Category Archive - Lighting
Adventures on the Fringe….
Posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 in Lighting | 1 Comment
Another week, another show…
So, I’ve been living it up in the world of fringe theatre, and what an adventure it’s been. As I write this, a stage manager who we’ll call Pingu for the purpose of this post, is sleeping on my couch in the room next door having just come back from the Edinburgh Festival, where her motto wisely has become ‘They all lie!’
But what, I hear the strangled cry, do They all Lie about?
Well, pretty much everything. Take the venue where I’ve been working. You walk in as a lighting designer and you’re told ‘we’ve got two beta packs plugged into a Strand series desk, we’ve got maybe fifteen fresnels and five profiles, we can run cable to wherever you need it but just keep an eye out on the overall wattage you’re pumping through the desk’ and you think ‘okay, yeah, I can cope with that! No worries!’ And your director, who is basically very lovely and on it, when you asked if you could get some birdies in (because birdies are the world’s greatest lamp) has clapped his hands together and said ‘actually, I have 8 birdies already! They’re all ready to rumble, new and shiny, and they’re yours!’ and you think ‘well, nothing can go wrong now, I have 8 birdies, my day is set!’
But oh no.
They lie.
Because when you look at the dimmer racks you’re not looking at a nice, healthy pair of beta packs… you’re looking at something that’s sorta the theatrical equivalent of sitting in the front row with your hands over your eyes shouting ‘not looking, not looking, not looking!’ in order to achieve the effect of a blackout… and one of the sockets doesn’t work and another, well, Christ knows what sound that socket is making but it’s not a comfort so okay, you think, I’m down to ten dimmers but that’s fine, I’m a Young and Dynamic Designer, I can still pull this off. Thank Christ, you think, thank Christ I’ve got a strand series desk and a large number of lamps I can plug in!
Well yes…
… They Lie…
… because this desk you’re supposed to be operating the show on, once you’ve swept the cobwebs off it, is sorta the electronic equivalent of a Victorian drying mangle. And alarmingly, every time you touch a control, something hisses inside but okay, you’ve still got 8 birdies and as established, is there anything in the world that can’t be achieved with 8 birdies… (If you think I’m kidding, take a look some time at the front of the Olivier Theatre stage at the National and you will see dozens of birdies all lined up and ready to rumble… even in a theatre that seats thousands, you can never, ever, underestimate birdie-tastic power.)
… except…
… now you look…
… you’ve got 8 birdies with no clamps to attach to anything…
… and no plugs on the end…
… and actually 2 of them aren’t working…
… and now you’re looking at them you realise that they’re already paired, two birdies to one transformer each so if you were thinking of sticking a birdie on an individual control channel say bye-bye to that cunning scheme and you know what…
… whoever wired these birdies decided to wire them without an earth wire and while I’m not exactly Electrical Safety Woman, I can’t help but notice that our entire set is made of metal and you know, what with the birdies and the stove made out of lightbulbs and the number of people crawling all over this metal set perhaps, but just perhaps, we should consider sorta trying to make this set safe so that if the actors do get electrocuted at anywhere between 12-240V, they’ll only be electrocuted for a little while, instead of say, terminally. And I say this as someone who has been electrocuted by full mains wattage and very unpleasant it was too. (Although as an experience, what I remember mostly about it was lying in A and E wired up to a faulty heart monitor while a matronly voice demanded in the cubicle next to mine ‘Well where’s this child’s arm, then?’ A question which in the emergency ward of St. Thomas’ Hospital could be interpreted any number of ways… anyway, just thought I’d share that moment…)
But back to our fringe venue.
So fine, we’re down to ten dimmers, and by cunning de-rigging of other lanterns and some exciting work with cable ties, gaffer and chicken wire, we’ve rigged the 6 remaining functioning birdies and by a little dynamic doubling up of colour gel I’ve sorta got the colours I was looking for, okay, fine. Now, to get power to these lamps…
‘It’s the magician!’ exclaims the venue technician in frustration. ‘We’ve got lots of cable but the magician who does his act on Sunday nights has used it all to run to all his lamps and now we don’t have any!’
‘Define ‘don’t have any’,’ I soothe, sweetness and light in a pair of spanners.
‘Well, we’ve got all this…’ explains the technician, opening up a washing basket of the saddest limpest ends of bare stripped cable you have ever seen in your life. It was like looking at the corpses of a baby snake culling, where the cause of death was beheading.
‘Okay, okay,’ I say, radiating my best calm-under-fire-persona, ‘Have you got any 15A plugs and sockets that I can put on the end of these dead bits of cable?’
‘Um… well… let me look…. no….’
Then ensues nearly an hour of desperate scrambling and scrounging from every corner. At the LSE, my ability to scrounge was probably the only thing that dubiously qualified me as head of technical for the various societies I muddled by for – that and my capacity to access the dimmer room when Conferences forgot to leave me the key through a means that I will not repeat here… but RADA spoils a girl. I mean, like all theatres, there’s a degree of scrounging at RADA, but I have never found myself stripping the ends of lanterns and crawling around on hands and knees in search of Just… One… More… Socket!!! As a lighting designer, your cunning plans quickly get adapted and re-jigged as the true horror of the venue comes home to you, and I personally have quibbles with those lighting designers who walk into any venue and go ‘well, this is the way in which I light…’ as your cunning plan for how you may do your job quite often bears no resemblance to what is actually appropriate in the venue itself or for the production. It’s all very well having a vision, but a vision without voltage ain’t going no where…
All that said, and for all that They Lie, (and they did) we did manage to throw something together! This is both theatre’s greatest asset and curse, for it seems to be the perpetual story that no matter how bad things get, and at the point when you’re sat on the floor of your theatre at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night wiring cable together from scrap, it’s pretty bad, somehow it all comes together in the end and there’s hugs and everyone says how brilliant everyone else was and what an experience and in years to come we have competetive fringe stories down the pub and we’re all very relieved…
… but regrettably, owing to the above tendency, people sometimes forget just how close we come, every single time, to it not all coming together. So next time you find yourself sat in a fringe theatre looking at an actor on stage and you notice that some of the lanterns are perhaps being held together as much by gravity and goodwill as by screws and chains, pause for a moment, and consider the lampie…
Adventures of an ALD…
Posted on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010 in Lighting | 2 Comments
I’ve been dropped off the surface of the earth for nearly a week now, and in answer to the question why, I have a one-word answer… lighting.
I’m writing this entry at the end of a hectic bundle of days of working on a show – though a lack of internet access probably means it won’t be posted until after I get home! In these days I have been at the lighting desk at 8.30 a.m. without fail and not got off the desk until 9.30 p.m. at the earliest. Lunch has been 1 p.m.-1.20 p.m., dinner has been 5.30 p.m. to 5.50 p.m..
Or, to throw the maths at you…
That’s 39 hours of work, 24 hours of sleep, and 2 hours of rest in the last 72 hours, with the odd drop-off hour here or there explicable by the fact that when coming to this job, I remembered everything I might need except a clean towel. On the plus side, having resigned myself to an undignified time of things on this front, I have re-discovered baths in a big way. My god I’d forgotten the joy of a really hot bath after a day of labour. Point being, it’s all been a bit of a whirl.
I was hired as an Assistant Lighting Designer, with a heavy dose of programming and op-ing thrown in. Mostly, in fact, it was programming and op-ing that was supposed to be my main focus, but alas, circumstances changed and I quickly found myself sat in a tech looking at a screen showing data for a show that was approximately 40% plotted, having not seen a run or read the script. (Dear reader, ALDs do read scripts… it’s just unfortunate that these circumstances meant I hadn’t been given one, as it hadn’t been considered likely that I’d need it….) To complicate matters (again) the show was a musical, which were pretty much invented to justify the use of codeine for lighting designers’ migranes. Throw in a dimmer rack whose numbers don’t correspond to anything that you’re actually likely to ever use ever, a hazer that eats up fluid faster than a pirhanna can gobble red meat, a lighting console that was really starting to feel her age and a production process that was already heavily overruning and suddenly you begin to understand why in the last 3 days I’ve had 2 hours off. (Although it is arguable that as every minute of those 4 hours was spent shovelling down food in preparation for going back to work, this too constitutes a sort of work…)
Now! Under these circumstances your ALD is put in a tricky position… there are at any given point a number of voices all asking different things of you. A designer, for example, might have imagined a particular scene to be washed in saturated blue while the actors spin across the stage, with a touch of warm cross-light to add a certain arty depth. Yet your choreographer might have decided that what is needed is an earthy reddish hue to highlight the emotional force of the piece, and your director again may be wondering why he can’t see faces even though your choreographer said ‘less faces’ and your designer said ‘more side’ and your director said ‘more faces!’ and of course when your lighting designer actually does get back you can be fairly sure he’s going to say ‘what the hell?’ with probably very good reason and you haven’t even seen this number anyway ever in your entire life ever and your stage manager is saying ‘are we ready to move on’ and you’re looking at a blank screen and thinking… … well, I won’t put down exactly what you’re thinking, but I’m sure you can guess at the punctuation.
Naturally the sensible answer, and the only one which at the end of the day is really going to get the show teched on time is ‘piss off the lot of you, let me think for two seconds and then I’ll be able to throw up something twice as good and twice as fast as I will with you lot shouting at me’ but alas, the manners of theatre generally dictate that this isn’t what is said. And besides, you’re only the Assistant Lighting Designer, and everyone is aware that you haven’t seen a dicky bird and thus feels the need, if not the right, to tell you what is desired and did I mention the stage manager asking if we’re ready to move on and by now the cast are getting restless and there’s a problem with the hazer but you’re the only electrician in the room and the only programmer and the op and…
… you’ve got it by now, I’m sure.
But what! (I hear the strangled cry…) But what is the moral of this story?
Well, I’m glad you asked.
First, may I say, that even if it’s going to set you back the cost of a small and reasonable train fare, with a youth railcard discount no less, I would urge all theatre companies to get their ALD in to see at least one run. Just one. Just once. Especially if it’s a musical and it looks likely that you’ll be throwing the whole thing together in five and a half hours flat.
Second! When my production manager at college ran get outs, he’d always begin with the sentence… ‘wear steelies, drink lots of water’. Were ever truer words of wisdom uttered, I doubt it.
Third. If in doubt, the sentence ‘we’ll move on and get it right later’ in a stressful technical rehearsal is without fail, trouble, as that ‘later’ very rarely comes when you’re ready for it…
Fourth. Who’d have thought that one bottle of dubious haze fluid could be so much more punchier than another bottle of dubiously marked haze fluid? Not me….
Five. A good Deputy Stage Manager with a sympathetic ear, an updated version of the actor’s bloking and a willingness to only ever be five cues ahead of the approaching scene, can and will actually save your life. And did mine. Throw in a designer who somehow managed to exude calmness and understanding even when the rest of the world was running a little mad, and the heaven-sent mercy of the man who ordered us pizza at 11.30 p.m. on the night of the get out, and I almost feel tears of fatigue-induced gratitude begin to well in the corner of my already puffy eyes…
Sixth and final pillar of wisdom…. cheese makes everything better. I mean, I may not have had much in the way of time off in the last few days, but I personally think what time I did have was made that much more blissful by the addition of ridiculous, obscene, joyful quantities of cheese.
But! Do not think it was all woe! The show is finally looking very good after some frantic last-minute programming. The tunes are still bouncing round and round my head, the dance numbers were absolutely fantastic, the acting was brilliant and the overall effect was, considering the circumstances, a triumph. A stressful triumph… but a triumph. I also learnt tonnes. When you only have five hours in which to tech something that in normal circumstances you would have teched over at least two, if not three days, you quickly learn the art of prioritising. Thus, if someone comes up to you and says ‘I thought your cue there could do with being maybe five percent less blue’ and someone else comes up to you and says ‘you seem to have gone to a blackout in the middle of a song about how beautiful the summer sunshine seems when in love’ then you don’t really have to think hard about which you’re going to deal with, even though you are required to nod and smile to both requests.
So all things considered…
… I’m really glad I took the job… but may have to sleep for a week before I can even consider taking another one…
Home at last!!
Posted on Sunday, August 15th, 2010 in Cities and Adventures, Lighting | 2 Comments
My own bed!
My own pillows!
A hot shower!
With an actual towel at the end of it!
A hairwash!
Not having to sleep in a jumper! (When, but when, did it suddenly get cold?)
Forget this train-taking lighting-designer lifestyle, I want cake, and a dressing gown, and fluffy slippers please, and I want them now…
… and that’s about all I really have to say on the subject.
For now…
Tox09
Posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 in Lighting, Writing | 3 Comments
What on earth is Tox09 all about?
The background to this query begins on the London Overground line between Richmond and Stratford a few years ago, back when it was Silverlink Metro or the North London Line or whatever the hell it’s been called in the last ten years of excitement. Looking out of the window, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of grafitti sprayed all over the place – something I’m generally curious about anyway – with the recurring theme of Tox09. Or sometimes Tox08 or Tox10 depending on where I was and what year it happened to be. And then on the train from Clapham Junction to London Victoria, there it was again… and now, I find myself sat on the Flying Scotsman heading into Newcastle Central and there it is again, Tox09, sprayed on the bricks of the railway cutting! What in god’s name??
So off to the internet and it seems like there’s a world of spray painting culture out there which I know nothing about. I mean, don’t get me wrong… I’m a fan of spray paint on the streets, with a limited reservation. My reservation being that I am not a fan of the kinda stuff we used to get at the back of my house when growing up – ‘Death to the Kurds’ or ‘Turks Leave Cyprus’ or often as not, incoherent gang scrawls that meant nothing except to those in the know. I cheer for political protest, sure, but not for messages inciting violence or marking out territory – but I suspect the Met Police bang their heads against the wall every time an ignorant git like me speculates on this subject, so I’ll move on. But all praise to Banksy, whose works I love as both a London nerd enjoying seeing something familiar made interesting, and slightly more pretentiously as art (whatever that is) in its own right, making a curious point. I know nothing about art (‘but I know what I like…’) but if stopping, turning round and walking back to look at an image on a wall, and thinking about it, and remembering it and sometimes even navigating by it with a cry of ‘here I shall turn left past the image of the girl with the red balloon…’ constitutes art, then welcome Banksy to the canon and all your mini-mes who are spreading their works across city streets.
Which brings me back to Tox09. According to the Londonist (brilliant website, visit it) there’s a whole street cult thing revolving around Tox09 and his tag, and he seems to be joining a growing number of street artists going mainstream. This is definitely a world I know nothing about… quite what it is that is so culty, or how the words Tox09 scrawled across a wall in Newcastle relate to those around Kentish Town, and to be honest, I’m not 100% certain I want to know the full details, as in its own sad way, that might destroy a little bit of the magic…
From a Shallow Angle
Posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 in Lighting | 1 Comment
There will come a point when I put up different photos to these… spectacular amazing photos far better than these… but as the last time I was in a position to take the afore-mentioned photos we were half way through a tech session and there were dimmer problems with the ACLs on stage left, I didn’t, and so can’t. So, with possibly the easiest of all challenges I’ve ever set in my time on this blog…
… guess where I was working on this day…
The Virtuous Burglar
Posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 in Lighting | 1 Comment
This is possibly going to be the first post in an emerging category… and while technically it’s an abuse of my blog since it has nothing to do with writing or fantasy, hell, it’s my blog, so I’ll do it! (And no one has yet told me that I can’t. So there.)
I’m lighting designer for a production of the Virtuous Burglar, being performed at the Edinburgh Festival. And while I’ve been lighting designer for plenty of stuff that I’m not going to name because, let’s face it, my artistic credentials aren’t exactly glorious and neither was it, I’ve got a good feeling about this one. I mean, I say that now… I haven’t yet got up to Edinburgh and sat at the lighting desk and looked at a fixed rig shared with seven other shows and thought ‘oh shite what now’ but it is my contention that even if, even if this should happen, the Virtuous Burglar would probably still be worth the 54 minutes of your time that it currently runs at.
When I first read the script my initial thoughts were ‘oh god, it’s a farce, how depressing’. I get depressed by farces as they’re usually not very funny. With, that is, the notable exception of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off which goes down as one of the few bits of theatre where I’ve laughed so hard I’ve had an asthma attack. (Michael Frayn = A Good Thing. Go see plays by him.) (Alistair Beaton = A Good Thing too. Just in case you’re wondering.) But then good news! The Virtuous Burglar is by Dario Fo, who I was forced to study at AS-Level Drama and who despite the rigours of the AS-Level syllabus (designed to destroy any joy in anything) I loved. In a kinda pedantic Italian way, but again, howled with laughter all the way through Accidental Death of an Anarchist. So that was kinda a look-up.
Then we had the read-through. These are soul-destroying occasions which as a technician you invariably leave with two thoughts: 1. Oh my god what have I got myself into and 2. How on earth have the actors managed to do so much work on their texts already? I haven’t even got a sharp pencil and a ground plan…
Yet strangely, even in the read-through, I was starting to giggle. And by the first run it was really quite funny. And even in the sound plot, another event guaranteed to undermine the strength of any reasonable soul, it was actually heading at high speed towards hilarious… don’t ask me why, don’t ask me how, certainly don’t ask me if I had anything to do with it because as this post presently stands I haven’t even touched a dimmer, let alone recorded its intensities into a cue… so the sneaky suspicion is growing on me that actually, this might almost be quite good.
With which in mind! Let me do the flagrant advertising bit now and say, dear reader, if you are in Edinburgh in this coming month, the Virtuous Burglar is running at the Assembly Rooms for the whole festival at the comfortable hour of 2.15 p.m. and while I cannot yet guarantee that the lighting will be an LED-tastic orgy of sexy luminescence, I can promise you that though you have the face of iron and the hangover of a recklessly liberal Viking, you will laugh. Lots.
Women in Lighting
Posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 in Lighting | 2 Comments
A few months ago, I mentioned in passing in a room full of techies, that I was a member of a relatively young organisation called Women in Lighting.
A male lampie in attendance, who I’ll guess we’ll call Ebenezzer for the purpose of this story, immediately embarked on something of the following rant:
“Jesus, I hate f-ing things like that, I mean, you’re not f-ing discriminated against any more, you women, you’re like totally not, I’ve worked with f-ing women in the industry and it’s not like you need an organisation. I mean I think it’s actually sexist for women to have this thing, like, you know, sexist against men!”
Now, I already owe Women in Lighting a lot, and I’ve only been a member a few months, so I figured I’d take this time to answer a few points raised…
I do not consider myself a feminist, although, it turns out that possibly, I am. The reason I was surprised to discover that I was one was because, until very recently, there had been no circumstance to test this assertion. At no point had I been (to my knowledge…) challenged on the basis of my gender, and thus whether I had anything resembling a gender-political conscience hadn’t really been tested. And whatdayaknow? I do…
That’s not to say equality = sameness. After all, I fully confess that men are physically stronger than me and are thus better suited to certain tasks. Like, say, moving steel deck. Oh woe. And there are men out there that are better techies, and there are women out there that are better techies – of course there are, I mean, obviously and of course! The point is this; that I do not wish to be judged as a woman, I wish to be judged as a person, real and whole, and not on the basis of whether I have breasts and, heaven help us, the quality of both the same.
“I would never judge you because your a woman,” or “of course I look at breasts, so do all men,” would probably be the two majority retorts. The latter – well, there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened up there and if anyone wants my Sociology 101 analysis on the nature of gender/sexual identity, just lemme know…
As for the former, sure, there are a lot of guys out there – great guys – who would not judge me because of my femininity. They’d judge me because of my wiring, and go from there… and that’s how it should be! Sink or swim, let it be because of my qualifications! But there still seem plenty working in the technical side of theatre who don’t get it. Sometimes its an innocent thing – an attitude of ’she’s a woman, she can’t do it, let’s keep her safe’ that leads them to chose a man for a job that a woman perfectly if not more qualified at – or the same attitude that leads to the addition of the word ‘darlin’ to make alright the sentence that went ‘yeah, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to send one of the lads, just because, you know, it might be kinda tricky… darlin….’ Sometimes it’s just people being tits. Because people sometimes just are.
And yes, this is active (if perhaps unconscious) discrimination and yes, it’s the minority position. Men are in the majority in theatre lighting, and I have learnt 99% of what I know from men who looked at me entirely as a lampie-in-training and where kind and generous with what they knew and did what they did absolutely superbly, with the added bonus that it mattered not who did the job so long as it was done well. Although that said, it is impossible to give the battle cry of ‘men – do not generalise about women!’ when in order to make a concise argument, women find themselves generalising about men. If you don’t mind me saying, I will, as a good historian, acknowledge the own hypocrisy of that argument and then with a swift academic vigor, move on.
No – my main reason for joining this ’sexist’ organisation is, if you don’t mind me waxing sociological on you, a bit more complicated. Your 1st year LSE sociologist basically is worried about identity – who and what you are within society.
For example, I say:
“I am a woman.”
“Ah-ha!” (quoth our sociologist) “But what is a woman?”
“Well,” I say, adjusting my hair pointedly, “a woman is the female of the species – she has babies, wears dresses and will probably chose wine over beer.”
“So all women have babies?” demands our sociologist.
“Well, no, some women may chose not to have babies…”
“So all women wear dresses?”
“Well, no, it’s just something that sometimes women can do to make themselves feel feminine…”
“So its feminine to wear dresses?”
“Well, yes, but you can be feminine while not wearing a dress…”
“So a woman doesn’t actually have to have babies or wear a dress to be a woman?” exclaims our sociologist, by now looking rather smug.
“Well… as you put it like that… no.”
“And can men wear dresses?”
“Well… yes….”
“Ah-ha!” he exclaims and then trots off smugly to write a paper on the subject.
Gender, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than simple biological function – its an identity, built up out of ideas of ‘wears and dress and has babies’ into a figure that society accepts and can classify. (Don’t even ask about sexuality. Whole other story.) But in technical theatre you can rely on one thing above all else – there’s only one gender identity going on, and it’s a bloke. Every cliche is somewhere founded in a little grain of truth, and there’s a sackful of truth in the cliche of the lampie who drinks excessively, lives on a diet of cigs, beer and cornish pasties, swears like a Satanist, and treats exciting bits of technological development with an almost libidinous affection. And to mingle in techie society, to be accepted as part of it, your average woman will, at some point, have to behave like your average bloke. Sometimes worse; will have to prove themselves to be one of the society, and it’s a man’s society. The word we’re heading for is macho, or machismo.
And fine. Okay. We all do it; it’s like finding yourself putting on a Scottish accent in Glasgow even if you were born in Cambridge – you may not consciously angle to do it, you may not realise you’re doing it at all, but the need to mingle with a social group just pushes your vocal chords over the edge. I’m not a militant feminist, I have no desire to ask technical theatre to change its ways. But I would like to ask it to expand its horizons; to look beyond the macho lampie world that has been constructed and say ‘hell, I may be a bloke who likes my beer, but actually, there’s no shame in liking a cuppa tea and a movie with the girls…’
So coming back to the very beginning of this tale, I’m back in the green room with Ebeneezer being told that I am the member of a discriminating group, and I have, I’m afraid, one simple answer. Cast aside, Ebeneezer, your pre-conceptions! It’s not about biological equipment, who is stronger and who has babies more reliably, it’s not about a conspiracy of bitter spanner-wielding female lampies looking for a bit of a bicker – it’s about introducing a new idea, a new identity into the world of technical theatre. Don’t write angry letters to your union about our existence, do the smart thing, go one better. Open yourself up to a world of tea and biscuits, of friendly social events and affection that isn’t shared over hangovers, in short…
Join us.
www.womeninlighting.com
Graduated!
Posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 in Lighting, Writing | 4 Comments
So, I’ve graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I should add, I’m not sure what my final grade was – I mean, I think it was quite good, but as the piece of paper I was given didn’t say (nor did anyone else’s say, if you’re wondering) then only cunning mathematics and a whole complex system of philosophy may hold the answer to that question…
You may notice I’ve started a new category in my blog – Lighting – in honour of the fact that from this moment on, my cunning life-plan is this: to be gainfully employed in the world of theatre lighting as much as I possibly can and in those (surely far-between!) moments when not being employed in the above manner, to while away my sorrows by writing as many books as there are bytes on my computer. And maybe a few plays and graphic novels as well, just as soon as I’ve cracked the art of getting my character names to capitalise nicely. (You’d be amazed what an art it is…) As life plans go, I’m sure my Dad would be quick in pointing out that it’s not as good as being, say, a doctor – at least from the point of view of his supported old age. But it will, with any luck, combine the two things I love – theatre and writing – into one gainfully structured life from two utterly chaotic ones, since I firmly believe that no writer can just be a writer and not go a little mad, and likewise, no freelance lighting technician can just do lighting and not go equally bonkers.
With which said…
… deep breath…
I am a freelance lighting designer and technician based in London. When I lit Pericles I went in too steep and didn’t consider the potential of cross-light enough; on Midsummer Nights Dream my cold profile cover was too narrow (although I’d argue that was the fault of the kit list, not necessarily my focus!) – on the Tree I think the cover was a bit too wide and I really should have thought harder about the follow spots. On A Lie of the Mind I went too shallow – BUT! Birdies are cool. Let no man even attempt to deny it – birdies are entirely, utterly brilliant. On Macbeth my profiles were focused too hard, but I have learnt that there are other ways to animate a scene without using wheels and that toplight is startling in sensible doses; strobes are cool but sunfloods can be curiously programmed with a little cunning. If stuffed a two-point cover can do the round but beware low grids, tight walls and tall actors. On Into the Woods I learnt that a ten minute fade is no shameful thing; from the National Theatre I learn that parcans can be brilliant and a 5k at 15m is surprisingly dim; that window gobos have nothing on profiles well-focused; that sometimes bounce is useful if you just charge straight at it with a cry of kill and sometimes it’s a right pain in the backside, especially if you’re sat uphill. I discovered that you really should check if your birdie bulb in a practical is 12V or 240V before testing this too empirically; always keep your 3-5 pin converter with the glaciator; Mac IIIs can invert their face panels if you’re trying to read them upside down in a darkened grid, there is no such thing as too much L200, neither is there such a thing as L120 that isn’t high temperature if we’re being serious about this. NEVER give your gaffer tape away, and always label your screwdriver. Tea is good. Biscuits are better.
All these mistakes I have made in the last… oh… three, four years? Good news being, is that I am very unlikely to make them ever, ever again.