current mood: geeky current music: Charlie Hall - Walk the World

If you don't have at least a rudimentary understanding (or even the slightest interest in) of programming lighting consoles and moving lights, this post will probably be extremely boring.

A while ago while at Bandit, I was fortunate enough to have a few minutes to peek in on Andy, lighting designer for Rascal Flatts. He was utilizing Bandit's programming room, which consists of a projector to which he had hooked up a laptop running Martin ShowDesigner, and he had a GrandMA plugged into that, with the output of ShowDesigner on the screen. He walked us through his cues for the song "Everyday", which featured an effect that I'll refer to as a "waterfall effect". All the hard-edged fixtures came on pointing down, randomly swept up and out into the audience, and then blacked themselves out and went back to their starting position. It looked really cool. I wanted to ask how he did it at the time, but we were all in a hurry and he was busy. A few days ago when I saw the effect live, it looked slightly different than it had on his computer, but it renewed my interest in figuring out how he had done it. At first, I thought he had used the effects generator on the MA to do it, but after twiddling with it for half an hour I couldn't reproduce the look. Anyways, after more time to think about it, I've come up with my own way of reproducing it, which I will share with you now. (PS - I'm writing this from the perspective of programming on a Hog. On a MA, obviously, it will be different. I'm most familiar with the Hog.)

First of all, I personally think that with this effect, the more lights, the better. Four lights will just look sparse and, well, boring. Anyways, let's say we have eighteen hard edge fixtures. The first step is to divide them into random groups. For simplicity's sake, let's divide ours into three groups of six. (If I were programming this live, I'd probably go just the opposite, six groups of three, though having more groups increases programming time.)

Group one:

Group two:

Group three:

(Note: moving lights, not bombs.)

Now we have our groups. Let's select our first group and write a series of four cues for them. Cue one will set all the fixture's pan and tilt at 0° and 0°. (We'll assume that all the lights are hanging upside-down.) Cue two will fade up the lights. Cue three will move them to 0° and 90°, making them point straight into the audience. Cue four will black all the fixtures out. After we're done, we will have four cues stored in their own cuelist. Since cue one is there only to get the fixtures in position, it will have 0 second fade time and a short follow time (just enough to let the lights get into position), and the rest of the fade times will be determined by how fast we want the effect to run. For now, let's give cue two a fade / follow time of 1 second, and cue three a fade / follow of 4 seconds, and cue four a fade / follow of 1 second. We now have a chase. And now the magic - fun with fanning.

Intensity fanned.

Tilt fanned.

We open up cues two and three, and set a fanned delay time on the dimmer attribute (on cue two) and a fanned delay time on the tilt attribute (on cue three), making sure the delay times on both cues line up. This will ensure that the lights come on and start to tilt upwards in sync. Now when we run this cue, we see the lights come on left to right (presumably) and sweep upward.

We repeat this process for the rest of the light groups, but we make sure to enter different fade / follow times for all the fixtures, ensuring a different overall run time for the cuelist. The end result will be that when we trigger the cuelists, their times won't line up.

To finish, we simply write a macro that triggers all three cuelists at the same time. The different times on each cuelist, as well as the random manner in which we chose our lights, will help make sure that the effect continues to look random as it runs. There are all sorts of cool modifications that could be made to this effect - make it non random, starting from the center, get the pan channel involved, etc. I'd be interested in knowing if this could be simply programmed on the effects generator of a Hog or a MA - I'm sure it's possible, but you'd have to stack effects and get the timing just right, and I'm not sure if you could make it look random. If anyone has any ideas on doing this, by all means, drop me a line. I'm pretty much a newb on the GrandMA so any ideas on how this could be done would be most appreciated.

Exit, stage left. Sparks