Joseph and Ion

This last week at the SMPAC hosted community theatre company CCYM's production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat and our final demo for our new light board selection.

Joseph was a pretty nostalgic show for me, as it was the last musical I was involved in at my high school and one of the first shows where I started getting involved in lighting.

It was pretty fun to get the opportunity to revisit this show as a lighting designer. It certainly looked a lot better than my high school's production did:

(Yikes: the date on the photo is March 16th, 2003)

Ion was an enjoyable console to demo. Like Congo before it I chose an ideal show that would play to the strengths of this control system. Ion's purpose in life is to play back pre-recorded lighting cues in a set order - which is ideal for a conventional theatre show such as Joseph. 

The displays are dominated by the live view, showing active levels on channels on the left; and the main cue list playback screen on the right. While the Ion does use a tabbed interface like Congo, it is not a versatile. Windows cannot be split across the screen and it is not even as obvious which tab you are controlling. The console seems designed specifically to live in this general view and occasionally access tools from other windows. It is also designed a bit more for a touch screen or mouse interface, which slows it down.

The best part of Ion is the cue list screen. It shows the currently active cue list, with the cue active on stage highlighted in the center. It gives you a nice wide view of the list, showing a great number of cues ahead of and behind the currently active cue. It also shows a ton of information about the cue, fade times, total transition duration, move times for non-intensity parameters, flags, and labels. It manages to fit a lot more information on the screen than Congo's master playback screen without even looking cluttered. 

Another major difference here is that Ion is a command line console, allowing you to type in lengthy and detailed commands and execute them at once. For example the command line:

[record] [cue][1][2] [time][6] [delay][out][2] [label][s][c][e][n][e][3] [enter]

Would all at once record the current look on stage as cue 12, set the fade time to 6 seconds, put a 2 second delay on the downfade, and label the cue "Scene 3". This system allows you to build more complex commands and have more specific control about how the console records your show - but it also takes longer to program.

The other major differences are that the Ion is a tracking move-fade LTP console where as the Congo is a preset state HTP console. I come from a background with Expression, Impression, and Express, so I'm more comfortable with a state/preset style of control. But, rather than trying to explain all of that, I shall defer to a bobblehead of ETC CEO Fred Foster who can do so much better than I:

When it comes down to it, Ion is a console made to control conventional theatre shows very well. When you depart from the world of neatly pre-recorded cues though, it tends to fall flat. Unfortunately for Ion I frequently find myself having to light concerts for bands I've never heard of, have no idea what the set-list is (not that it would do me much good having never heard any of their songs), and the only idea of their style I got from the sound check. Add to that the crazy dance shows (like my Congo demo), school events, and corporate meetings and I only end up running off pre-recorded light cues for about a third of all shows I light. Congo is just much better for those kinds of on-the-fly and flexible events.

Now the really fun part begins - trying to find the money to buy one! Anyone have $13,000 laying around they'd be willing to donate to the SMPAC?

Milwaukee Airshow 2011

Rachael and I spent the day at the Milwaukee Air and Water Show, it was a great time (well, I think I enjoyed it more than Rachael), and we're both a little sun burned. Still, this year was a spectacular success compared to last year, where I spent the whole drizzly overcast time lounging by Lake Michigan eating pizza and taking photos of the only things flying in the weather:

There were a few more interesting things flying around this year:

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. There were plenty of interesting shows, and although the myriad of civilian prop-powered aerobatic acts got old after a while they were still plenty of fun to watch. First up were a series of performances by the Firebird Aerobatics Team:

The team ran multiple performances, one with all 4 aircraft and a few with only 2 performers.

Also up was the incredibly impressive Jason Newburg from Viper Airshows, piloting a customized personally-built bi-wing stunt plane:

Also in attendance was the Lima Lima Flight Team out of Chicago, flying retired T-34 military training planes:

But of course the thing I was most interested in were the military demonstrations. There were three demonstrations by currently active combat units, one of my favorites of which was this USAF F-16C/J Block 52 Falcon:

I've spent many, many, hours flying a virtual version of this aircraft in the computer game Falcon 4.0 and it's various community-born offspring. Since it is the single most advanced and realistic combat flight simulator ever created, I have to say I feel a sort of close familiarity with this aircraft.

Also doing demonstrations, though not technically pilots, was the US Army's Black Dagger Special Forces Parachute Demonstration Team:

And the final military demonstration flight was a US Navy F/A-18C Hornet:

But none of these compare to the grand finale and headliner performance for the Air Show: the USAF Thunderbirds Jet Aerobatic Demonstration Team.

These are some of the most elite jet pilots in the world, their only equals in the US military services are the US Navy's Blue Angles.

It was a great time, I'm already looking forward to next year - where I'll hopefully have a 2x tele-extender to take some even better photos. You can see the rest of my photos from this year here:

On CUE

Last week I got the opportunity to travel to Madison and be one of about 180 theatre professionals present at ETC's CUE conference - their first ever training event for end users.

Electronic Theatre Controls, or ETC, was founded by current CEO Fred Foster, then a lighting design student at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, in 1975. Fred and his brother started by building computerized lighting control systems out of their parent's basement, but expanded quickly enough that they hired a few friends and took over the garage as their office and factory. A few contracts from big names like Disney later and the rest, so to speak, is history. 35 years later ETC is the world's primer manufacturer of entertainment lighting control, dimming, and stage light hardware. Their Source-4 line of conventional stage lights is the industry standard the world over, their Expression and Express control consoles the most popular line of light boards in history, and their current flagship console - the Eos - a staple on Broadway and has controlled several major spectacles including the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Their current corporate headquarters and factory is a massive 330,000 sq. ft. facility in Middleton, just outside of Madison and a short walk from their parents house where they started. It is affectionately known as "The Mothership"  - a Mecca for lighting professionals the world over. The entrance to Fred's custom designed office is a garage door.

(Monona Terrace - image from their website)

While several events at the conference were held at the ETC factory, a majority of my time was spent at the beautiful Monona Terrace conference center in downtown Madison. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Terrace sits right on the edge of Lake Monona and two short blocks from the Wisconsin stage capital building.

The Monona Terrace's roof is also a public park with a cafe overlooking the lake. It was a wonderful location to go and relax during the conference.

The name for this event, CUE, stood for Create, Understand, and Explore. It aptly describes what ETC's goals for the event were: To allow its employees and the people who actually use their products to get together and talk about the ways in which they can be more creative with design, understand why things are designed the way they are and how they could be better designed, and explore new possibilities. I really got the feeling that this was supposed to be a two-way discussion; sure I spent plenty of time in classes learning how to better program lighting cues, mix LED and halogen lighting sources in a light plot, experiment with a broader range of color, maintain existing elements of my system, and fund upgrades, but there was more to it. Many of the classes were taught by leaders at ETC; the product managers, and designers who actually created the systems they were talking about. All were completely open to feedback and recommendations - whether it was how you thought the independent controllers on Congo should work or why the stickers were peeling off Source-4 stage lights. If you ever have a question about why a control console behaves a certain way, there's no better person to ask than the person who actually built it. The ETC employees who were there were not only open to answering all kinds of one-off questions, but were just as open to listening to suggestions of how things might work better.

This is very indicative of the culture at ETC, where everyone eats lunch together in their "town square" lobby, the CEOs office door is always open, and the floors in the factory are more expensive than those in the offices. The entertainment one evening was some time at their headquarters drinking from an open bar and listening to bands comprised of ETC employees from all over the world. Fred Foster himself was there dressed in costume and handing out free ice-cream.

The experience was wonderful and one I hope I get to repeat in the future. The most common question I heard asked at the event was "when is the next one?" It was great to be able to get together with users from all over the world and employees from all throughout ETC, and talk about the way we do things and could be doing things better.