What I Dream About

Honestly? Lighting. I'm that crazy about it. :P I woke up this morning with my head reeling about how to fix a problem we have at school. Followspots. We have two of them but they are extremely sub-par for our application. There is a span of 90 feet between the apron of our stage and the followspot stands, which is too large of a gap for the followspots to cope with. Our 1982 Altman 1000Q followspots have a data-sheet trow of 80 feet. So, you wouldn't think that another 10 feet would cripple a stage production but oh how it does. We recently preformed "Hairspray", a very followspot demanding show, and boy did I steer clear of that as much as possible. Throughout the whole span of the 2 and a half hour play, I recollect using the followspots maybe three or four times. I couldn't stand the way the beam looked on stage during our dress rehearsals, it was just dreary, grey, and all together depressing, the exact opposite of the plot. So I got to thinking, if I can, why don't I fix our problem. And, I can! The solution literally came to me in a dream. All we have to do is get two ETC Source Four 5 degree lens tubes! That's all! We just rid ourselves of the followspot bodies, keeping the stands, and mount the Source Fours on the pipes. It's gold. All we have to do is run cabling from our dimmer racks out with the sound cables to the stands and we're good to go, no problem. I even worked out the math and with the new lens tubes, at a throw of 90 feet the beam diameter of the fixture would be nine feet. However, Mrs. Ogle was telling me at the end of the year that she's looking into getting a new board to replace our Electronics Diversified Mistrel Plus. And with that, some moving lights, something like a Martin smartMAC or MAC 250 Entour. She'd like four or five and I won't argue with that! I was thinking I would mount one or two of them, depending on how many we purchase, above the tech booth to replace whatever followspots we may have at the time.  It would certainly free up two techies to work in other places we need help and it would help eliminate operator error, with the whole system completely computerized, the only thing to go wrong is the power going out. I like the sound of that.

For now, that is all,

That Tech Kid, Jordan