#u67c4

Today I came in at twelve to sort out the amendments that needed to be made to the lighting using the lists that I made during both the run and the first show.

Also Denise had cut quite a bit from the longer, duller scenes and wanted to add another state, so Caitlyn, Dan (Sound) and myself had a meeting with her to go through the changes.

Today we started by running the through the rest of the second act (making a few changes here and there), as this had been plotted the night before, we expected this to go quite quickly and planned to start a dress run at half eleven. However (In true miskin fashion) this run didn't start till about half past three; it was here that we discovered that both acts run over an hour long and with the interval included aswell this now meant that we had less than half an hour until the house opened.

We raced to get the lighting desk out of the space and in the control room as quickly as possible and whilst i was setting it up everybody else was getting their presets done and taking out the production desk. Unfortunately this meant we had no time to correct the lx notes we made in the run. 

Today I came in to be told that Mig had left, I am not sure why, but she isn't coming back. This meant that I would be plotting the rest of the show by myself. 

We continued the day with me plotting and designing the lighting states, I did this by looking at the scene (the location, the mood, where people were on stage and what they were doing, etc) and combined this with what the directors were asking for as well as what lights were available. I had some designing help from Alan as he is more experienced, but did do some states on my own. I have kept in with the theme of an old fashioned, pollocks style theatre by mostly using generic lights in the states and trying not to use the movers very much, especially the A7's which have bright LED's.

Today we started teching straight away from where we left off, Mig was there to help in the morning but had to leave in the evening so I was left to do It independently (getting design advice form Alan when I needed to.)

Today we spent the morning getting ready for the tech to start this afternoon. We made more some groups and palletes and I set up a birdie under the rake for the av operator.

Today we focused the rig for “Oh what a lovely war.” I called the focus, whilst the others took turns up the tallescope focusing the lanterns. We did bars 2 and 3 easily, bar 4 was a bit more tricky because of the thrust, but we managed to do it using the tallescope where we could get it and the zarges where we couldn't.

The lamps on either end of bar 5 we managed to reach by climbing the front structures. However we couldn't get to the middle of bar 5 or bar 6 Because of the raked stage, so we had to use a technique called bounce focusing.

We also had to bounce focus bar 1 as the only ladder we have that can reach it has gone missing.

Bounce focusing is when you lower the bar to ground level, then attempting to guess the focus of the light without being able to see our in position. You then have to fly the bar back out to see if you got it right, if not you have to lower it and try again. Bounce focusing is not the preferred way of focusing, nor is it good industry practice, but we couldn't find any way around it.

To do this focus I learned to use the riggers remote, which allows you to perform basic operations on the desk without having to be near it, this was helpful as it meant we could have everyone down on the stage helping instead having to keep someone by the desk.