Moving Light Show

PRG Demo

The Spring semester starts next week, but in the meantime, CalArts has this 2 week interim schedule thing. The purpose of it is to take specialty classes and seminars. One of the classes I'm taking is an advanced moving light lab master class that Don arranged for all of the LDs. It's a two day seminar about programming moving lights and the role a programmer plays in the design process.

PRG Logo

PRG-LA was kind enough to host us at their facilities today. We got a great tour of the building and access to their moving light demo lab. Our assignment was to create a meaningful moving light show set to a 2 minute piece of music with a partner. Each group had 1 hour to tech their song with the assistance of professional programmer. The programmer was Matt Cotter for those who are wondering. He's an amazing programmer and has a great attitude to go with it. We programmed on the Virtuoso console in the demo lab which is equipped with about 80 fixtures ranging from VL5s to MAC 2Ks to VL3000s.

On a side note: We even got a glance a Vari-Lite's new VL3500 Wash FX fixture. The most interesting thing about this light, besides the fact that it's super bright, is that it has the ability to project a gobo pattern! Yes it's a wash light, but it can also focus a gobo, however this comes at the cost of an iris in the light. P.S. Thanks for the swag Vari-Lite!

Continuing on…my partner and I decided that the Pink Panther theme song had an interesting orchestration to base a light show on. It has a great theme of spying and sneaking around as well as excellent crescendos and swells from saxophones and trumpets. We had a lot of great ideas that we talked about before our tech time and got most of them into the piece. It's pretty intense trying to cue a very rhythmic and precise piece of music in an hour. That is the lesson I learned today. Overall I think it was a pretty successful first run. There are a few timings and cues I'd like to add in still, but the final presentation is on Thursday, so it may not be possible to get it done. I took a rough video of the piece today to look at mistakes on when we called the cues wrong, but I will post a final version on Thursday.

As promised here is the link. Ultimately I decided to post the first run of the show we ever did, as I was not happy with the quality of the final run we did. Enoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nshaH7dLDMw