Anyway, we visited two really beautiful Italian theatres and I am stunned by the amount of traditionally designed theatres there are in Italy. Unfortunately a lot of them are not looked after very well. The interest of the people in theatre is not very big any more and thus the buildings are just empty shells. The first place we went to was in Pavia, not far away from Milano. A medium sized venue, but again very beautiful. There was a complete lighting stock available and I was told that this stop of the tour would be much easier than our next one, deep in the south of Italy. Well, the crew here was not incredibly good and this made working not much easier. I had one of those a little drug-intoxicated crews that you sometimes find. Everything was just a little bit too slow. And the theatre's equipment was a nightmare. PC fixtures with broken lenses and basically no output at all. It was hard to get decent lighting on stage and after the show was over I am convinced that we didn't really get a nice look. Also because there was simply no time at all. We had an 18 hour get-in including focus which we didn't finish. So during the scheduled plotting time, we completed the focus. What was left were 3 hours to plot around 90 cues for the evening performance - a show that I had only seen once during rehearsals.

My biggest problem was that the script that described the cues and what was going on on stage was written in French (not my best language) and the action on stage when there were spoken scenes were in Italian. My cue list I wrote in English, the director spoke to me in French, the technicians in Italian and my brain felt like a in tumble dryer. In the end I had a student that could not be in the show to give me the cues. The only way this could somehow work.

After this experience and very little sleep we took several busses and an airplane to go to Reggio di Calabria. This is at the most southern point of mainland Italy with a nice view on the Etna just across the water. Here again we were in a really nice theatre, but this time in a completely empty one. There is not a single light, cable or anything technical in this building. Crazy. Because the mafia controls almost everything in this part of the world, I found myself, the tour manager and the manager of a technical supplier in the back room of the theatre at 10 p.m. discussing the lighting rig of the get-in the next day. Apparently everything had to happen at the very last minute or the mafia would make this show impossible by blocking the loading bay, kidnapping the truck with the equipment or some other trick. Unfortunately the company could not supply nearly as many lights we needed so I had to cut down half the rig. I was told in advance that at this location we would have much more trouble with the technical crew than in Pavia, I thought it might be a good idea to cut down a bit anyway. But that much?

The next day arrived and as often, everything came out differently. The crew and the equipment were both excellent. The guys spoke no word of English, I still didn't speak any Italian but they were good and kind people and somehow we always found a way to explain what we needed to know and do. I met Mario, a crew member who lived in Germany for a while and was a big fan of Berlin. He and our tour manager functioned as translators for the bigger problems and the rest we could solve with some baby language and our hands and feet. We focused the whole rig with just sign language. Worked very well. In the end, due to the good crew and equipment, this show came out 200% better than the first one. Sadly there was only a really small audience and which was hard for the dancers.

The following day I was lucky that the trains drivers in Italy went on strike and my journey back became an 18 hours nightmare with busses, trains and a plane. I am extremely happy to have survived the really horrible working conditions of this production. But I also met some great people, a really fascinating tour manager which could tell the most interesting stories, had some great food and have been working in two really beautiful theatres.

For the summer, Showtunes 2012 in Bournemouth was confirmed. Which means I will be going to England again for a short time to work on this usually great performance of young talents in the Pavilion. Stay tuned.

Besides that there has been some projects of the more serious nature: General assembly and the usual TV-production "Giacobbo / Müller". Mid-week I am going down to Lausanne where I will watch the performance of "Ecole Atelier Rudra Béjart" which I will have to re-light in two weeks time in Italy. It all seems a little unclear at the moment but I hope this improves when I was there with the LD.

On a more personal note, I would like to draw your attention to "Project 365". Some of you might have come across about this term already. It simply means you publish one photo each day for one year. The idea is to really take a new picture every single day which is then posted to a blog online. I started this project on April 1st and I am wondering how long it will be until I find it really hard to get a new idea each day. (Today was challenging already and I am only 3 days in the project now...). So feel free to head over to my personal project 365 and leave a comment if you want to.

That should be it for today. No rant this time... for a change

But not only is it a very large scale trade show for the latest in cars, no much more it is also the largest display of the latest lighting technology. It is absolutely crazy how much stuff there is in the roof. If you ever felt that it is bad times for lighting design and so on, you probably just work in the wrong area of the business. I can tell you: motor shows it is. Where if not here could we use as much lanterns and power as we want? The sky is the limit and if we need more, there is always more.
It is so wrong what is going on here... Quite some years ago, I would have been more than happy to work on that scale a production, but now, I have real trouble to commit to this work. Today I walked across this huge hall and looked around... Music was blaring from everywhere, a circular saw here, a sledge hammer there, an armada of forklift trucks and so many lights. I work on a mid-scale exhibition stand here, but it is a company that belongs to VW, which happens to be the company that made so much money last year in car sales that their annual revenue was the biggest ever in the history of all German companies. Which also means, we have quite a few lights.

But it cannot be right what we are doing. We are shining light on a car. OK. But we are shining so much more light on a car than it would need to look nice. Today I measured how much we actually had on one of the cars. The reason was that my eyes started to tear. And I found out that depending on where you look at the car, you will have 30,000.00 Lux! Yes. Isn't that great lighting design. It is close to the point that the car paint starts to bubble.
Come on. That is crazy! Oh... and on top of that, for the press conference (which seems to be more important that life or death) I have around 60 moving lights on top of all the other stuff, to give it a bit more punch. (The only problem is, that you cannot punch something that is much stronger than you are...).

I know a lot of people make a living with stuff like that, me included. But I am sure that we are heading into the wrong direction. Not only when it comes to lighting, but generally. We ascribe importance to things that should not have that much relevance at all. I totally understand that when you exhibit something, you want it to look nice. But is it really necessary to shine a gazillion discharge lights onto a single car? And to do the same thing a thousand times in one big room? The result is such a clean and sterile look that does not make you feel comfortable at all. The one stand that stands out in the hall is the one of Lotus. Because it uses tungsten lights. And not so many. Their stand looks so much nicer and with all the cold white light, their's looks almost golden. What a clever idea someone had. Perhaps the only real idea in the room. Because it has nothing to do with art and creative work to put up whatever the warehouse stock can possibly offer and "create" something with all the gear once it is there. Because most of the time, you end up shining even more light onto something, that is already perfectly lit.
Oh, and by the way: How can it be that it is absolutely unacceptable when a fixture bleeds a little through the barn door? Nobody will be able to see anything anyway because there are 30,000 lux on one single car! And there are 17 cars!!!! Add that up and you should probably worry about free sunglasses for your visitors but you don't have to worry about spill light in the roof...
As I said, it is surreal.

Oh, look what I found, last week, a few minutes before 6 p.m.... There was nobody around, no sound, no music, but the lighting was perfectly timed: (I know, it is just mobile phone quality, but this is all I had)

The Eclipse

Eventually all the different bits and pieces came together and we finally opened the show to the public one and a half weeks ago. There has been a major roller coaster moment just after the open dress run, when some of the producers approached the director with strong concerns about the show. Apparently the show has been marketed differently to what was now happening on stage. Besides the fact that this has nothing to do with the lighting design, something like that can also become a serious problem for you as a lighting designer, too. And it did in a way. One day before the first public and sold-out show, we did some heavy restructuring of the show flow and added new parts to the first act.

This all required a lot of re-plotting and moving around cues in the program that was already there. After 22 hours, this day also came to and end and I returned to the big top after 4 hours of sleep again to add another 16 hours to the account. When we reached the opening night, all tracking issues had been resolved and the show went rather smoothly. Except that I almost fell asleep due to the lack of sleep and the lighting desk started to skip cues, which created some really interesting and unexpected looks. You should try it once you get the chance! It gets your adrenalin production going again when you see things happen that are meant to happen much later in the show...!

This song might be performed at the Eurovision 2012

In the end, everything that was not in place just yet could only be seen by me, as they all fell in the category of really tiny things or things that nobody will notice when you skip them. It might change the look and feel to the scene a little early but it didn't destroy it. By now the hardware has been fixed and the show is running fine without any skipping and jumping.

Unfortunately we also had some rather interesting discussion with the production photographer last week. He was hired in to produce a documentary of the show, from day 1 when the tent was being erected until the premiere of the show. At some point during the rehearsals he brought in a s*** load of equipment, including 4 strobe units and the typical stuff (some) photographers (seem to) need. He took a few thousand pictures of the rehearsal and then published them on his website. Not only did we have to get him to remove some photos that clearly showed how one of the more complex illusions worked several times, but he also presents the photos there as a representation of the actual show. That of course is absolutely not the case. Adding 4 additional light sources to the show and overpowering the rest of the lighting rig will lead to a completely different look than the show was.

Sadly he claims that it is his artistic freedom to do so. When I mentioned that his artistic freedom would massively communicate the wrong impression of my creative work, he said that this is not of interest to him as he has artistic freedom to do what he wants to do. And that it is absolutely impossible to get decent pictures of a production with such low lighting levels as this one without using flash photography.
There are two things I hate about this argumentation: First, claiming absolute artistic freedom to express what you want to express is fine when people come into your studio and want you to transform them and the surrounding into something that usually isn't there. But it is not OK to do the same when your job is to capture the emotions and feeling of a living product like a live circus show. And second, I think it is rather boring to say it cannot be done. There are an awful lot of things I cannot do, but that doesn't mean that IT cannot be done. When it comes to live photography, I greatly recommend to have a look at the production shots of Ralph Larmann, one of the most respected photographers in the field of live entertainment at the moment.

The former Cirque du Soleil act

When it comes to our production photographer, I feel sorry for the really dull and rather flat images that he could catch with his really expensive camera that has almost no noise and the best and most expensive lenses available. The pictures in this post have been done with a 6 year old SLR, with a lot more noise, much lower resolution and from the strange angle of the lighting desk. They are far from being perfect, but they caught the emotion and the look of the moment much better. And again, sorry for the guy, as we will now hire someone else to take proper production shots and won't be buying a single one of his unrepresentative pictures.

Left outside alone...?

What happened over the past days? Well, the lighting and video cues have all been done. It is an interesting plot so far. Certain elements of the show are quite detailed already but some others are not. The link in-between the individual show elements will be quite a bumpy journey tomorrow when we have the first tech-run. All I worked with were the individual show elements without any link. Now there have been choreography rehearsals in the big top today and yesterday and the gaps will be filled. This will be the points tomorrow, when we run the show, that we notice a lot of weird fades and dark spots on stage.

Some things still need discussing

But I hope that the main work from tomorrow on will be shaping the transitions and adjusting focusing for individual acts rather than re-working entire scenes. Although I already have one scene on my list that will need to be done. Actually, there are two scenes in the show that I have not yet found the right lighting language for. Somehow I am missing the connection to it. They both are quite upbeat and high speed. But I cannot find the right states for the performance at the moment... We will see how this will look tomorrow.

Generally I found out, that I can handle everything quite well, that fades over a longer period. The high speed power things simply don't work for me in this show. I have a lot of long fades... I am also letting go off the idea that only a show with a lot of cues is a good show. For a long time I felt, that I could not make a proper show with only a couple of cues. But: If the performance only demands a hand-full of cues, why search for more places to fit something in? There are some really great moments in this show, and all it needs is one single state for the entire performance. So I kept it that simple and didn't add anything more. I am brave now! So I was a little surprised tonight that the show already counts 270 lighting cues and 140 video cues on top of that. With the roughly 100 follow spots cues there is already quite a lot going on and I won't get too bored operating the show over the next couple of weeks.

Director in action

So here is what I learned over the week:

1. If you like what you are doing you can walk a lot longer than if you don't like it. That is not a new insight but I should consider its meaning for future decisions.
2. A 90 hour week will start to stretch your physical capacity no matter what your mind says.
3. The only guy that has to stay in the big top longer than me every night is the night guard. At least, he can watch films on his laptop.

Custume Parade... They didn't like my comment that the uniforms look like the ones from the SS...

I am not sure if he had ladder training

Apparently it is Thursday already and we are in Week 2 of the Christmas Circus Production here in Zurich Oerlikon. Days don't matter any more. The past nights I spent sitting at the lighting desk and programming lighting and (with growing displeasure) video for this show. It is one thing to find the right lighting state for a circus act but I feel it is a completely different thing to also find the right video feel to it. And programming the media server is something that I think I will never like.

So it all started with the first rehearsals and went quickly on so that there is now about a good half of the show that has been staged. It all ran rather smooth the first two days but yesterday didn't make a big difference in developing my idea of the show further. We had a patchy day with lots of different things of different parts of the show. It was jumpy and I never got a real idea of the connection of the different acts. So all the stuff I could program at night were sections of the overall show. That makes it harder because it means most probably re-programming a lot, especially on the video front, as you cannot really keep a clever layer structure flowing when you don't have a timeline of things happening after another. So I guess that will be fun.

He kicks ass... (and not his friend)

Some acts are difficult to light for different reasons. One artist constantly complains that the lights are blinding her. That of course is something that I have not heard for the first time, so as always I try to find a way to light the act that is suitable for everyone. In this case I have not yet found the solution, possibly because I never saw the entire act in one piece as she arrived without a finished performance. So she is constantly all over the place on stage and that means I have to flood the entire stage with light in order to see her. That is what makes it blinding... doom loop. Several acts arrived without any or without a finished performance. That is something rather annoying, because they say for them it is not problem, they can make something up. But obviously I cannot busk the show, so there will have to be a finished performance by the end of this week (which is tomorrow...).

Some things happen at the edge...

I am sure I will spend the coming nights in the big top again. It is freezing cold, but I got two gas-heaters to keep me warm and the biggest advantage of working during the night is that nobody is around. Unfortunately my own productivity is inversely proportional to the progressing time at night. So at 4 a.m. I called it a day (or a night - however) for the past days. So far, I have some stunning lighting states that for sure will have to altered when the producers and director get to see them without the working lights on - because "it is too dark". And I have states that I simply don't like yet. The premiere is one week away now and I hope that the show will shape up until then.

So here are the three most important realisations of the past days:
1. MAC 700s are not useable when (1) there is an LED wall running at only 15% of maximum brightness, (2) they come with old lamps inside and (3) you have over 20 year old VL5 on site that are simply twice as bright.
2. The production management is inexistent and the production schedule does not include any break for the creative team, but bites off three hours of LX-time every night for photo shootings on stage.
3. I am a lighting designer and not a passionate LX & video programmer. Sorry.

I think my houselights are quite sexy...

Working VL5s made possible by the Vari*Lite helpline

Classical look: VL5

During the first days of get-in I made my daily visit to the bigtop in the evening after I left the office. Although everything seemed to go quite well for the technical supplier, it became evident that there were a few issues with certain elements of the lighting rig: The VL5 and how it is set-up, maintained and run as well as 4 fixtures that the designer (that would be me) had easily positioned at the highest point of the tent on a piece of paper. Well, after calling the Vari*Lite telephone support in Leipzig, Germany (thanks again Hendrik), the VL5 finally worked according to plan. The only thing I was slightly curious about was the fact that it became really quiet about the issue of rigging 4 Clay Pakys in the roof.

Having learnt the way this particular crew worked, I figured that I would at some point walk into the venue and someone would simply come up to me and tell me that the roof lights would simply not be rigged. And so it happened. Although section drawings of the tent suggest its hight of over 15 meters at the highest point, the Genie lift that there was on site only reaches to about 9 metres, which is the trim hight of the main rig. It seemed to come to them as a big surprise and I was really shocked of the way this new truth was now presented to me as a fact and not as a problem that might be solved. The serious suggestion was that the lights would look much nicer as floor lights anyway... After carefully considering this really creative idea for about 2 seconds I turned it down and agreed with myself that the compromise would be to hang the fixtures very high up of the 4 masts surrounding the stage. Not ideal, but better than on the floor.

The following days brought other minor and larger surprises that proved that it is a very big advantage to be able to read a rather uncomplicated lighting plot carefully. Unfortunately not everyone that was in charge of reading it was fully capable and willing to do so. And also, that depending on the crew, meetings are absolutely obsolete. It was a pain for the crew that in the end had to de-rig and reposition quite a lot and also a pain for me as the crew left with a half finished lighting rig. Only due to the help of a colleague of our company and more telephone support by Hendrik, the two men-team that my colleague and I formed, managed to finish the whole thing before rehearsals started.

So that was quite a challenge and not really a nice way to start a long-term project. It still isn't completely fun for me now, as the support technician for the show constantly keeps disappearing and has no working experience with any technology used in this production. So this will become quite interesting over the next two months.

At least, the day before yesterday started with the first impressions of the coming show. The artists arrive on site and we were able to see some of their performances. Saturday was particularly interesting because we got to set up and understand the magical illusions the magician of the show brought with him. I never knew how incredibly expensive and massive these things are! The young guy from France is surprisingly open when it comes to his tricks and illusions and I have the deepest respect already for his female assistants. What looks like an easy job and glamour is actually hard and unpleasant work. Although it is all about the presentation of the illusion, the assistants are the real stars of an illusion.

Setting-up deathly illusions...

Another important aspect I took away from the weekend was that it is not always the really dangerous looking performances that are really dangerous. When the stage manager, myself and the magician wanted to de-rig one of his trick, we all were only centimeters away from being struck by almost 100kg of metal weights falling from 5m height. Only a second before they hit the floor, the magicians head was right where the weights fell down. This is certainly an experience for the "closest you have come to death while working" section of the L&SI magazine...The falling metal posts of another quite dangerous performance yesterday lets me be grateful about my far away control position...

So this coming week will see me a lot of hours plotting during the night. The days will bring rehearsals of the script and hopefully bring the performances closer together. I will record the final rehearsal of the day and then use the night to program the lighting and video cues. I don't know when or if I will get any sleep during this period and I am also not looking forward to the temperature drop during the night when the heating is switched off and everyone except me goes home...

So, the three most important realisations I took away from this first week are:

1. A crew is only as good as their enthusiasm for the work they are doing.
2. Just a tiny moment of distraction can make the difference between magic and horror.
3. Not new, but ever so true: Friends are the most important thing in your life.

And just so that I have said it again:
3.5. I think it is not the best idea to be lighting designer and lighting/video operator in one person. See number 2 for why...

Last year I was assistant LD and also operated a fair amount of the total 60 productions. This year, I am in charge of the lighting design now and also have to program the lighting and video for this show. But why "old school"?

In 2010 this was a high-tech production that had to get a lot out of a small budget when it came to lighting. So the equipment was chosen according to the current standard. A lot of LED lights combined with the usual moving lights that you can see around most of the time. The result was a very glamorous and brilliant production that really made a lot out of the fairly small rig.

This year, the production has a new story to tell and this is going further back in time - at least when it comes to the feeling of it all. There are several story lines interlinked into each other and one of them also deals with power and its consumption. So we will have a lot more dark times in the show. Also some elements have a 70's or 80's musical feeling to it... so I ended up - together with the director - that we need as much tungsten light quality in the show as possible. For me, the tungsten-LD, that was a great idea.

So after some really difficult processes in advance, we finally ended up with a rig, that holds a lot of lights that were developed when I was a little kid. The VL5 (as people know, one of my favourite lights of all times) plays the main role, combined by VL1000, MAC 700, Robin 600 LED, Clay Pakys and a lot of lightbulbs. Today I was in the tent, which is simply massive and huge and now I am a little worried, that the VL5 might not be the ideal light any more. The rig is very high up and I am not entirely sure if there will be enough light on stage in the end. I hope there will be...

Well, the next weeks will be exciting and exhausting. But I am looking forward to it and will be reporting here... if I have the energy to do so.

Now, it seems we are about to close another chapter of technology in theatre- and event lighting. The one of tungsten light sources. The incandescent light bulbs for our homes have already been banned from the shelves in the supermarkets and been widely replaced with questionable "alternatives" that don't bring us the same quality of light in terms of colour temperature and spectrum, but are a lot more energy efficient. I won't go into details about the disadvantages of these revolutionary replacements and the given fact that this has been a very clever lobby movement - this article is about something else.

Of course, us, working in the entertainment industry also get affected by this. It is only a matter of time until the halogen light sources are banned (not only in homes, but also for entertainment purposes) as well. The manufacturers have started years ago with the development of new, compact and lightweight LED fixtures to eventually replace the now common ones. We gained a lot of new tools out of this. As always when there is new technology developed and shaped, there is a lot of crap products around. But time usually helps for a natural selection of the useful things.
We gained much faster lights, lower power requirements, lots of little dots that light up, extreme brightness, lower costs and so much more. What we didn't gain is a better quality of light. I feel that over the past years, every event I attended and where a large amount of LED fixtures were used, the overall feel of it was quite sterile and in a way cold. I cannot describe it better, but for me, the feel of any colour coming from an LED source is quite cold. And it is highly saturated. I also feel that we lost variety. As people don't really know how (and if) you can get subtle tones out of the pixelated fixtures, they simply tend to go for full saturation all the time. Think about it. I think the most commonly used colours lately were deep blue (100% Blue), some strange type of amber/yellow (100% red, 100% green) and a lot of magenta (100% red, 100% blue).

Don't get me wrong. This is not meant to say we should get rid of LED lighting. This would also contradict what I say on my "green light" page. But I think it is also wrong to completely ban the incandescent light source. It is a given fact that the spectrum of this light source is good for us. And I don't mind selecting colour gels for a fixture. In fact, I always like doing this. And I also don't mind that the colour changes when I dim down the light. Maybe this is even an effect I want to have...?

LED will be the future. Period. But there is an awful lot to do before I accept it as a perfect replacement for the tungsten light we are still used to. The charm of a tungsten show is unmatched by modern LED fixtures. And I really feel we are loosing something by blindly following the LED way. I don't expect the manufacturers to build brighter lights or faster lights. How much brighter and faster do you want to go? I expect them to build fixtures (and I know there are products around already that can do some of this to a certain extend) that offer:
- NO visible pixels. LED as a light source and not as visible "dots" everywhere.
- proper dimming. No further explanation needed.
- in also in the dimming section: Maybe it makes sense to build a light that behaves like a tungsten fixture? So that when you dim it, it changes the colour temperature according to a tungsten light source. But then, probably the spectrum will always remain in the way.

But then, there is a lot to say about the positive aspects of LEDs. I leave this to everyone else. If you want to contribute, then feel free to do so.