Dear Charlotte
BY JOY Gregory
Programmer & Light Board op
Director: Christopher Owens | Scenic Design: Afsaneh Aayani | Lighting Design: Addie Pawlick |
Costume Design: Victoria Nicolette Gist
We’re using what board?
This was my first production at UH, and it was a super fun challenge! For this show, we used the Strand NEO light board, which I had never worked with before. This was also my first time programming for a lighting designer and working with intelligent lights– woah. Before we began our tech process, I met with the assistant lighting designers to patch the show and do a channel check to plan for a smooth first day of tech. The syntax of patching was different that what I was used to, but I adjusted quickly (mistakes were good though because we were able to figure out how to delete a patch since none of us knew..).
Intelligent fixtures
Coming straight from high school, I honestly never even knew there were lights that could move so I was ecstatic. Aside from the board, I had to learn to quickly navigate the intelligent fixtures. It took a minute to get fast at selecting the channel, finding where it was on stage, and then focusing in on one actor which was easy after some practice. Since not all of the movers were hung in the same position, some of the pan/tilt encoders were backwards and I had to remember which were which.
Also, when a particular light or area needed to change color, I thought it was cool how the designer just told me a color and she wanted me to match and adjust. I learned to see and match very specific color and how the fixtures with different color temperature “think” each color looks like. Encoders were my best friend.
Practicals
There were also many practical used in Dear Charlotte, like the big flowers in the set and life sized street lights that were flown in and out during scenes. In the lighting and sound class, we learned about electricity and wiring. For the show, we had to wire standard 100w light bulbs in lamp sockets to get power from Edison plugs to stage pin cables. These light bulbs were spray painted blue, placed inside the large paper flowers, and then received power from the grid.
A LOOK INTO DESIGN
During the tech process, I worked with the lighting designer, Addie Pawlick, and one of our design faculty, Kevin Rigdon. By quickly picking up on the Neo’s programming shortcuts, in my mind I translated what I was doing with the board to what we were creating on stage. I was able to understand how all. the different colors, textures, directions, intensities, and temperatures exponentially affected this play’s theatricality. Through picking up conversations between Kevin and Addie, I put myself in the eyes of the lighting designer– where is your area of highest contrast/what would happen if we removed this/why not use this light to hit her/why don’t you remove everything and build this look from scratch?
