Fuck Yeah Lighting!

ME stands for Master Electrician.

An ME’s job encompasses many things.  In the most broad spectrum, they are in charge of bringing the lighting designer’s design to life.

The ME will take plots and paperwork from the designer, and use it to hang all of the lights in a space.  They will also use it to figure out how much and what kind of gel or color medium to get for the lights.  They will figure out how to circuit all of the fixtures so that they come up in the right order from the light board.

The ME is also the “boss” of the lighting crew, leading lighting hangs and so on.  There are many other tasks that an ME can undertake, but these are some of the most common.

Okay so picture this:  A very basic console, say with 10 faders on top, and 10 faders below.

Both sets of faders control the same 10 lights.  The top row of faders lets you set the look for Scene X, while the bottom lets you set Scene Y.  

There is a fader that allows you to fade between those two looks. Once you have made your transtion (like pressing the “Go” button), you reset the row of faders that you just came out of to give you your look for the next scene.

Essentially the console allows you to have one scene active, and another one waiting to be used, or “preset.”  These desks can come in anywhere from 12 to 172 faders, sometimes even more.

I hope this helped!