Drew Lighting Design

Legally Blonde- Post Mortem

Now the we have closed Legally Blonde, I can actually say that programming over 340 cues for a 2 hour show wasn’t too bad. Many of the cues were what I call a “Snap and restore” which means that we’ll be in a look and something will pop up (like a light bulb moment” and then go back to the regular look. I’d say half of my cues were for these kinds of situations.

The best part about closing this show is that my load out was done in less than 45 minutes.

For those programming major shows that are cue-heavy, I highly recommend using magic sheets to make programming that much quicker. For Hog they are called “Plots” and for MA it is “Layout View” The Magic Sheet I use is an augmented graphical layout. I will put all of the “like” fixtures together in a layout that would match where they are in the plot. Then I have buttons for every color, intensity and beam attribute for easier programming.

Legally Blonde Magic sheet running numerous chases for the song “So Much Better”

Starting on the left I have Intensity broken down by 10% increments. This saves me a lot of time trying to use the flywheel or entering in a percentage on the keypad by being able to just click and adjust as needed.

All of the Blue buttons are Beam attributes. So gobos, zoom, iris, and prism.

Next to that is the colors I most frequently use. I ended up adding a few for specific looks, but since they were a one time thing, I did not include them on the magic sheet.

Below the color is my positions. I set up “focus areas” on the stage based on the plot they had in the venue. I labelled them as Letters because I already have a ton of numbers to remember and recall, so letters makes that easier. You’ll also see on the right side I added some focus palettes for looks I added after the fact and used a couple of times in the show. They are way over there because I was just a little too lazy to move everything around.

Everything else on the Magic Sheet is a fixture or a group of fixtures. The grid of buttons in all white are the front and top lights for the stage all laid out in their 7 wide by 3 deep configuration. For quick programming or editing on the fly, I was able to grab the lights I needed and adjust them as needed. This is super useful for when you show up to a rehearsal and find that they had to re-block a scene to the other side of the stage for other logistical things like the fact that an actor in high heels can’t run all the way around the back of the stage in under 5 seconds. I was able to grab the lights where they were, and use the “Copy To” function to copy a light that was previously being used to the new set of lights. 2-3 clicks and 2 keystrokes to do what would have been 3-5 minutes of typing and looking through notes to see what color palette and intensity palette I used.

Of course everything is labelled so if I was sitting in the audience during a rehearsal I could call up to my board operator to fix some looks without having to explain where to find all of the information.

Not shown on the screen is the Start up and Shutdown Macros I created for my Board Op to turn the rig on and shut it down without having to enter a ton of numbers. I placed them off the screen just in case they accidentally bumped one of them and shut the entire rig down mid-show (speaking from experience. Luckily not this show.

Legally Blonde- Tech week

I am up to 323 cues just for lighting and we open in just a couple of days. It is amazing how much doing the pre-production programming has helped. In the past I would have spent many nights slogging away at programming and editing and refocusing. Besides one night where I had to update 50ish cues, I have been done making my fixes before the actors are done with notes.

The only struggle I have is the haze. The air flow in this space is very odd. I mean most theaters are designed to have the air flow go from the stage to the house, but for some reason the architect also has a return duct above the stage so it is literally sucking all of my haze up. But if I try to use a fan to keep it low, it all goes into the house or looks like we have a small fire on stage right. It is almost like I need a fan on a moving light just doing figure 8’s the entire night to keep the haze even.

Legally Blonde: The Musical Pre-Production

I recently signed on to be the Lighting Designer (LD) for Legally Blonde at a local high school. To preface, I have never read the book and have never watched the movie. So like I do with any show I am designing for, I read through the first time just to get the story (and listen to the recordings along with the read through). And it is quite the ride. I am glad it is a story I can follow, unlike some shows I’ve done in the past, but this is by far the fastest-paced show I’ve done.

On top of the fast pace, the school putting on this production is (thankfully) following socially distancing guidelines for the performers on stage. The only downside is that when you get 30 kids socially distanced on a stage, there is literally no room for scenery. SO lighting has to make up for that fact. For an average High school show, I average around 200 cues for something of this caliber. This one is looking like it may be upwards of 400. Almost every song has a dance break that the director has requested we highlight the obvious musical cues in them.

I’ll be programming on their in house ETC Ion. I am very excited about this because ETC has recently released their newest software which has included a built in visualizer. This is going to allow me to program the show from the comfort of my desk or recliner and then be able to load the file into their console, and make sure virtual matches reality. So I’ll probably only be spending a night updating focus and colors, rather than pulling all nighters 2 or 3 times to get the programming done.