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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!

I’m about to bus and train over to Leeds to watch Sean dance like a pixie. It’s all in a good cause, and the perfect opportunity for a moblogUK meet-up.

Hopefully the rain will stop, but it’s going to be a fun evening whatever the weather!

I’m playing around with new letterforms for the coming-soonish notlikecalvin.com relaunch. Here’s my current thoughts:

The new site will be radically stripped-back, with a much less tangletastic interface that’s more geared to my portfolio first and foremost. I’ll probably keep the weblog bits and pieces ticking over in the old styles until they become a priority.

(Note to self: don’t try to design letterforms on a country bus. It doesn’t work.)

I’ve been pondering a decision for the last couple of weeks, after finally getting ’round to investigating a topic that was brought to my attention over the summer. And I’ve decided that, for better or worse, it’s a worthwhile thing to do, and it’s time to put my weblog where my mouth is.

I’ve very deliberately kept my entries here away from subjects where my personal opinions have no bearing on what, for want of a better phrase, I shall call my professional activities; I’ve kept Enlightening Times ‘on message’ and businesslike, but this is important and here’s as good a place as any for an announcement.

I am a Bright.

What, you may well wonder, is a Bright? I’m glad you asked.
Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings Radio KoL listeners!

When Orange gets ’round to delivering my email, there’ll be some exciting hat- and Faustus-based pics up at my moblog.

Also of interest is this week’s antic, helping you de-Microsoft-ify your life. I’ve just done a presentation for my course, and Powerpoint was really getting me down – so I switched to Eric Meyer’s standards-based slideshow package, S5.

You create all the slides in a single web-page-like XHTML document, with styling controlled by standard CSS. A bunch of Javascript behind the scenes does the slideshow-ing bits and the whole thing is extremely bloat-free. Use Firefox for best results, and OS X for the smoothest of onscreen typestyling.

The best consequence of using S5 is the remarkable ease with which alterations can be made, a whole presentation residing in a single text file. If you know enough (X)HTML and CSS to code a web page, you can easily get started with S5. Have a look at the intro slideshow to get an idea of how things work.

One less barrier to a Microsoft-free system!

A very happy Christmas to all Enlightening Times readers. I don’t know who you are, where you come from or what you do, but season’s greetings to each and every one of you.

I’m spending the next few days with my family, so the internet, ah, isn’t happening for a while. Once I get back to Bretton there are quite a few projects that need wrapping up before I can even think of tinkering under notlikecalvin.com‘s bonnet. So that’s for another day…

Merry Christmas!