Production Designer/Programmer
Fika 'n' Flash
Photos by Mathew Nicholson (@matnix03) and Finn Irving (@finnirving)
My role
Production Designer/Programmer
As my graduation project, I took on the role of designing the main lighting and rigging behind this show. Working closely with Jaiden Parsons, the sound designer and engineer, we provided the full production behind a band and DJ act.
Production Planning
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I first drew up an initial design in Vectorworks and imported it into Capture to generate some renders to show to the talent and team.
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After the project evolved, I generated some more renders, mainly for the band act that was added. I also created a general rig plan.
I also got the opportunity to use lasers on this show, so I worked with the laser programmer, Jakub, to create some renders for the zones needed for the lasers.
During these renders, I started to fine-tweak the view parameters within Capture to get a more realistic view of the lighting.
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Getting the information from the sound department, I had to fit in the rigging for both lighting and sound front of house, making sure the main arrays were at the point the sound department wanted them, but, also to fit in the LX in front of the proscenium, which had automated points attached to it. We decided on two trusses FOH, one braced to the building to make sure that any force that was put on the LX truss did not move the array positions.
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Originally, this project was planned with hired Kinesys hoists, so it was tourable. I drew this point plan with two different ways, recommended by the NRC handbook, to get the location of the hanging points.
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In the end, we used a mixture of in-house hoists and TAIT big-tow winches for this show. Due to having an accurate plan for the grid and the dimensions of the A-Frames in the grid, the in-house riggers found it easier to work with a graphical plan, with measurements from the proscenium.
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Once the design was locked in, I produced several documents to make sure that the crew installing the lighting had all the necessary information. With circuits on the VWX plan and addresses on a separate sheet, fixtures could be pre-addressed. I also provided a diagram for looms so that these could be prepared beforehand.
