notlikecalvin news

Initial ideas:

Dir: Paranoia and isolation in a small community. Madness and the distortion of truth. Loss and survival. Dependence on others. Quite bleak, as apposed to black, comedy. The sea as an independent force. Outsiders vs insiders. McCarthyism, in a way.

Design team: The sea as an external force suggests a large performance space, elements washing-up as the play goes on. It needs to be a flexible space to deal with many different settings, but we’d rather create staging that allows for a greater flexibility of light and sound than simply shunting scenery about – I don’t want to get too stuck into the specific elements of the scenic design.

It can perhaps be treated slightly fantastically, at least around the edges.

We’re mostly interested in creating a large, surrounding expanse, lit at times very intimately as separate scenes require. We’re already tempted by quite a high-concept idea, perhaps to do with water.

Dir: We should build a very immersive environment for the audience and performers, to magnify the themes that we feel are important from the text using scenic/lighting/sound design.

I’ve made a (very) short film: Landscape.

It’s an exploration of the – duh – landscape that I’ve been living in for the last couple of years: some of the sights and sounds that come with being surrounded by Yorkshire’s fantastic nature, and some practical experimentation with framing and exposure. I shot the film on a series of walks over one weekend, wandering around the Bretton Country Park with camera and tripod, setting up then waiting for the sun to make an appearance.

I’ve spent much of the intervening time trying to find the ideal soundtrack – since there’s no real plot or dialogue in the film it uses music to help drive the visual, so getting the right track was very important.

I wanted to use Creative Commons licenced music, since that would neatly step around any problems with copyright, and I found what I was looking for at CC Mixter. After ploughing through practically everything in the classical, instrumental & experimental categories – among many others – I found sHORT fACED bEAR and his Big Idea (reduced mix).

Thanks to the wonder of Creative Commons’ non-commercial sampling plus licence, I could have sampled, remixed, scritched and scratched bEAR’s music, so long as any derivative works that I make with it are released using the same licence.

So, that means that Landscape is now also kind-of public property: you can “creatively transform this work for non-commercial purposes” provided that you play by the rules: please drop me a line if you do.

Anyway, downloaderify away: Landscape.mov [16MB .mov - QuickTime required]

[Update: file now hosted at archive.org ]

Okay, so I’m back from Munich – and London and Edinburgh, too – and I can sit m’self down to write up the many, many pages of notes I took during the wonderfully fascinating talks and panels. That’s going to take a little time.

There’s also a couple of hundred pictures from my phonecam lurking unprocessed in iPhoto, waiting to be sieved into Light & Dark. That will also take a wee while.

A quick summary of the conference, then: it was amazing. Plenty of new stuff to learn, different fields of lighting to consider, but the biggest mind-explosion for me was simply to meet so many of those (all puns intended) leading lights who, until now, have been names in books and theatre programmes.

Time for a quick met-roll:

• Nick Schlieper
• Rick Fisher
• Ken Billington
• Richard Pilbrow
• Sue Gibson
• Geoff Spain
• Roger Simonsz
• Ian Dow
• David Taylor
• Jeremy Collins, Mike Goldberg and Dave Wilkins of Selecon

To talk, eat and drink with these and many more was the most hugely valuable experience for me. I’ve been massively down on the prospects for making a career out of lighting, but Showlight really opened my eyes to the potential of other countries and fields of practice beyond theatre in the UK.

And, of course, there were a bunch of other students from all over the world – Rose Bruford, Central School, and the Beyeische Theaterakademie in Munich among others: very interesting to hear about the different approaches to teaching lighting and technical theatre, and it was great to meet everyone.

More coming soon – keep an eye on the Showlight category.

Notes from Rick Fisher’s presentation at Showlight 2006; Prinzregententheatre, Munich; 22nd May, 2005.

Panni projectors controlled via pulses from lighting consoles.
Acceptable fate of convergence of LX/projection control.
Who controls the projection? Scenography? Projection designer?
Collaboration or dictatorial?
Teamworking has not expanded to properly include projection.
The LD is caught between the Scenographer and Projection Designer – to improve communication become a diplomat more than LX.
Good news: projection design/er is being taken more seriously, is involved earlier in the creative process.

Equipment is becoming cheaper, quieter, more flexible.
With more dexterity of projection, PD and LD have greater respect for each other.

Projection is an all-too-easy solution to too many locations. Shouldn’t really replace set.

Stein’s Seagull: too invasive, rejects the power of the writing to coney information theatrically.

Woman in White: actors standing in front of a video screen, on a black floor. Not the future of theatre as he sees it.
Frustration of LX design with unfinished projections.
Lighting becomes /reactive/ to projection – has to respect the projection and stay away from the screen, but projection doesn’t have the same respect of LX.
Gives LD a dilemma.

Billy Elliot: “theatrically right”, looking like the 80′s but with modern equipment.

Added projection: previewed for six weeks, projection added two nights before press night. Added a historical perspective that couldn’t be added theatrically.

Producers and directors want to use projection as backcloths.

Projected light seems flat and dead, compared to stage light. Needs to be better and brighter.

What is ‘wrong’ with LEDs? The unquantifyable attributes – measure its /smell/.

Needs more discussion to establish communication. Collaberation = good. Doesn’t want to grab more of the responsibility in the creative process.
People need to talk about opinions.

Right. In about thirty minutes I’m getting a bus to catch a coach to make a flight. I’m off to Munich for the next five days to attend Showlight 2005, the biggest international lighting conference and the only one that’s really about lighting rather than just technology.

I’ve got myself a sponsored placement, courtest of the good folks of Selecon, so it’s only costing a small fortune. And I’m about the least well-travelled person you could meet, so it’s going to be quite an adventure for me.

I’ve no idea whether I’ll have any ‘net access at all until next Wednesday, but I’m more likely to post here than on my moblog – a whole phonecam’s-worth of pictures will most likely have to wait until I get back. The conference itself looks like it’ll have some great talks, and it would be a shame not to be able to ‘blog them.

Be seeing you!

Yesterday I had my first mince pie. We sang carols in the foyer of the Lyceum in Sheffield. There were lots of decorated trees in Leeds College of Music.

But the icing on the cake: today I saw my first Coke truck advert – so it’s officially Christmas! Yeah!
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m off to Edinburgh by bus and train in a couple of hours, reason being that I’m lighting Liz Lochhead’s Beauty And The Beast for Phurious Productions in East Kilbride.

So I won’t be posting anything here for a while – as always, watch my moblog. Show runs Thursday through Sunday.