Student Projects for Lighting Design Class

[RonHebbard]

One thing I would suggest from when I worked in a theatre as the MLO and worked with guest designers.

Have one program and one call the looks they want, 1-4 at 50 etc, without their plot in front of them. The amount of time I have had wasted by designers that didn't know what they had in their plot was amazing to me. It would also teach them the delicate art of making changes without frustrating the programmer. While I usually didn't mind a bit of OT programming I would usually get frustrated when a 12 hour day turned into a 20 hour day programming, with extremely minute changes to a dance show.

@gbirdsall DANCE SHOWS!! (Arrrrgh!!) Once upon a time in a previous life I was the IA Head LX in 750 theatre with an LP90 for its LX board. Spring time arrived along with dance season and all the husbands that are voluntold to handle tech. One year I found myself programming for a fellow who insisted he had all of his cues figured out in advance to SAVE US TIME. After a few hours of dutifully programming precisely as instructed we had four or five hundred cues in the board and he was less than half way down his clipboard of paper. He was programming chases as never ending sequences of cues, NOT CHASES but series of individual cues. He absolutely swore that we needed to program his way since he had it all fully figured out to save time. Oh how I wanted to show him how quickly we could've programmed chases as chases with a variety of steps and a variety of chase directions and types and how effortlessly we could've changed tempos. He and his wife were paying my wages, my overtime wages.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard

 

[Colin]

@gbirdsall Spring time arrived along with dance season and all the husbands that are voluntold to handle tech. One year I found myself programming for a fellow who insisted he had all of his cues figured out in advance to SAVE US TIME. After a few hours of dutifully programming precisely as instructed we had four or five hundred cues in the board and he was less than half way down his clipboard of paper. He was programming chases as never ending sequences of cues, NOT CHASES but series of individual cues. He absolutely swore that we needed to program his way since he had it all fully figured out to save time. Oh how I wanted to show him how quickly we could've programmed chases as chases with a variety of steps and a variety of chase directions and types and how effortlessly we could've changed tempos. He and his wife were paying my wages, my overtime wages.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard

Been there!

I don't do a programming team/communication exercise explicitly in my course, but they definitely get taught beyond cue-per-effect-step level. The five major projects assigned all have a programming component. The first four aren't under major time pressure - they use offline editor to cue two paper projects, and program their own cues (on their own time) at the console for two small fully realized projects. The final project is a design for a piece of choreography in the semester's dance concert, which they have a week to prep for and a half hour tech slot to cue and run with student board op and SM. It has to happen at semester's end due to the dance company's rehearsal needs. It would be nice to get it done with sooner so students could apply copious lessons learned (usually not as much about syntax and strategy as preparation) to subsequent class projects.

 

[Colin]

I assign several pretty run of the mill projects - the picture/painting analysis one, a song, a play, a dance piece. The two I see the most development across though are back to back designs of static looks for the same literary or historical character. I do my best to make a diverse list in advance and everyone picks a name out of a hard hat and researches, conceives, plots, installs, programs and presents one lighting look using a classmate as a model in our black box. For the first project, they get access to whatever spare inventory isn't running a show (not extravagant but enough) and color and gobo stock (enough). The second project, which I list as TBA in the syllabus until the first has been presented, asks them to re-design for the same character using no color. I can imagine this working by eliminating any other controllable quality of light too, but color is the nearly universal first crutch for young lighting designers so it's a very useful struggle for them to do without it. They can still use texture and diffusion, and amber shift, and different temperature lamps, but have to make friends with "white" and non-color qualities of light, and they have to find multiple (typically very different) approaches to the same material. It broadens their visual vocabularies and deepens research and concept development, like others have said in this thread regarding imposed limitations. We're past half LED here as of October, which starts me pondering the future of the project.

 

[Moonthink]

Slightly off-topic, but related I think... I've been doing a study of color temperature and simulating daylight in various conditions and time of day.

I also do photography/video as a hobby, and recently purchased a few led flat panel variable color temperature fixtures. They are adjustable from 10-100% brightness, and from 2200k to 6800k. I have a large room at home that gets good daylight on one half of the room, but kind of dark and shadowy on the other side. So on my holiday/vacation/off-days, I turn them on -- on the dark side of the room, and try to simulate the natural lighting coming in on the light side. Of course this changes from early morning to sunset, and on sunny days/cloudy days/snowy days etc. Sometimes when it is too dark/drab/depressing outside, I try to simulate better conditions. Having multiple lights allows me to use one as a direct source, one as a fill, and another to color shadows. It has been both fun and informative.