Not too much to report from the last few days. As we’re getting closer to the show (this Saturday!) we’re basically just going into crunch time with Qlab, getting ready for the rehearsals.
Outside of the work on this project, I have also been offered some more lighting design work, which I will be working on in the venue on the Monday after the show (17th), as well as potential music related lighting design projects in the future (likely next year). I’m pretty happy about this, as I’m starting to feel recognised as someone to trust for such projects.
7th October
Started in the morning at Honor’s house, working on getting all of the cues named properly, and inserting some new files. In addition, I prepared a music cue based on a song Honor will play at the end of the show, as a buildup to the song itself. For this, I used Spitfire Labs’ Glass Piano and Vital software synth, both free plugins.
We headed over to the residency studio in the afternoon to set up the projector and sound system and simulate the venue tech setup. It was good to finally get some time in the space to test things at a larger scale. I learned a few things about Qlab as well, such as being able to stop entire cue groups (this was a huge realisation and would have saved us a lot of time had we known about it earlier!) and, similarly, play entire cue groups (which will come in handy if we have any recurring cues throughout the show).
The cue preparation took us a lot longer than expected, and we only managed to get through the first act before calling it a day at 7.30pm.
10th October
Another day of cue preparation and playing around with some new ideas, including some AI-generated subtitles for the “life tape” sections. These will be all taken care of by Honor, but I had some creative input in terms of font selection and some other technical details.
I continued work on the music cue I’d started on Friday, rendering a version with reverb in order to be able to fade to reverb as the show ends. The only work that remains for this is to edit it into loops for the cue triggers.
Speaking of loops, I also took on the task of editing a pre-existing musical cue into a loop for a section where Honor may become overwhelmed and need to take a break. This took some time to get right, but we eventually settled on a gentle looped version of the main chords which can be faded into and out of without too much of a jarring transition.
We managed to complete most of the show’s cues by the end of the day, at least in a draft state. We will be in the venue on Wednesday morning to briefly test some new lighting patterns, but will likely return to the residency studio to do a run-through of the show before the tech rehearsal on Thursday.