The Ultimate Punt Page - Avolites Diamond 4 Vision

I'm sure you're asking yourself "What the heck is a punt page?"  Well, have you ever had to run a show completely on the fly, with little to no programming time?  If the answer's yes, then you've punted before and have used a punt page.  In this post, I'll go through my tips and tricks on punting and creating a punt page on an Avolites Diamond 4 Vision.

Pretty slick, huh? Photo courtesy of Avolites.org.uk

This is one of my favorite desks for running shows on the fly because everything I need is right in front of me, not hidden behind multiple menus and screens.  First, lets go through some logistics of the desk...On the bottom left are 28 playback faders along with flash, swop (solo), preload, and connect buttons for each. Just to the right of the playbacks are 2 playback encoders (wheels) that are used for setting chase speeds, pausing and playing chases or cue lists, going to certain cues in cue lists etc.  On the bottom right hand side of the desk is the programming section, which includes 6 encoder wheels - 1 for pan, tilt, and dimmer, and 3 other wheels that control selectable fixture attributes (color, gobo, iris, zoom, etc.).  The top two rows of faders on the desk are preset faders or fixture faders.  These faders have two buttons below them that control fixture selection and pallette selection, which we'll discuss in a moment.

Now that we've got the logistics out of the way, lets get to programming.  Most shows that I run off the cuff are either one-off shows (show where an artist comes in without a lighting director for evening) or festival shows (several artists share the same stage throughout the course of a day, or 3 days, or possibly an eternity if the weather's right!).  Both of these types of shows can be prepared for much in the same way.  First I patch my desk.  I'll explain patching in a later post.  I patch the desk so that the fixtures that I will need to use the most are closest to me.  I usually put my moving light fixtures on the left-hand side of the bottom row of faders in the preset section of the desk.  I start with my principle movers, usually the ones with the highest light output or the fixture that I have the most of.  After my moving lights, I add in any specials that I will need to access during the show, such as ellipsoidals (Lekos for all you concert freaks), audience abuse (moles), ground package conventional lighting, backdrop lighting, and ACL's (more on those later too).  After the specials, I put in my conventional washes.  Usually I leave the downstage all together as single color washes (ALL DS blue, red, amber, congo, cyan, magenta) and separate my upstage as single units.  So I burn 10 faders per color if I have a 10K wash US.  This separation allows me to build some mean chases on the upstage truss.

After patching, it's time to setup some palletts (presets for all you GrandMA peeps, don't worry, I are one too :-).  I put my color palletts on the bottom left hand side of the preset section of the desk.  I usually setup 16 solid colors, a warm color combo, a cool color combo, 4 split wheel colors, and 2 color scrolls (depending on the ability of the fixtures of course).  After that I setup my positions.  Normally I do 16 positions consisting of 2 crosses, 2 asymmetricals, 2 full band looks, 2 audience positions, a fan out, a fly out, a fly in, a backdrop look, and 5 or 6 solo positions (depending on the size and style of band).  The two full band positions are inclusive presets, meaning if for some reason the keyboard player moves after I create my focus for it, I can update my keyboard focus and the desk will automatically update my band focuses to match.  This is very handy for a festival situation where band members change from act to act.  After my positions, I create 8 gobo selections for each type of fixture.  In these gobo presets, I include zoom and hard edged focus so that I don't have to select those features separately in the live situation.  At this point, I've filled up 48 of the 64 presets on the bottom half of the desk.  For the last 16 at the bottom, I do 3 gobo rotation speeds (off, slow, and medium), 2 gobo scrolls (slow, fast), and 6 shutter presets (on, off, random slow, random fast, even slow, and even fast).  With the shutter presets, make sure to include dimmer on the on and off presets or you'll probably get some bleed through of the shutter.

On the top portion of the presets section of the desk, I create some seldom used things, such as zoom and iris (small, medium, large for each) and some specialty focuses (soft edge, color focus, etc.).  I put my groups right in the middle of the top set of preset buttons.  I do an all group for programming purposes, then odd, even, and all's for each fixture type, starting with the primary fixtures.

That's pallette (preset) programming in a nutshell.  This one has gotten sort of lengthy, so I will continue with my playback programming in the next post.  Keep lighting up!!

Lighting Design 101

In this day and age, lighting design has become one of the integral parts of a concert/theater/production tour's success.  A well designed show can have people all across the country talking about how great the production is.  That word of mouth is an important part of a tour or artist's success.

For me, concert lighting is about making a performer seem larger than life.  If a designer accomplishes this, the audience will be wowed by the production.  I'm not talking about taking the focus off of the performer, but instead enhancing the performance with solid looks and impeccable timing.  The looks of the show are important; however, I think the most important part is the execution of those looks.  If a designer creates a great look and overuses it, that becomes boring to me.  With today's moving light technology, there is so much that can be done that the same look shouldn't be seen more than a half-dozen times within a 2 hour show.  Another thing that typically happens on tours of today is the overuse of video walls and content.  I'm all for using content to enhance the show, but when the continuous content causes the cues that are executed perfectly with the rhythm of the music to be lost then it's overbearing.  Here's a show that I did recently with Bobby Rush that used NO video, whatsoever.  I was pretty happy with the final outcome.

Many times looks can be related to the feeling or lyrics of a song.  For example, when I was 17 I was on a mini-tour with Sammy Kershaw.  Sammy has a song called "Matches" about arson (not really LOL).  I was using a par rig on the show and for that particular song (which was a ballad) I used deep reds and ambers from the top during the verses and added some blues from the bottom during the choruses.  Simple effect that painted a picture for the audience.  One of the best looking shows in the recent past has to be the Brad Paisley show from 3 years ago.  Dean Spurlock was the designer and added a lot of custom content to the show.  If a designer can use video to add to the lighting show and help the audience understand what the artist is trying to accomplish with a song, then I think video should be added into a show.

Ticks - Brad Paisley Live, Lighting Design by Dean Spurlock

Not the best quality, but notice the ticks on the video wall.  This entire show had references like this and was well thought out.  At one point, during the song "Whiskey Lullaby" an image of Allison Krauss is displayed during the duet.  I thought that was a very thought out addition and added to an incredibly designed show.

That same painting a picture principle can be used in theater productions.  My favorite example of good lighting in a theater production is the Broadway version of Disney's "The Lion King".  The designer painted a picture during the entire production.  The night scenes used a lot of blues and deep lavs.  The daylight scenes used more reds and ambers and yellows.  Overall, a phenomenal production that left me stunned and wanting to see it again just to marvel at how well the design was executed.

I had the privilege of designing for Miss Mississippi and Miss Georgia USA recently.  I know, I have a tough job, right.  The group came into Harrah's in Tunica, which is my home venue.  Since they rented the room, we provided all of the equipment that we had on hand for them.  With that production-style show I had to paint a picture like a theater designer would and also create some well-executed looks for the production dance numbers that the girls did.  So that show utilized a little of the theater side of things and a little of the concert side of things.  Sorry guys, no pictures.

Flexibility is key.  When we took the show to Georgia, I adjusted the design to fit an entirely different venue.  In Mississippi, I had an arena setting with 24 moving yoke fixtures and about 40 LED's at my disposal, not to mention all of the conventionals.  In Georgia, we were in a High School theater (a nice one mind you) that was a little out of my comfort zone.  I brought 6 moving yoke fixtures with me as a floor package and there were barely enough conventionals to make any washes that could be used.  So, I created a couple of no color specials and 4 color washes of red, amber, blue, and congo blue (UV) and made the show happen.  Didn't look as good as Mississippi, but overall I would consider it a success.