Boom Color Changes
Master Electrician, Studio Dance 1: Moving Forward/Looking Back
Using dance students as our changeover crew meant that they may not know much lighting terminology, but I still needed them to be self-reliant and complete these color changes accurately. My solution was to assign every dance piece a color and label the gel frames with corresponding colored tabs also labeled with the position.
For further clarity, I created a grid illustrating which color was used in which pieces and placed it on the front of every folder. The two axes showed position and dance piece accordingly (color coded of course), and the background of each gel cell was colored to show the approximate color to an untrained eye. If a frame was misplaced, they would know vaguely what color to look for.
Minimal backstage space required compact storage, leading to the install of folder holders in alcoves and the reuse of color throughout the show.
Colors correspond to the dance piece, labels tell which fixture on the boom.
For a dance show with minimal masking, the booms were the only ‘scenery’ onstage and needed to look exceptionally clean. Sandbags weighting the bases were covered with black duvetyne, safety cables were wrapped snugly, and electrical cables hugged the pipe and made to run in line with each other.
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Strike Plan
Master Electrician, Crazy For You
There is always a lot to get done during strike, so Electrics met with the Technical Direction team to make sure that the two departments could move around each other and still be productive while we had our large crews available.
I divided everything that needed to get done into separate phases where each item can happen concurrently with other items within its phase. Then the phases themselves each take precedence above the next phase’s items.
I found this formatting helpful to assign and keep track of crew, check off completed tasks, and to ensure that prioritized tasks don’t accidentally fall by the wayside.
Repertory Changeover
Asst. Master Electrician, Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre
Four shows each had their own color: red, yellow, green, and blue for spiking rover placement, paperwork, and labels. In my case, I wanted a more efficient piece of changeover paperwork to display what gel/gobo changes occurred between these four different shows. I compiled all of the information from LightWright into an Excel file, hid columns not pertaining to the two shows of choice, and highlighted the changes in their particular color.
In the example here, anytime we changed into Madame Butterfly (MB in blue) from Music Man (MM in green) or vice versa, this piece of paperwork was used. In total, there were six documents ready to changeover into or out of any combination of our four shows.
