Lets talk about lighting design....

[Charc]

1:40:00.00?

Ouch. Something tells me your hourly wage is significantly higher than my last place of employment ($3.36/hr).

 

[Sean]

It might not get any better in college though. THe tech teacher spends a LOT of money on the set and we end up getting about 5 lamps per run. Now at 1.5 lamps blowing per preformance or rehearsal, that gives us about 3 1/3 days of lamps. We have a full tech week so 4 Rehearsals in the space and them 7-10 preformances so that gives us 11-15 shows/rehearsals which require 1.5 lamps each. That means I need between 16.5 and 22.5 lamps per run. If I get 5 lamps, that means I am short 11.5 to 17.5 lamps per run.

Man, what are you doing to your lamps???

Are you buying 115v or 120v lamps? Have you metered your power (with load attached)? What kind of dimmers?

We regularly run 400-600 unit shows, and lose maybe 3-5 lamps during a tech week. Once we're running, we lose maybe 1 lamp every 3-5 performances....that kind of really depends on A: the size of the plot, and B: the type of show. Shows with battles, storms, etc tend to suffer from all the flashing, etc.

I suspect that either the lamps aren't being handled properly, or you're getting more voltage at the fixture than the lamps are rated for.

--Sean

 

[photoatdv]

It might not get any better in college though. THe tech teacher spends a LOT of money on the set and we end up getting about 5 lamps per run. Now at 1.5 lamps blowing per preformance or rehearsal, that gives us about 3 1/3 days of lamps. We have a full tech week so 4 Rehearsals in the space and them 7-10 preformances so that gives us 11-15 shows/rehearsals which require 1.5 lamps each. That means I need between 16.5 and 22.5 lamps per run. If I get 5 lamps, that means I am short 11.5 to 17.5 lamps per run.

Needless to say, we have a lot of units that get stripped every show. Then, when we hang the next show, we discover that at least a few units don't have lamps in them(we put the cap back on the unit after taking the lamp so the working caps don't get mixed with the broke ones). So I start the next show with even fewer lamps. I actually got them to buy 8 lamps between 2 orders this time because I had no more units to strip that didn't have EHD's in them. EHD's dn't blend the greated when everything else has FLK's. The EHD's are surviving relics from when we had analog dimmers that blew up about 5 years ago.

That sounds familiar. My school's theory is 'the techies will find a way to make it work, they're good at that'. So far I have not discovered a way to make lamps out of thin air. Though I have pieced working fixtures together from masses of broken ones. Oh and pulled lamps out of bad ones to use in good ones. My school hasn't purchased lamps in 2 years. (A few performing groups have though) I do keep finding good lamps stashed behind stuff and in random places.

 

[Les]

You might be able to make lamps out of an old pickle jar. lol

 

[TheSlowPoisoner]

I suppose there has to be some way of making that sort of plotting work, but it does seem a little nonsensical. I agree about the faces, as well, it looks terrible. At least as far as I've ever seen. On a high school production of a play called Honk I saw once, the LD had used blue and what appeared to be a chocolate color (he didn't know what color the gels were, he just put them up), which had a sort of sickening, dizzying effect on me when anyone moved. I was a little under the weather when I saw that, though. It luckily only looked horrible when everyone was still. I later found out that he, too, had put up the cools on one side and the warms on the other, and also had actually been trained as an electrician and ended up at his post due to the original LD and her trainee leaving due to a conflict with the director. That made me feel a little better, but still....

 

[TheSlowPoisoner]

That sounds familiar. My school's theory is 'the techies will find a way to make it work, they're good at that'. So far I have not discovered a way to make lamps out of thin air. Though I have pieced working fixtures together from masses of broken ones. Oh and pulled lamps out of bad ones to use in good ones. My school hasn't purchased lamps in 2 years. (A few performing groups have though) I do keep finding good lamps stashed behind stuff and in random places.

From what my mentor told me, the high school in which I did the lighting once had a technical theatre teacher. *gasp* I know! I don't know how it is in the rest of the country, but as far as Nevada is concerned, I've never heard of another school that had anything but a general theatre teacher, most of which know little to nothing about the technical side of theatre at all (my first director, for instance, didn't even know how to turn on the lights, though she did know where the switch to turn the board on was). Anyway, Mr. M's first act as TD was to hide two of cases of lamps that were ordered upon the opening of the school and say that they had been lost. To the day that I left high school, nine years after the school opened, we still had a little less than half a case of lamps hiding in the catwalk for emergencies, as the lights that we had were surprisingly efficient where lamps were concerned, and the school was rather lax on accounting for where our funds were being spent (For example, we once bought a mini-fridge for the booth and hid it in the costume budget). Of course, we were putting a few extra in the boxes when we could, as well, but the system works relatively well if you can manage it.