Volunteer sound design & light operator for youth Shakespeare troupe

For the last several years my children have been working their way through a local youth group that puts on a Shakespeare play every year (sometimes two plays, one by novice students and one by advanced students). As a mobile DJ, I was asked to "do the sound", i.e. provide occasional sound effects and music during scenes, and I went ahead and also played music during the many scene changes.

We rent a 150-seat community theatre (originally built as a single-screen movie theater), paying the theatre a fixed fee and handling all ticket and concession sales ourselves (prizes to the cast members who sells the most tickets). The theatre has a volunteer lighting designer who comes in a few hours at the beginning of tech week and programs in the cues on Horizon running on an ancient PC. They don't actually refocus any of the fixtures for us, but there are usually fixtures pointed at the areas we want.

They have another ancient PC running some sort of free sound software, but I always bring in my laptop with my DJ software and plug it in to the mixer.

The 24 dimmers probably don't impress you much (and last year I asked for a leaf gobo for a forest scene, but was told that all the gobos were damaged or stolen or something), but it's a lot fancier than my elementary school in the 1970s, where we would actually flip circuit breakers on and off in a subpanel -- no way to fade up or down.

With this somewhat more advanced tech, I've gotten interested enough about it to want to read more, and found a trove of useful info on this website.

Lee
 
Welcome to the Community Lee! Good to have you here. Neat to find another Horizon user such as myself.

Good to be here, thanks, Dave. I'm not really a Horizon user in the sense of knowing how to set up a show, but only in the sense of being able to run a show. I'm guessing that Horizon might be one of the better solutions for how this theater is often used: when a group rents it, a long-time theater volunteer works with the group to program light cues, and then for each performance somebody runs the cues who often has no theater experience at all (but does know how to boot up and open a named program on Windows).
 

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