When, Where, What - Who?
On May 30, 31, June 1st, 2nd (and the week or so before) i was involved in Hawker College's fantastic production of Cloud Street, a lengthy play based off a novel by Tim Winton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudstreet
The play was directed by two fantastic drama teachers at Hawker, the cast and crew consisted of students (with the exception of me) - very able students at that. In one of the original cases of this Australian written piece, the play went for a good 5 hours. It had two intermissions, one of them was a sit-down dinner. This... wasn't 5 hours. It was closer to 2 1/2 hours with a 20 minute intermission – none the less lengthy.
Tech Breakdown:
The Set and Blocking
From a technical point of view, the show was very much a lighting show, part of the reason why I was involved, however the set was pretty complementary too. Using scaffolding the set was raised on the stage with two or three levels spread out across the stage for different rooms in this 'house' in the neighbourhood. A large ground level space was located in front of the house which represented the front of this big family house in scenes - or just random locations needed throughout the play.
At the front of the main stage were two extensions with a big pit in the middle. The pit signified a downstairs room of the house with a very distinct and different feel (dusty, spooky, ghostly - very fantasy like) and also water where a row boat was located and played a key role in Fish’s story.
The extensions were mostly seen as piers or used for the oracle (the Black Man) of the story as it was significantly separate to the main action.
Lighting
Here's the fun bit, Hawker's theatre is equipped with 48 dimmer channels and plenty of patch points and roughly 80 standard fixtures. Pretty good for non-private-school theatre, however I went a bit further for this production and here are the rough specs:
- 60 dimmer channels
- 8 Geni Oby 3's
- 2 Martin Mac 250's
- Hog PC (Or Echelon/Hog 1000 Desk)
I ended up using about 54 of the dimmer channels. A further break down of the standard fixtures were:
- 4 open white Fresnels
- 5 2kw wash... chunkybutts as i call them. They're big, heavy and bright.
- 4 'night' blue fresnels
- A whole heap of 123's for lighting the rooms and other specials
- Minuette's for specials/spots
- 1kw T-Spots from the catwalk to light the piers, front of stage and the water/pit.
Biggest rig I've done in this theatre to date and I couldn't really fit any more in, I ran out of room on lighting bars, even when rigging an extra for some of the moving lights.
Now while I had heaps of fixed lights I still wanted the ability for closed specials anywhere on stage at any time. Also had some fantastic ideas for fantasy scenes - smoke/haze + gobos is a very nice thing.
Originally I would have liked 8 of the mac250's but the order went through late so I was left with 8 of the Oby 3’s and two Mac250’s.
I ended up doing the programming with a HogPC, while still as effective as an Echelon or Hog desk itself, it slows you down with programming due to the inability to select parameters with buttons and move lights as easily with scroll wheels.
A total of 160 lighting cues for the 90 something scenes was definitely a task for the student lighting operators and our DSM who ended up just cueing lighting, taking the task off the Stage Managers hands. There were two student operators each night taking the show in two shifts, this not only allowed for a break but for greater experience and opportunity.
Sound
Sound was your typical sound cues, a micropohone or two used for the telephone exchange scene - nothing spectacular - no hired in gear either. I guess in short what we used were BOSE 802's as the house audio, shure SM58 microphones and not much more.
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