Todays challenge was rigging the lights for ‘The Box’ in anticipation of n event being held there on Thursday for the launch of the International Comic Arts Festival in Kendal.
there were 2 main aspects for this rigging the lighs and creating a magic sheet and submasters for the rigging.
I was stationed on the lighting desk hepling create the sub masters and the magic sheet.
We were given a plan to work from.
So a fairly simple set-up as it is for a dinner speech event with tablesm podium, lecturn and some washes. So we knew what lanterns were going where, so we just needed further information as channel number and colours.
So we drew out the rigging plan and as others rigged the lights we were to update the plan with channel numbers and colours and also produce a working magic sheet on the Element 60 lighting desk and software.
Though this first appeares as qute a simple process there were still obstacles to overcome. Ensuring that all the lanterns worked and then troubleshooting any errors that appeared. These were mostly solved via trial and errotr, by checking a known working lantern in a channel that appeared not to work. That said however we had quite alarge numbers of lantern failures and the cause of this was that the power on procedure was incomplete so there were areas of the truss not getting power.
As we made the above lighting plab we also constructed a magic sheet
This is soiftware based and enavles us to quicklu control the various lanterns as you can see from the image above this shadows our inital plan very well. Once this was complete and we had checked all the lanterns to ensure that they worked the truss was then raised and focusing could begin. For this we methodicallty went through each lantern turning them up to full brightness, this then enabled the riggers to focus the lights where they need to go. The PARs and Washed were worked on in pairs, trying to mirror each other. The profiles for the lecturn and podium are being used as ‘performer’ spots so these need to be fairly tight with a crisp edge for their locations. The table profiles unfortunately w couldn’t focus as we did not know the layout for the tables at this session.
Once the focusing was complete we could then created submasters to allow us to control many lights with one fader. We ended with 10 submasters in all.
Matt Cooper 