Unit 9

week 1- rewiring and patching our theatre:

our teacher wanted the theatre to a more simpler and basic setup, she decided to make this our unit 9 for improving our skills. we sat down and went through what she wanted and the layout which we were gonna use.

after some planning on what we were going to do, we had decided that we could go for a basic setup using generic lights for most of the states and using the movers to add extra and more detail to states.

when we were planning the layout we discussed which movers and the position of the movers, this took a long time as we had 3 different types of movers and each did something better or worse than the others. we chose to do a 3-2-2 position in the rig, we chose this because this left us with 2 overs for down stairs which could be used for gigs if needed.

we drew out a plan and worked out which light would plug into a specific socket, this took some time as i wanted it to be as simple as possible, we have 144 16a sockets in our rig and that consists of 20 non dimmers which we will use for the movers.

we started of by redoing the stage front lights, which consisted of 12 flat profiles and 4 side profiles to give an even cover, whilst rearranging these lights we were testing each light for damage and giving them a little clean if they were really bad.

we also lowered 3 unibars and rearranged and cabled the bars to the plan we had discussed, whist doing this i decided to design and make the magic sheet of the etc GIO offline version for PC, i wanted to do this as it would be more helpful later on in case i didn't have access to the desk. as i had done this at home it was a lot quicker rigging as we weren't changing the magic sheet as we went, i also learnt how to patch and make macros on the PC version of the desk, this was so helpful as our previous

we then reassigned the mover to a different address so that it made more sense and was easier to understand for students learning. I then recorded some macros on the desk to make recording cues and states quicker as the more common cues where macros. I did this by using the following code [learn] [macro] [805] [1 thru 20] [@ full] [Enter] [learn] this is the code for recording a macro with a basic lighting state at full.

I then began to organize the use of the macros, i tried to make group macros bit found out that our console didn't have this and that it is easier to make groups, i then recorded groups for all the basic lighting states and affects to make programming quicker.

I then started on sorting out the addressing and positioning of the LED, the LED,S were set to 6 channel mode so i choose to set them 10 DMX channels apart to give us some lee way and to keep them apart from the movers. our lighting console didn't have the correct profiles for our LED'S so i found another led which was almost the same, this was a pain as it was alot of playing around.

Mandy:

In this lesson we have began to look at affects for our performance of the Christmas carol, we have been asked to arrange a way of having snow fall at a specific point and for and a lotion of a ghost. we research any previous ways of doing these affects and found a few.

for the snow we had the idea of hiring a fake snow machine but were quickly told that we didn't have the money to hire anything in, we then looked at using wired mesh and a cradle to hold fake snow, this was out first idea but we quickly realized that this was unpractical and wouldn't give the effect we wanted.

ROH:

For the design challenged i choose to to set design as i believe that this will show my skills.

I began looking into the time period of romeo and Juliet, i was looking as the scenery, location and what materials were used in building and art wear. Once I had done some research it gave me a few ideas and layout of my set, I realized that many traditional houses and locations would have a court yard in the centre of the housing complex or in the centre of a village, as the set would be used in the theatre and sight lines are key I began to come to conclusion that a court yard layout would work well. I also noticed that many of the houses were made from several different types of stone but the majority were limestone. They also had been changed and added on when the Romans had power, this made it hard to fined a entire building that hadn't been changed or modified.

I made a mood board with some key information about the different types of stone used in there houses and walls.

I have come up with a few designs that fit well with the design idea i have chosen,i quickly realized that my design would need to be built strong and smooth at it had alot of curves and flat surfaces to it, i wanted to keep my design plan but still be interesting so that the focus was on the ballet and not the set. I wanted to site views to be good as well as i know in ballet viewing all angles of the dancing is crucial.

i began to work out slightly more the details of each of my designs to help me choose which one i preferred, once i had done this i had quickly chosen my final design.from this i began to research various ways of building the set and what textures i wanted, i choose to use the lazer cutter to my advantage as it is precise and very customizability, i researched and tried several tests of lazer cutting texture into the material i was using and it looks great, it would make the set more realistic and would be alot quicker to make.

I then lazer cut the larger sheet using 4mm MDF (medium density fibre)

Christmas Carol:

For the Christmas Carol we were told that we were mentoring the first year students by helping them arrange their roles and then assisting them in the technical side of things as well.

I was put in charge of Adam, he was operating the lighting, sound and visuals side of the show. I made it clear to the director and other people that I thought it was unfair on Adam to do all these roles as he has only just started learning all the equipment as has very little experience in doing theatre shows, but my opinion wasn't taken on board.

However I carried on helping Adam, I showed him how to use the Mac Martin 700 and Mac Martin 250. The 700's have a bigger capability and a higher amount of fixture functions that the 250, I chose to do this so he could get his head around the more complex fixture first.

I then began to explain how internal patching worked on the lighting console, as this was used for the moving heads, I had already re-patched and DMX addressed the movers several times but chose to show him as a good learning point. He was glad as it developed his skills.

During the re-patching I began to think of good ideas on how to cover the front of the 5m x 4m portable stage, a teacher suggested using large white boxers to cover the front, I then decided that having a slow smooth fog machine in each corner and then a single back fixture with each fog machine would give a great affects, I chose a fog machine as we could use it to show snow and cold weather in specific scenes.

                                   PICTURE OF THE HAZE AND FRONT FACING FIXTURE

Adam and I then were given the task on making a fire effect, we chose to do this with fixtures pointing onto our backdrop behind the stage, we would put different colour gels on the tinkers to give a fire effect and angle then to form a triangle. the reason I use the large steel base plates was so that the fixtures wouldn't melt or damage the floor, these fixtures pointing forward where to give the stage a ghosty effect but also a cold and moody feel, this idea worked very well with the haze machines as it gave the look of fog rather than haze, the lighting programmer also used them as face looking blinders th bid the audience at specific times to give an even greater effect, there were a few problems  with this idea, for example the amount of cable that was run was a pain as each front facing fixture needed an indurvaisl power feed so that we were able to control the intensity indurvisualy, the haze machined need non dimmer power which was ok as we could run a single feed of power and then use a homemade 16a  splitter to that we didn't need to run unessary power.

if I was to do this again I would have run two socapex feeds and then use tales, this would have been great as this is a single cable rather than lots of indurvisal ones.

                                         PICTURE OF TINKERS BEFORE AND AFTER

To do this we had to run 16AMP to each fixture this was a total of 9 separate power feeds, 6 for tinkers, 2 for the front facing fixtures and a single for the fog machine, my original plan was to use a 10m soca-pex with 16AMP tails on either end to save running tones of individual cables.

                                                PICTURE OF SOCA-PEX AND 16A TAILS

However we didn't have any available so had to op for individual feeds. This took some thinking as 9 x 8mm cable would leave a large obstetrical running over the floor, the route in which we had to take would result in it running straight in front of a well used door. to the much anger of my teacher I chose to use the underfloor cable runs, these were great as they ran to each and every junction box in our theatre. along with the 16A i also ran a single 5pin DMX cable so that we could control the fog machines using DMX patching and macros.

                                                      PICTURE OR JUNCTION BOX

During all of this we had a large problem with 16A sockets in out junction boxes not working, we were getting a live feed but when put to 100% intensity we wouldn't get feed, to resolve this i checked the dimmers to make sure none had tripped and that everything looked correct. we then called an electrician in the have a look, he confirmed there was nothing wrong with the junction box and that it must have been our dimmers.

these gantries along the floor are great when you are running a lot of long cables as they can be hidden under the floor which is safe and easier to clean up, the only annoying thing is that they are not always that excusable and in some locations they have been screwed down or covered up by carpet or other objects.

                                                         PICTURE OF DIMMER RACK

Because of this i then payed my attention to the dimmers, i checked to see if there was an error message on our control module which there wasn't and then it was down to checking the 2 channel dimmer module.

our larger Dimmer rack has a total of 49 dimmer modules but a total of 98 indurvsial dimmer breakers, this is a 3 phase dimmer rock with the master controller in the centre, this converts dmx to an indurvsial dimmer module, this is the heart to the dimmer racks, when we had the problem on specific sockets not being able to be controlled over dmx we suspected that this control module could be faulty, is so this would have been a huge cost and time consuming proses as there is also an interning patch built into the dimmer racks.

To do this i removed a module that had two sockets not working and swapped it for a module with two sockets working, unfortunately this didn't fix the problem.

each module is an indurvisual break for each 16a socket located in the theatre, the reason this is a great design is that it keeps the fixtures safe from a power surge but also means that the breaker will trip rather than exploding a lamp or damaging a fixture.

         

Snow Effect for Christmas carol:

-Confetti Cannon

-Tissue paper dropped from above

-Moving gobo (Mac Martin 700??)

We were asked to create a snow effect for our upcoming show which was the Christmas carol, we were each given a small budget and told to come up with the best design and solution we could with that budget, we had to take into consideration mounting the solution, the coverage of the snow and the price of it.

this is what we found:

Location: West Minister Kings way college

Budget: £10

Ideas:

confetti cannon:

-looks effective and has a large coverage when deployed.

-Can be costly if you buy out but hiring isn't to expensive

-wait if we were to hang it from the rig we would have to look into wait and mounting points

- cleaning up after being used

-

Tissue paper sidspencer:

-easy to use and maintain

- cleaning up would take a while

-Where could we dispose the tissue paper after use

Moving gobo:

Easy to use and maintain

-can be rigged in many locations

-would need to look into weight if hung from heights

-no cleaning up is needed

-easy to set up and change.

I have chosen to make a tissue paper dispenser that would hang from the unbars in our theatre, I choose this as we would have the opportunity to make it our selves which means that we can customise it and over come problems quicker, we could also make it to our needed, so for example make it out of something light in weight so we wouldn't need to worry about weight when rigging it, we would need to make it strong as we wouldn't want it falling on someone.

Creating a snow machine

https://youtu.be/g_1SAF9eiG0

We started by using a steel rule to measure out a 150mm radius semi circle out of 6ml MDF (medium density fibre). Next we then drew an inner semi circle with the radius of 130mm within the inside of the first semi circle. We then drew a 40mm radius circle on the centre point of the original circle. We also made 2 semi circles out of 4mm plybord. Then we cut out the outline using the following tools:
Bansaw
Disc sander
Gerbil sander

Next we got a 45mm by 45mm square pine wood

Then we drilled a 12mm hole in the centre at the top of the mount. After this we drilled a 10mm horizontal hole from left to right for the rivet

Unfortunately the wood was not strong enough and kept snapping so we will try another snow effect.

Here is a table of different effects and the pros/cons of each.

EFFECT	COST	COMPANY	PROS	CONS	OVERALL
Gobo	£25	thegobo.com	Simple to use, no tidying up, easy to position	Won’t fully cover stage, take a light out of use	3/5
Back projection	No cost, can purchase professional images	N/A	Can be cheap, is programmable	Can look messy	2/5
Photoshop	No cost	Photoshop	Looks effective, is free	Needs expertise, is time consuming	1/5
DIY Show Rig	Dependant on size	N/A	Can be made to the correct dimensions, looks effective	Hard to rig, needs to be controlled, can’t be stopped easily	5/5
Snow Machine	£35-£80	Disco equipment hire	Looks realistic, can control it and direct it	Availability, high cost, causes accidents, time consuming cleaning	3/5
Tissue Paper	Dependant on quality	Craft shops	Cheap	Causes accidents, time consuming cleaning	3/5
Confetti Machine	£120 a day	Online companies	Can control and direct it	High cost, availability	3/5
Polystyrene Balls	Dependant on machine	Various	Looks effective, can control and direct it	Time consuming cleaning	3/5
Plastic Snow	£100 for 15kg	Limelight plastic snow	Looks effective, can control and direct it	High cost	2/5