Trouble In Paradise

Kind of, not really. We came back from Winter Break this week and Mrs. O gave me the great opportunity to reorganize our Lighting Closet. It was quite therapeutic actually. I took decided that the best way to go about it was to pull everything out, organize it, and them put it all back in. It was certainly an interesting experience to behold. We had equipment hiding under the staircase that I didn't even know existed. We pulled out all of the strip lights, lens tubes, and dead fresnels and went to sorting. It took out two man team about 5 hours but we got it done. Then came trouble. When I went about hanging things back on our organization board, I got a little too crazy with the space saving and we have a big top half of board that is totally empty. Whoops.

And then came even more trouble. I went to the booth to check all the labels for the lights on the catwalk and noticed that some of the faders have started  to ghost and the Grand Master malfunctions when you bring it all the way up. You basically have to set it at 99% or else it starts reading the wrong values and all the lights flicker. It's going to be a nightmare. Especially with the musical coming up. I need to talk to Mrs. Ogle about looking at getting an ETC Element. I really think that that's the board for us. It's focused at schools that have primarily (or all in our case) conventional lighting. It has the perfect amount of hands on control as well as the indirect control through the keypad, which I like.

At the beginning of the year, Mrs. Ogle put the idea in my head that we should maybe start thinking about LED cyc lighting because of how quickly we burn through our cyc silks. I really like that idea and the Element is perfectly suited for such a thing. However in light of the fact that we don't have any foundational DMX outputs around the stage, we would have to look at a wireless DMX system. Which is actually very cool. The Element has two DMX outputs which is so handy. Universe 1 would go to the dimmers for all the stage lights and the second universe would be where the wireless comes in. Chauvet makes a wireless system called the D-Fi, there are both transmitters and receivers and can be used from a distance of up to 600 feet away. There would be a transmitter hooked up to the second DMX output and a receiver above the stage connected to the (theoretical) Chauvet COLORstrips. IT'S PERFECT. I just don't know how realistic it is. I just hope and wish that I could have at least my senior year with something so amazing. I want something like that to be my Senior Legacy. That would be nice.

Oh dreams, whatever shall I do?

Welp, goodnight,

That Tech Kid, Jordan.