4. Programming and Technical rehearsal

 Introduction 

Today we went to the venue in the morning, and we started programming the lights and sound so that we were ready for the technical rehearsals later in the morning. We constructed cue stacks with light cues in the right order according to the script and assigned them to a fader. And then we meet with each performing group to do a technical rehearsal, which consists of both a full run-through and a cue-to-cue technical rehearsal. We made changes to the lighting states of the various cues based on the feedback of the director of each performance after they had seen the lights that we had programmed.  

Programming

There are a few main things that we need to do when programming the lighting states, first, we have to choose the lighting fixtures we would like to use, and then we would adjust its position if it's a moving head. Then we adjust the dimmer value, which is how bright the light is, and then we choose the color of the fixture, all the fixtures are RGB, so we can basically have any color in the RGB color space. Additionally, we could adjust the zoom of the light beam if the fixture has the zooming function. Finally, we can add FX to the lighting fixtures, for example, FX for Zoom or for colors. 

Here is an example of some party lights that we programmed for a scene in a play: 

There are some FX used in this lighting state: 

- Zoom FX

- Color FX (Which changes the color of the lights ) 

- Dimmer FX (Flashing) 

Problems

There are some limitations that we found during the programming stage of the lights, especially for the lights that we envisioned having. The lights on the side of the venue that points up to the roof is not able to be controlled with the lighting desk through DMX, it only has a few presets with limited colors to choose from. Also, we were informed that the smoke machine is not able to be moved under the stage. As well as not being able to add footlights to the front of the stage.    

 

Technical rehearsal

In some scenes, we realize that there weren't enough lights on the actor's faces therefore we had to adjust the profile lights on the actors in order to light up their faces a bit more. Other than that, there were minimal changes made during the technical rehearsal.