fixtures. Learning how to clean and maintain lighting fixtures is a valuable skill and will help you get more from the equipment you have. There's info on CB about this, probably on YouTube too, and any
conventional fixture is a pretty low risk thing to explore on your own in terms of tear-down and re-build. Not much you can't fix with simple
hand tools and some cleaning supplies. Just pull out the (unplugged) lamp assembly, look it over for obvious red flags like busted lamps and exposed or broken
wire (take that stuff out of service and clearly
mark it as such, and report to your appropriate authority) and then set it aside and deal with the rest of the
fixture. Learn to disassemble and clean everything and especially lenses, get shutters sliding smoothly again, and if the lamp assembly is in good working order then turn the cleaned reassembled
fixture on and learn how to
bench focus your lekos before moving on to learning how to focus each
fixture type on
stage accurately and quickly. My college students tend to struggle with the
manual tasks surrounding lighting production - muscling the pan or tilt loose, or finessing a
shutter cut or
barrel run. Practice all these things to get good with your hands and eyes and ears and you'll find yourself frequently the most useful person in the room.
Now, you say several fixtures don't work at all, so that's something electrical anywhere from a lamp replacement to a full
socket replacement and re-wire. These issues too are almost always easy to safely identify by sight without plugging in potentially faulty equipment, so you can certainly work on figuring out what needs fixing and make a recommendation. Then it's a judgement
call by somebody more in charge than you about who they're comfortable with making those repairs. If the answer is nobody, then you can still often buy the entire lamp assembly fully wired (as for your spots) so that there's no electrical work to do - just screw it onto the
fixture and
plug in. Costs a lot less than a new
fixture, but then again some old fixtures you might decide aren't worth it.