Festival lighting

[astuart]

Hi all.. Will be the first to post in this topic..
With the festivals about to begin let me ask other technicians, stage managers and directors some questions.
What do you consider to be acceptable re the amount of lights neccessary to compete in a festival?
What do you do when you are trying to come up with a complicated lighting request and you don't have the lights available?
How do you distribute your lighting amongst the competing teams?

[jgh]

This response is probably a bit late, but better late than never.

For the Edinburgh District round at St Serf's we are very lucky on a number of reasons
1) St Serf's Players who manage the stage have lots of lights
2) I light the festival and have lots of lights
3) I manage the halls and can pre-rig outside of the hall times booked by the SCDA.
For this years Festival, I gave the groups:
9 areas of general lighting.
3 colours of cyc lighting
1 front scroller colour wash
2 front fixed colour washes
1 back colour wash (LED, programmable)
After that there were 26 different specials used among 10 groups.
We were able to repatch each night on to our 32 dimmers without needing to re-patch during each evening, and we only had to change colour on 2 cyc circuits during one of the three evenings.
So I think in answer to your question:
9 areas of general lighting; cyc lighting; 2 or 3 specials per show, provided by the groups if you are short of lights.
best regards
Gordon Hughes

[jgh]

Some other statistics:
One Group had 7 specials, another 2 groups had 5.
These three shows had about 25 lighting Qs each, but was mostly re-using the same states.
One of the shows with 5 specials won, so I look forward to seeing what Jim lets me away with in district round!
best regards
Gordon Hughes