Lighting Designers love their tech toys, so what is at the top of your Christmas wish list?

In the spirit of the holidays, I finally broke down and bought myself an iPhone. It is awesome! One of the first Apps I downloaded of course was Wybron’s Gel Swatch Library for the low price of $9.99. (FYI: The App got updated yesterday.) Everyone more

There is a lot of talk about VW2009 and the Parasolid kernel that is going to make it super fast. There are also some great added features to spotlight and that VW will automatically update Lightwright 5. All of that is great, and you can read up on it more at (www.nemetschek.net). What I want to remind everyone about, or at least more

Well the end of my summer was certainly busy which is why I haven’t posted in a while. I got back to California just over a week ago, and things went back into full swing at CalArts at the start of my second year in grad school. I did however get some great news today that I thought I would share. Over more

I have been programming on an Expression 3 for the show, and the discussion came up between the designer and me about how you would write a RemDim Macro for the board.  Well I figured someone else had come up with the answer, but after a quick glance around the internet, I only found a few hits, and some of the Macros were fairly complex.  The one that I did try didn’t work, or I didn’t understand their complex syntax.  So none-the-less I went out to improve and write my own Macro.  I ultimately came up with two solutions that are more based on personal preference.  They work just fine, but I am still attempting to think of a way to start the Macro “At Full” so you can type in [Channel Number, Macro*] instead of typing [Macro*, Channel Number] and potentially missing the M-wait delay window.

[Rec] [Cue 999.9] [Enter] [Time] [0] [Enter] [Enter] [Cue 999.9] [Go C/D] [Rel] [Clear C/D] [M-Wait 1.5] [At] [Full]

To clarify what this does:  It records a very unlikely Cue 999.9, then change the time of that Cue to 0, then goes to that cue and releases the channels and clears the cue.  Then the cue will fade to whatever the default cue clear time is on the board.  It should be 5 seconds by default, but I like to change it to 2 or 3 seconds.  Your default time should be longer than the time you allow in the M-Wait command though that follows.  Then there is a M-Wait which allows you to type just the channel number or group number during 1.5 seconds or however long you would like it to be and brings it at full.  For channels you can type just the number as it defaults to channel, but if you want to bring a group up to focus on this Macro you have hit [Group] [Number]  The result is a nice fade of the current light or look followed by your new fixture popping on at full.  There are a few other things I might alter to make it better, but for me it works just fine.

[Stage] [Rec] [Group 999.9] [Stage] [Chan] [M-Wait 1.5] [At] [Full] [Group 999.9] [At] [0][0]

To clarify what this does:  This is very similar to the above Macro, except that it is a little more crude, as rather then having a nice fade of your other lights, your new light pops on and then your old light pops out.

If anyone else has any really great Macros let me know.

 I just thought I would post a cool time-lapse video I took of the theatre crew loading in 5.5 tons of wet sand for our beach setting in Twelfth Night.  Unfortunately it rained the night and day of the delivery.  The load in actually only took about 25 minutes thanks to this amazing dump truck that had a conveyor belt that could shoot the sand up to 44 feet away.  One thing about wet sand is, once you turn the lights on to try and dry it, the theatre becomes a self contained green house…ugh.  Loading out will take a long time, but at least the load-in went well.

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