Now that I've had a little time to collect my thoughts, here's my take on how lighting at Arisia went. I learned a *zuttload* of stuff, some of which may be of interest to the folks here. And it should be more engaging than having to read yet another whine about mailers. The "lighting director" position, as it apparently came to be called at badge-making time, was a lot of work but also a lot of fun. It involved quite a bit of pre-con work to haul a bunch of Minnesota Mafia gear that most people had entirely given up on out of storage, bring it all back into working shape, and swap all those Edison plugs for new stage-pin. Now that that is done, I'm hoping that the gear can find its way to being used at some other northeast cons and not just Arisia. It might be a tool to provide a small, sporadic income for Arisia in nominal rental fees. Unfortunately, a couple of the attempted strain-relief wads of tape at the pin-plug shells are already slipping out. The shells don't have much in the way of grip mechanism back there. It doesn't present an immediate electrical danger since the wiring itself is into the plug pins *very* firmly with crimp-lugs, but it's annoying. Some of these might want to be redone, or at least made thicker, next time this gear is taken out. Plan accordingly. At teardown, most of the Arisia instruments packed nicely into the two black wooden cases on wheels and went back to storage that way. There are also two file boxes of gels with "Jeff Berry" written all over them, which received extensive reorganization pre-con, and a couple of flat cardboard boxes containing more gel rolls and spare lamps. I still have random leftover parts at home that one or two working lights may yet emerge from, but most of what remains is just a bucket-o-partz to go back to deep storage and likely never see the light of day, or of the stage, again. I will be sending some more details on our gel stock and other inventory soon. For Arisia, quite a bit of additional gel and gobos were provided gratis from Liz Orenstein's personal stock, which drove the need to keep track of the sources of everything and return her stuff properly back to her. The planning aspect of all this represented *hours* of work and paper- shuffling. Chasing down all the little details, such as whose stash any particular borrowed accessories came from or what cues to preprogram into the board's memory card for the club dance, took a surprisingly large amount of time. And the basic plan had originally come from Liz, not me -- I probably wouldn't have known where to start without her guidance. I then took it as far as I could. Maybe it's just me, possibly in contrast to some other TFers who do lighting for other cons, but it all paid off: I actually had a Definitive Plan for every event's lighting needs and a fair notion of how to set people to the various subtasks therein. And that's something, coming from someone whose hair is normally anything but pointy. I was thankful that I had done most of it way *before* getting sick right before the con -- if I had waited till the last minute, I would have been totally hosed. One thing that *really* helped was pulling all the gel cuts needed for all events into *one* folder, ready to deploy into lights as shown on the plot, and marking them all with white grease pencil. This was especially important to have done beforehand and *logged* on a pull-sheet since gel was coming from three different sources, and trying to hunt it all down at-con amongst the file boxes and various spare rolls would have been a nightmare. I also had a stack of gobos preselected from the larger stocks and an exact list of where to deploy them when. Of some note is the fact that *black* grease-pencil burns up within seconds if marked across a gel, taking the gel's integrity with it, particularly if at the center where 90% of the light hits. White is best because it doesn't get hot and is visible on dark or light gels, and even visible as opaque lines when looking at the front of a lit instrument if the lettering is inboard of the gel-frame hole. I tried to interest techno-fandom in some of the ongoing pre-con planning I was doing, but I think it went over many peoples' heads. By load-in time the Plan such as it was was pretty much still in my own head, and a big part of the job was to transmit this in a sufficiently clear manner to the build crew so that things didn't have to be redone. Several people stepped into the breech in fine style and did a really great job -- notably Chip, who not only cut and loaded most of the cyc-light gel but then went off and hung the whole house right side pretty much correctly the first time by himself based on my sketchy directions. Only minor sight-line corrections were needed after all the crews had done their thing. Additional kudos are due to Stephanie, Catherine, that other tall MITGASP guy whose name I never caught, Seph, and Marc for busting ass in a really clueful manner with minimal direction -- not to mention putting up with me during the Refocus From Hell. David Silber also took up a lot of the slack where the spots were concerned; I wound up delegating almost everything about spotlights to him and never even looked at the things myself, and poof, there were spots anyways. It was a good thing we didn't spend too much time trying to get the hotel's spots to work, since we never came up with enough crew to run them. And Liz O. was right there with answers when I needed her, either onsite or back at the shop. I think I've missed at least one other person in the above; please get in touch if I brainfarted. [Can we pleeze get some of those people onto the mailing list??] The crew M and D handoff went pretty well, I thought, at some slight risk of placing the more junior people into positions they might not have been fully trained up on. But in this case they applied Clue and came through it just fine. In general, tag-teaming two crews *does* double the number of runtime people needed, which is good for some cons where a lot of people want runtimes but potentially disastrous if there aren't enough to fill all the positions. There seemed to be some slight uncertainty as to which crew was supposed to run some transition times, such as opening the house or the changeover from play to masquerade, but those needs are simple enough that either crew could easily deal. One major missing piece was that there was never really any time provided for basic lighting *focus*. Either that, or maybe there was plenty of time given and I just handled the timing of everything badly. Somehow I don't think so, given that I had a pretty clear punch-list in hand, but I'll entertain well-reasoned counterarguments. We had to sort of wing it where we could, working around other events such as play rehearsal, or quietly doing seat-of-the-pants fresnel aim behind the curtain when the GoH was speaking. Regardless of whose fault[s] it might have been, lack of focus time pervaded the whole weekend, with the topper being a big ol' misunderstanding on what was involved in the changeover for the club dance. The lighting crew was waiting for the sound-check to finish and go quiet before doing refocus, but the DJ had long since finished his sound-check and started in. It all got straightened out in the end, with the possible amusement of the dance attendees being able to watch the focus process for what they would then dance underneath until 6am. The main lesson here is that in general, we have gotten used to setting up lighting for *one* event in a weekend, and changeovers for three or four separate events may not be on our typical TD's radar yet. Nonetheless, they do involve transition time, sometimes significantly so, and need to be planned for. I thought rehearsal time was biased too heavily toward the play, and per Susan's comments, not enough toward the masquerade. As it was we got really lucky on the masquerade with so few entries, especially after my brainfart about the lighting board not speaking DMX. It was also rather difficult to work in the ballroom with the orchestra going at it the way they were. In general there should have been another person *under* the TD wrangling most of the play planning. Nonetheless, I think the play came together *really* well in the end, yielding a nice, polished and quite clearly *audible* performance. [Nice hack with the PZMs, guys..] I don't recall seeing the "three-region" stage lighting really used after all, so it is possible that working up the minor replug and shutter-pulling changeover back to masquerade mode wasn't really needed. The masquerade ran on a mix of generic warm/cool Fred submasters and a couple of programmed cues. For cued presentations, the show caller simply issued "lighting cue 57" and the like, reminding the board op [ahem] to type in NEXT-CUE, 5, 7, ENTER to run that entry with the crossfaders. The cyc lighting was not really used enough, possibly because Marc and I were under too much time pressure to think of using it except in a couple of cases, but crew D made up for that somewhat by using the cyc for the halftime show as well. Having a lower-time-pressure masquerade rehearsal block would have allowed for more thought about things like the cyc and special effects and creativity to really match what the entrant is trying to present. Susan's ideas from Sunday morning basically boil down to having an additional experienced tech person present at rehearsal, who can talk to the next on-deck contestant about tech needs and then come over to the show-caller position and translate it directly into tech-ese for the caller and lighting operator. This would multithread the time needed for the contestant to express what it wants to the tech crew and reduce the "dead time" when nobody is on the stage rehearsing. Maybe that's an additional role that the hitherto theoretical stage manager could pick up. That makes sense, especially considering that *I* was sitting there suggesting that some of the entrants should re-block their positions and moves to get better lighting benefit. I was really pleased with how lighting shot through the chandeliers made sort of sinister, spidery shadows on the opposite wall archways. This along with the "flicker" trick made for a nice gold-toned, subtly shifting light in the room reminiscent of firelight, which was initially too dim for the dancers' taste but was okay once augmented with more from the house lights themselves. It was also a good thing the built-in overhead stage lighting was readily available, because otherwise that "small" [?!!] band would have been playing in the dark since no lighting requirements were otherwise given. The club dance was a blast, and worked Boots' board to its absolute limits. Various combinations of chase-subs and timed cues kept things nice and bouncy, and despite the lack of motion or color-changing ability seemed well-received by those dancing. The floor was pretty packed for several hours, in contrast to previous years where the dances ran rather lackadaisically under boring half-house-lights, which I take to indicate that better "clubby" lighting lent a lot of enhancement to the event this time. Liz's recommendation of adding Rosco 114 frost to the instruments lighting the stage works really well to eliminate all the hard-edge circles normally projected by ellipsoidals. The *many* 3/4 height pieces I found in the Arisia gel files have the interesting side effect of fuzzing out the top and sides of the circle very nicely, and leaving the bottom edge of the circle a little harder so that it can be shutter-cut to the stage edge more accurately. The visual effect is also better than just trying to defocus the circle. I would now recommend 114 or some appropriately light frost gel *any* time a Leko or S4 or similar instrument is being used for a wash -- just load 'em up regardless, and the light will be much more even and manageable. Filament preheat worked well, after working through a minor problem with different curves on the dimmer packs. The Strand CD80 glowed filaments about right at 2%, and the other, older pack needed a 12 or 13% kick in the ass before it came up to the same level. This was fixed by reprogramming the preheat sub in separate chunks of channels 1-12 and 13-24 at the different levels. People seemed happy with the nice slow-fade presets I saved into the house lighting system, although the sucky user interface caused some abrupt transistions despite our best efforts to *not* tap the preset twice. *sigh* Selwyn on the hotel engineering staff is quite aware that that system needs some serious rework by the Crestron people, especially after the ballroom refurb work. I was prepared to augment or replace the functionality of the house lighting by hanging a couple of spare scoops and fresnels up on the goalposts that we could control from the board, but the house system was more or less under control enough that we just used it. The new electrical panels in the Imperial balcony are *really* nice, and no longer require electricians to tie in bare ends. They can output 200 amps 3-phase directly to camlocks. So we didn't use some of the tie-in wiring from BN, but I didn't try to remove it from the rental order just in case it turned out we needed it. We know for next year. All told, I thought everything went pretty well, and I think I'd be willing to do this part of it again, with the exception that I would want to try to involve other people earlier in the game and actually have someone able to back me up on the plan and execution. I also have all of my notes from this year that can eliminate a lot of that learn-by-doing time. But someone has to *want* to backend me or whoever winds up taking the role, without a lot of coercion or supervision. I don't think techno-fandom plans too well along these lines in general, often taking an approach that seems to be more last-minute than otherwise. Sometimes that really shows, and I would really like to see people unlame and begin work well before any given event so that they have *time* to think about the polish and the elegant touches. We have a set of Imperial Ballroom measurements scattered across about three different places now, which should be pulled back together as a reasonable machine-readable dimension diagram at some point before next year. Oh, and two of my FRS radios were stolen very late Friday night, along with two of Megan's, from where they had been stashed pretty much out of sight on the house left balcony. The oddest thing about it is that my third identical radio was right in the same box as the other two and was *not* taken. Maybe the little bastard ran out of pockets. _H* 020305