Last year’s work

Of all the work that I did in the past school year, only 2 shows really stand out to me as being really well done. The first was Mates of State when they came to Calvin in 2008, and the second is Rangeela 2009. Part of this has been that I have been working more as a head electrician rather than a lighting designer, but also because I tend to work on pretty limited shows, such as orchestra concerts at my school. Not a lot of activity. Anyhow, a few photos from the Archives, and some thoughts on them

Mates of State

This show came to Calvin sometime during the fall semester, and I really enjoyed both working on it and the music itself. The concert had a really small amount of people on the stage (3) compared to what we normally run (4-10), so I had a lot more freedom to use tight lighting areas and lots of different effects. I also got to use a lot more colors than would normally be permitted for a show, just because of the small area. I tried to play with the qualities of the light using diffusion and templates, as well as the direction, focusing a lot on low backlight and low sidelight. I tend to favor these positions because they emphasize the physical nature of the performers, and offer many dramatic options. Overall, this show was a great success, and was a hella lot of fun to work on. The show was also well received among the College community.

Rangeela 2009

This show is the College’s annual “multi-cultural” variety show. It is an interesting blend of ethnic-inspired acts and traditional performance styles, usually put on by a broad collective of students from across the world. In addition, this is probably one of the most heavily designed shows of the year, with some acts having as many as 12 parts to them. One of the primary challenges to doing a show like this is that there is a lot of variation among acts, as we move from the night outside of a Chinese palace to an African mine to the American Plains. In addition, many performers want their act to look a specific way, and this usually results in a huge rig being thrown up. I hate huge rigs. Ill hang dozens of lights with the best of them, but I dislike having huge amounts of stuff up for one act and one act only. Thus for me, the major challenge was unifying all of the acts into a common idea and theme, while avoiding any specific pattern or allowing one color or idea to dominate. The show worked very well at not being too choppy, or making odd and confusing flows between the various acts, while still maintaining the individuality of each performance itself. This show was very well received by the college community and the Rangeela organization as well.