I had a mystery illness from the 22nd until the 28th, so apologies for the lack of updates in that time. A lot has progressed since then though; I’ll update again on Monday with the results of the training day on the 30th.
21st September
I was invited to attend a work-in-progress version of a Capitol lighting & live music show that students from various VE stage programs created based on Jim Moginie’s album The Colour Wheel.
I didn’t realise it would be a live performance, and one consisting of six guitarists at that (one of whom was playing a Bass VI at that!). Very relevant to my interests. It was a great mix of avant garde composition and more accessible post-rock/shoegaze music. A highlight of the show was the performance of Opus 1 No.2 BLACK in the middle of the set, which involved the performers unplugging their guitars and rhythmically pressing their thumbs on the bare plugs, which resulted in some satisfying minimalist noise more akin to a Ryoji Ikeda piece than anything involving guitars.
Some notes I took on the lighting articulation:
- Most of the lighting was static, with the colour matching the track titles from the album. This gave the brief moments of movement more emphasis, especially in the aforementioned BLACK where the entire ceiling was flickering randomly with areas of white.
- The static scenes did use subtle movement, mostly slow random pulsing, but in RED there were some very nice rings of white descending from the ceiling, crossfading back to red. I’m taking some ideas from this for the remaining designs in Honor’s show, in particular a section where I’ll attempt to control the lighting live.
- The colours in general looked great, especially the yellows. It looked like they’d spent a decent amount of time in the venue in order to test colours properly.
- Something I hadn’t noticed, despite working on three shows at Capitol, is how the proscenium and wall lights can be treated as one piece if lit consistently. I don’t think I’ll find anywhere in Honor’s show to use the technique, but if I get offered any more shows, I’ll be sure to experiment with it.
Overall I was pretty impressed with the show, and it gave me some good ideas for both Honor’s show and future work. I believe they were using direct DMX control over the lighting, rather than the somewhat clunky Pharos system. Unfortunately I was unable to stay around to talk to anyone about that, but it’s something to look into for sure. It fits in with my ideas regarding generative/procedural control of the system.
25th September
Honor and I had intended to work together in person at some point over the weekend, but some delays in receiving audio files, as well as both of us individually developing different illnesses, it didn’t end up happening. Instead, we met over Zoom, and worked on getting a very basic Qlab session together, with the audio cues sent over from Marty (sound designer). This was a productive session, and it was good to have a starting point from which to attach the lighting and video cues required.
I’m learning a lot more about Qlab and how to schedule, layer and trigger cues. Turns out it can do a lot of very complex scheduling. The aim for this show is for a list of cues that can be continuously stepped through using the spacebar key, with the complexity hidden away under layers. If we do have a live lighting control portion of the show, the controls can easily be assigned to other keyboard keys, effectively giving me the opportunity to perform.