Patrick's Wedding

Well I have once again neglected my duties to update this blog. Seems my myspace gets all my attention these days. But here they are at last, my photos from Patrick's Wedding. Simple design to say the least.


The room before anything has been done.








A swatch of Patrick's tartan for my color choices







The Set Designers concept of what it will look like



















Well it turned out as well as it could for an afternoon wedding. But the groom wished for a theatrical wedding and this was the best I could do competing against the sunlight. I think I did quite well, and it only cost him a bottle of Cazadores Tequila. Now that's a great designers fee. But I promise not to make that the standard.

Fantasmic & Friends

I have officially been signed off now as a followspot op for Fantasmic at Disneyland. I have to say it is one of the hardest shows I've ever spotted. I sit in a tower about 50 feet up in the air and when the wind kicks up the tower sways. I'm not afraid of falling, I use a fall arrest harness and lanyard for safety purposes, but the hard part is keeping the spot steady enough to make the pick-ups and follow the actors smoothly.

My hardest shot is Peter Pan at the top of the Columbia but since I'm new, they are letting me get away with picking him up in a wider iris and narrowing down after I come on. Eventually I'll be able to get him in a tight shot at the start and follow him when he flies down to fight Captain Hook.

I left my job at Pirates and said farewell to a lot of new friends. I know it's a risk because Disney isn't going to give a newbie a lot of work, but if I want to succeed, I need to have a clear schedule whenever they do call me for work. Financially I saved a lot of money so that if a rainy day comes along I will be ok, and I am ready for that. Plus, I am using the "free time" for my neglected friend and family duties. This weekend I'm hosting a baby shower for my niece, who is doing quite well and should be home in August after being born three months premature (Thank goodness for life-saving technology) and next weekend I am designing lights for my friends wedding up at Mt. Sac. (Gotta hate that no alcohol on school district campuses policy!) But pictures will follow if all goes to plan and it's worth putting on a portfolio. Hopefully the schools inventory is as available as they have promised and the short load in time is plenty enough.

New Job

Well today was my first official day working for The Mouse. I'm loving it so far. Great people, learning a lot, working with great technology. My first day was 12 hours long (6am to 6:30pm) with a 30 minute lunch. Built truss, hung some light Mac 700 washes, profiles and Mac 2k's. Fun times.

I'm hoping this job works out. So far, the hours aren't great, not enough that is... But if it doesn't work out... There's always the cruise ships.

Tiffany and I went to Fish in a Bottle for some great sushi afterward to celebrate. She's got a lot more hours than me though because she's been placed on the training crews for Fantasmic. Grrrr....

And yet more pics

Final Dress

Light Sings - The pit rises with the scaffolding on the pit





Light Sings - Music changes with the 'sunrise'






Monologues - Each character has a short quote or thought that gives insight to who all of the characters are.






Dream Babies - Nora sings her child to sleep as other look on in enjoyment of the pretty night






Hear My Song - Not part of the original show, added by the director as a way to tie the episodic show together






Monologues - As the scaffolding revolves, a new character is revealed and they talk about their made up ties to celebrities. 'I am the long lost son of Paul McCartney..."






Hear My Song - Final pose before bows

Show opens tonight at 8pm on the dot. Door lock and entry will not be available to anyone until intermission after show starts. Tickets are free

The Me Nobody Knows

Campus Theater
Fullerton College
321 E. Chapman Ave.
Fullerton, CA 92831

tech rehearsal

I arrived at the theater around 11:30am today and began working on notes before I finished programming. First thing I did was change the gobos in onstage gobo wash. I changed to a circular foliage gobo instead of the squared off sponge looking ones. This helped with the coverage problem I seemed to be having. A good bit of advice that I remembered: "Don't shutter if you absolutely don't have to."

Next I sat to fix a few patch problems and found my wonderful friends had already jumped in to fix some. (Where would I be without them?)

Finally it came time to start programming and rather than move on, I decided to jump backwards and fix previous cues I had pondered on over the night. I guess things didn't look so bad afterall. I decided to fore go the stop watch and just have the stage manager call as many cues as possible. No more nice Roxie. :-)

And after finishing cues (30 minutes before tech was supposed to start) I sat down to meet my crew. I placed the girls with the most spot experience on the followspots, and the sound girl who decided to run lights for this show on the light board. I'm really happy with how things are going. I got a lot of compliments with "buts" attached.

"The cue looks great, but..."

Mostly, the director had specific colors in mind (no problem with color faders) and he wanted a lot more movement and changes in two of the numbers. Well, without a hog I guess I'll be programming a hell of a lot more tomorrow. Good thing I can go to the hundreth of a decimal in programming. I have several cues like "22, 22.1, 22.11"

Thanks ETC! :-)

blah

So I started programming my show today. And my first impression is that it looks awful. I'm hating my color choices and I'm having so much difficulty learning how to program with tracking. I've always programmed in cue only because I never used intelligent lights. Now I find myself working with technobeams and color faders and auto yokes.

Tomorrow I'll set up the fog machines and see the cues with the actual cast on stage and maybe I'll see it differently. I still have yet to meet my crew since the stage manager was kind enough to not give me a freakin contact sheet! Still! The show opens this weekend and I'm still in the dark as how to contact anyone but the director and her.

I will never again, ever work on a show that doesn't have a production manager. EVER!

Oh and the show music, which I finally got today (an hour before I started programming) sounds like some guy recorded himself playing a little casio keyboard. Blah!!!

Meeting the director

So yesterday I spent the morning up in the booth loading old shows and finding something close to house plot and what's actually up in the air, just so I can see what's actually up in the air. The problem with designing a show off a current plot is that no one usually wants to share their paperwork. I've asked several times from a friend who's the master electrician and house plot designer for the theater, but I think even he wants to protect his design and he keeps sending me stuff that helps, but doesn't quite cut it.

I asked him to send me the house plot on vectorworks. First he sent it in version 12, I had to reask for it in version 11. When it finally came, I opened it and found it was his plot of The Crucible which had also adapted house plot. Then he sent me a word document which was a poor scan of the electrics from a hand drawn plot. No info on FOH.

So yesterday's morning was well worth it just playing with the board and RFU bringing up channels and taking lots of notes. I will be spending any free time I have at work today trying to figure out how to use as many of the lights that are up in the air, and where I will switch some out or just plain take them down to make room for the 6 to 8 technos (I wish I could get a clear answer on inventory) and the 5 auto yokes (the 6th is out for repair and won't be back for probably a year, seeing as how the school district's delivery is slower than my grandmother).

And I still don't have a clue which linesets the scene designer wants. I keep asking him and the director, but they can't meet until Monday to decide that and no one wants to take a guess. So until then, I'm going to try to stick to the current electrics, which I've made clear I will not move because of time.

The meeting with Gary went wonderful. Since I attended their first blocking rehearsal I was able to write out all the opening cues of the show and so far, he loved them. He had a lot of ideas of what he wanted for certain songs and certain moments which I loved. He's not one of those directors forcing his idea of what the lights should look like, he just uses key phrases and always re-iterates that it's up to me.

For example, the song This World, he asked for lots of circular motion. I said with the technos I could have lights chasing circular and he added, "sounds great" and just said to do it however I wanted and make it as busy as possible. The next section is a series of people speaking. His idea is to create "hallways" with lights. Basically isolating a horizontal plane of the stage as the person crosses from SL to SR (or vice versa). I recommended pure side light with different colors as each hallways is revealed moving upstage along with the followspots. He said great and we moved on for an hour like that.

So now I'm off to work and taking my notebook with me and my ipod which has the old version of the show music on it so I can learn it. The new music won't be ready probably until tech rehearsal begin which blows since timing is key. So until then, I just have to keep figuring out how to finish the plot and keep the hang/focus time under 2 days without changing too much and rendering the theater useless since there are events going on in there the weekend before our show.

First rehearsal

Today was the second production meeting ever for Me Nobody Knows. I scheduled time on Friday at lunch to meet privately with the director and ask him tons of questions and listen to what he wants from lighting for the show.

The director informed us all that this show is about to open in New York as well, so I guess we'll all be keeping an eye out for how it does.

After the meeting I headed into the theater to watch the first blocking rehearsal. This helped a heap just to find out how the shows going to start. I got many of my questions answered ahead of time. Basically the show will start as follows...

main in, and hazer going
(second and third electrics are in to the deck)

Q1 preset - house lights, curtain warmers, basic worklights on stage

Q2 house to half, worklights out (overture)

Q3 fade all
first "ding ding" Main flies out in black

Q4 second set of "ding ding"
sounds in the Light Sings number cues the pit to begin rising

follow spot picks up soloist on top of center scaffold that has just
risen out of the pit filled with fog

"stars in the sky"
Q5 third electric begins to fly out and lights come up

"kids start to shout"
Q6 second electric begins to fly out and lights come up

"... and its the sun!"
Q7 Light build

Basically, you can see where I'm going. I've obviously made my description on here a lot shorter than what I actually will be doing. I took a massive amount of notes and have tons of auto-follows with color chases, bumps, etc.