Your Favorite Tech Theater Lesson

[TheaterEd]

Students, Graduates, Teachers, and anyone else who has taken a tech theater class. What was your favorite activity that would work in a high school classroom? Could be something simple that solidified a concept for you, or just that you got to build something extra cool! I get to build my own curriculum for next year and I would love to be able to provide my students with a memorable and productive semester.

My personal favorite lesson was sorting M&M's underneath differently gelled lights. Really helped solidify the concept of how light works and sparked my interest in stage lighting.

What's Yours?

 

[cmckeeman]

learning knots, i don't know why but that was probably my favorite lesson.

 

[TheaterEd]

I did a check today, I still remember the tech olympics knots! Was there any one knot tying activity that stuck with you?

 

[ryanswiftjoyner]

Cable races. A bracket style tourney of the quickest AND cleanest audio or lighting cable wrap. Have the two students coiling the same type and length of cable, winner moves on. Coiling cable will be essential for any future techies and this is a fun way to teach the whole class and get them hands on experience with it. Just make sure you have more than 1 judge or things can get ugly, haha

 

[StNic54]

For me the most useful exercise goes as follows: use available funding for your tech class to purchase connectors and a cable spool, then teach your class as an assignment how to properly build cables. Depending on how many students you have per semester or year, and depending on how many sizes you have them build, a 1 day assignment can greatly increase your cable stock without affecting your department budget, or labor costs either.

 

[AlecIrwin]

My teacher was a genius. The program at my school was very small, and I was actually one of the only technicians around for that day, but before I had virtually any experience with such systems, he dropped a 12 channel Sound Craft mixer, an amplifier, a CD player, and a set of speakers, and said "Set it up." He made it a point to help me as little as possible, but being forced to learn in such an environment really sparked my confidence for lessons to come. Programming the light board was also a great one, my friend and I would have competitions in writing the coolest effect for my school's ETC Element board. When in doubt, depending on your curriculum, we also used to use Karaoke as an excuse to work with mixing vocals and learning ducking and similar concepts. Any lecture pertaining to sound has always been my favorite.

I feel like this has been a scattered answer. My teacher used the concept of "Wow them with something they have never seen before, then explain it so that they realize it is something they could easily do too." He would bring in a moving head, put it on a table, have us watch it spin around and cycle the Gel and Gobo wheels, and then say, "All I am doing is moving this fader up and down. See? This is the PAN, and this one is the TILT..." And so forth. That was always really effective.

 

[LavaASU]

What level are you teaching?

A cool one for younger kids is making a flashlight. I did that with some 3V leds, half dead AAs from mics, aluminum foil and gaff. I can figure out how and give you instructions if interested.

Learning how to safely use multimeters is useful and important. **If you are allowed to do this**, shock pens/flashlights/toys are great for teaching about resistance and the one hand rule.

 

[Txtech]

My high school program was only a few years old, and we were on our third telecom director/teacher in ffice years, but we still had a program that was pretty well respected nationally because we were able to actually have a varsity tech crew that our TD could work with, and we always did well at whatever contest or festival we went to compete at. That said, most of our lessons weren't really lessons, because we were constantly working on the seven or eight shows we did each year and the two dozen or so smaller gigs that our school sponsored or the department helped us get. Our lessons were more taught by older technicians on-the-job, rather than actual classroom lessons, and most of us feel that we were better prepped for college theatre because f that. And most of our lessons were frighteningly unsafe in retrospect, but they were effective. In building a practical onstage, one of our electricians taught the importance of a ground by wiring a battery to the metal pylon and letting anyone who tried to wire it shock themselves. But I firmly believe that any training that students get while working will stay with them much better than any classroom instruction, aside from the very basics. I know that most programs don't have as many opportunities as we did, but any practical instruction will help.

 

[JLNorthGA]

Taking apart Altman 360Q instruments and cleaning and servicing them. Not difficult - but it helps you really understand the physics of the lamps and how they work.

 

[RickR]

Taking apart Altman 360Q instruments and cleaning and servicing them. Not difficult - but it helps you really understand the physics of the lamps and how they work.

I did one like that that really stuck. Between shows- here clean these FOH that haven't been touched in 5 years. The only instruction was to use alcohol to clean the glass parts.

 

[TheaterEd]

I just got done teaching a sound unit, and I feel like a lot of the information just went zooming over my classes head. I think I'm going to try AlecIrwin's idea and do use Karaoke to introduce them to sound mixing. Does anyone remember any really basic ways to introduce sound systems and mixing to beginners?

 

[alyx92]

At UCF, we do "The Rockband Project". Our professor gave a lecture about the project at LDI this year, here's the quote from the LDI website.

A Microsoft Xbox 360 Game Console and Harmonix’s Rock Band video game, plus lighting, projection, and sound gear, provide a unique platform for the fundamentals of concert lighting, from drafting, maintenance, and troubleshooting automation to DMX control, timing designs to sound, and moving light programming.

Basically, a group of actors, techs, or whoever wants to can get together to form a "band" to play a song from the Rockband game. The techs participating in the project design a rock n roll show plot in advance, and load it in the morning of the event, giving the feel of a real touring show. The projector or screen that displays the game is flown out behind the audience, giving the audience the "illusion" that the people on stage are actually performing. We usually turn on "no-fail" mode on the game. Then the designers busk (or pre-program if there's time) and we have a big rock show to end the semester.

It's a lot of fun, but it teaches a lot about loading in a big show, and designing for rock n roll!

 

[TheaterEd]

At UCF, we do "The Rockband Project". Our professor gave a lecture about the project at LDI this year, here's the quote from the LDI website.



Basically, a group of actors, techs, or whoever wants to can get together to form a "band" to play a song from the Rockband game. The techs participating in the project design a rock n roll show plot in advance, and load it in the morning of the event, giving the feel of a real touring show. The projector or screen that displays the game is flown out behind the audience, giving the audience the "illusion" that the people on stage are actually performing. We usually turn on "no-fail" mode on the game. Then the designers busk (or pre-program if there's time) and we have a big rock show to end the semester.

It's a lot of fun, but it teaches a lot about loading in a big show, and designing for rock n roll!

I had not thought about incorporating Rock band. I have some kids that will definitely not sing, so this will help keep everyone involved. Thanks for the idea.

 

[wvutenex]

My personal favorite lesson was sorting M&M's underneath differently gelled lights. Really helped solidify the concept of how light works and sparked my interest in stage lighting.

I vaguely remember doing this in college, are there specific colors that work best for this? More to the lesson than the challenges of sorting the colors?

 

[TheaterEd]

I also have them observe the effects of the light on the different colors so they start thinking about how colored lighting can effect what we see on stage. I'm not sure on the exact numbers, but I believe I use r68 or any other saturated blue, r 26 or another saturated red. Also r 57 is nice just to show the difference between it and an un gelled light. the finale is r 382 congo-blue. It will only allow them to differentiate between blue and everything else. If anyone has another gel suggestion I would love to have more.

After this, I do my post lesson wrap-up with the students with all of us standing underneath red cyc lights. Once their eyes are saturated I turn on the lights and have them observe how their eyes adjust. It worked great last time since there was an orange ladder on stage.

 

[cdub260]

For me it was my first lesson on coiling cable. I was given a brief demonstration and walkthrough of how to do it. Once my teacher was satisfied that I had a handle on the technique, he took over to a two ft. high and four ft. diameter pile of tangled mic cables and told to coil them. Needless to say, twenty four years later, the lesson has stuck with me.

 

[TheaterEd]

For me it was my first lesson on coiling cable. I was given a brief demonstration and walkthrough of how to do it. Once my teacher was satisfied that I had a handle on the technique, he took over to a two ft. high and four ft. diameter pile of tangled mic cables and told to coil them. Needless to say, twenty four years later, the lesson has stuck with me.

Yeah, My first lesson is always how to coil cables. They have a hard time getting their volunteer hours in if they can't do that.

 

[TheaterEd]

I vaguely remember doing this in college, are there specific colors that work best for this? More to the lesson than the challenges of sorting the colors?

Just an update on this:
We bought LED lights at the end of last year and I am using them for this lesson today. ours are RGBWUV fixtures. The full Red, Blue, and Green are WAY more effective and the UV is very interesting. With UV, it was very hard to distinguish the colors when the M&Ms were on white paper, but if you hold them in your hand it was very easy to tell the difference.

The only gel that beat the LED for this lesson was the Congo Blue. Congo Blue is still the hardest.

 

[BillConnerFASTC]

I thinking building things with goop - no longer asbestos furnace cement please - but paper machier and celastic (is that no longer allowed either) and stuff where you are into goop up to at least your elbows. Primal soup stuff, and usually the results are admirable.

 

[Brandofhawk]

Well... for anyone who comes to this thread in the future as it is quite old at this point,
The best thing I did in my tech theatre class in high school was the first assignment project. We had to build a 3d sculpture on who we were as an individual. A 3d representation of what we saw as us.

Only rules were it had to fit in the door and stand up on its own.

Then after the first week and introductions when we finished them, we spent two class periods going over all of them and trying to guess what the person was suggesting and such.

It was great as a getting to know your fellow class mates as well as understanding that design and art takes multiple mediums and that you can take one or more things and put them together in a way that really is different from anything ever seen before. That I think is what theatre is all about, different departments of people working togeather on one final outcome. The scenic guys have to build the set that painters paint so electrics can light for an actor to stand on, amplified by sound with projections behind them.

A project in college I did was that we had to build something that would light up and cast shadows and create a feeling. Very vague but our class was small so we got away with a lot of things. The night before I had almost no time to actually do the project, so I took an old box and threw some blue rope light in the bottom. I had an old plot posted on cardboard that I cut up and made little boxes that went around the outside, stuck vellum paper over the rope light in the bottom and stuck a small C6 night light at the top of the box. It turned into a subconscious representation of my light plot, hung the night before. Go figure. Here are some photos of it if you are interested. I liked how it ended up looking!