today we had our theater workshop combining lighting and devising people
Devising groups are given a word to inspire and inform their piece. (My devising group's keyword is maya-lila. Sometimes I think this course gets way too meta for me. Then I make magic on the lighting board.) Our group's was limen, meaning threshold. The space in between spaces.
So we had five characters in some metaphorical waiting room:
A pregnant woman, alternately looking forward to motherhood and hating the kicking, just waiting.
A runaway girl who escaped an abusive home life and lives on the streets.
A girl in her last year of high school who doesn't know whether to follow her boyfriend to uni on the other island or go closer to home.
Apparently a man who caught his wife cheating with his best friend, but it wasn't too clear from his lines; we called him the Breaking Man.
A girl in her early teens accidentally shot dead on her way home from school.
Why, yes, there are barely any boys in this class. I'd give a play by play but I have a headache... Maybe some other day, because some minor memes came out of ours that I suspect I'll be spouting for a while now and they make no sense out of context.
Lighting babble just to get some thoughts down before I actually do my folio:
The pregnant woman and the girlfriend weren't as moody as the others and tended to interact more with the other characters so they usually had a wash, a nice neutral light all over the stage, except when preggers had a bitchfest about the kid not coming out yet, where we had a red wash over the stage.
Runaway girl had a monologue possibly to some kind of social worker and had this beautifully cut spotlight, 40% intensity. The shadows both made her look more depressive and cut out some of her facial expressions, which didn't quite work because she was pretty static.
The ghost girl had a light blue wash. I would have loved to backlight her to give her a halo effect but we would have blinded everyone; our attempts to get rid of her shadow on the floor didn't work either. It had to wash the stage because she walked around a lot.
The Breaking Man stood in the center of a handless clock that I cut the gobo for, while the other actors, representing his consciousness rather than their characters, circled him going in and out of the lit numbers of the clock and into the darkness of the audience.
There's kind of two main things to being a board op that I really love but that I think the people who weren't board ops don't really get. The rest of the lighting team, once the lights are set up and focussed, once the lighting states are programmed into the computer, sit in the audience and cross their fingers that all goes well, kinda like a director or someone else who's involved in putting it together but doesn't touch anything during the performance.
Being a board op and changing the lighting states means you become a part of the performance. You're waiting for cues and trying to hit them too. The difference is that onstage, the performers can cover screwups and fake it till they make it. If a board op screws up, it makes everyone look bad till you fix it. I'm not sure I'd say it's more pressure than being a performer onstage, because board ops get their cue-to-cue sheets/scripts saying exactly when to hit "GO" whereas performers don't always have a prompt, but it's certainly a different kind of pressure than I'm used to onstage.
But I enjoy it in a different way to being onstage. Because our lighting's all programmed into a computer: Which lights are on, how bright, and how long they take to fade in or out into the next lighting state. And I am always comfortable in front of a computer. (Unless it's a Mac, because I always manage to hit the wrong key on Macs. That said, I don't think the lighting computers run Windows either, but the interface is pretty intuitive.) So that kind of offsets the pressure of being the man who arranges the blocks.
(This probably all sounds obvious to other theater people on my flist but this is as much a record for me to look back on "shit I actually liked in uni" as it is a "shit I'm doing in uni, you guys" post.)
In other news: I'm looking to buy a tag and crest. Which of the original eight crests + Kindness do you think could be a strength of mine with a little work? (Pity there isn't a crest of rambling. :)) Honest answers are appreciated not least because I'm looking at this as an attempt at self improvement too.
So we had five characters in some metaphorical waiting room:
Why, yes, there are barely any boys in this class. I'd give a play by play but I have a headache... Maybe some other day, because some minor memes came out of ours that I suspect I'll be spouting for a while now and they make no sense out of context.
Lighting babble just to get some thoughts down before I actually do my folio:
There's kind of two main things to being a board op that I really love but that I think the people who weren't board ops don't really get. The rest of the lighting team, once the lights are set up and focussed, once the lighting states are programmed into the computer, sit in the audience and cross their fingers that all goes well, kinda like a director or someone else who's involved in putting it together but doesn't touch anything during the performance.
Being a board op and changing the lighting states means you become a part of the performance. You're waiting for cues and trying to hit them too. The difference is that onstage, the performers can cover screwups and fake it till they make it. If a board op screws up, it makes everyone look bad till you fix it. I'm not sure I'd say it's more pressure than being a performer onstage, because board ops get their cue-to-cue sheets/scripts saying exactly when to hit "GO" whereas performers don't always have a prompt, but it's certainly a different kind of pressure than I'm used to onstage.
But I enjoy it in a different way to being onstage. Because our lighting's all programmed into a computer: Which lights are on, how bright, and how long they take to fade in or out into the next lighting state. And I am always comfortable in front of a computer. (Unless it's a Mac, because I always manage to hit the wrong key on Macs. That said, I don't think the lighting computers run Windows either, but the interface is pretty intuitive.) So that kind of offsets the pressure of being the man who arranges the blocks.
(This probably all sounds obvious to other theater people on my flist but this is as much a record for me to look back on "shit I actually liked in uni" as it is a "shit I'm doing in uni, you guys" post.)
In other news: I'm looking to buy a tag and crest. Which of the original eight crests + Kindness do you think could be a strength of mine with a little work? (Pity there isn't a crest of rambling. :)) Honest answers are appreciated not least because I'm looking at this as an attempt at self improvement too.