I’m back! As much as I’d like to use this blog for general purpose writing, for the time being it is exclusively related to uni work. One day I’d like to change that, as I have some ideas for things I can write about. Anyway, on to the main purpose of this post.
Week 1
I’m quite excited about working at the Capitol Theatre again, after spending some time with the system last year creating my own original work. This time around, I’ve been invited to create lighting designs for Honor Eastly’s show No Feeling Is Final, part of the Big Anxiety festival. The work involves not only articulating lighting designs to accompany audio and stage cues, but also learning and researching the internal systems, writing guidelines and generally being involved with the processes behind Capitol’s LED lighting installation. As a natural problem solver, this kind of work is very relevant to my interests. Additionally, I’m delighted that this is a way to get my foot in the door in terms of potential future employment at RMIT.
The initial meeting with Honor via Zoom was a great introduction. We seem to be on the same wavelength in terms of ideas and working style, and coupled with Honor’s demonstrated skills in project management—from the early drafts and schedule shared in our second meeting with Erik—I think this work will be a success.
Week 2
It was great to visit the venue again in order to show Honor the initial draft designs I’d sketched out, as well as showing some of the previous work from the Heightened Multisensory Experiences studio from last year (see earlier entries in this blog for examples). In addition to this, I spent some time with Ben and Simon running through some essentials of the system—how to back up the main session, how to add new sessions, how to run scenes, etc. There’s still some room for learning in terms of more detailed operation, so I’m looking forward to going deeper. Already I’ve discovered that it is possible to manipulate the lighting in a somewhat live manner, which is useful for quick iteration. I’ll definitely be enquiring about booking solo time in the space in order to document colour values, intensities, and the behaviour of preset patterns in the system, which are all elements sadly lacking from the experience of programming the lighting remotely in the studio last year.
On a slight tangent, I have some rather ambitious plans to research the file format used for the lighting designs, and potentially create a 3D environment which can interpret such files and display the programming virtually. Coupled with a VR headset, this would make the design process a lot easier, with the possibility of pushing things further and adding design capability to the environment itself. I am of course getting way ahead of myself here, but it’d be incredible to be able to “paint” lighting states in VR and have them be exported as files compatible with the real system. Something to think about..