Moody By Nature
Overview
On November 19th, I participated as a lighting designer and VJ in a concert titled “Moody By Nature” as part of my Radio-Televison-Film “Intro to Music Business” course. The goal of the project was to group students into mock companies to mimic a typical live event scenario of industry-standard practices in company contracts. For example, my “company”, titled “All of The Lights Productions”, drew up and signed contracts with the sound company that hired us to design lighting cues for a live concert.
The concert involved 3 bands playing covers of soft rock classics, and a magician performing a short magic act. Since I was on the lighting team, I communicated with each band for information on their setlists, along with receiving recording samples and logo graphics from them. I coordinated with the studio manager in patching fixtures, programming the console, and doing a run-through of the software. We utilized the ETC EOS software after upgrading from a Phillips Strand Lighting 200 console to an ETC Element console. While working on the lighting design, I also engaged in setting up water-based haze machines and coordinating with a fire marshal to get the location approved for hazing.
For the lighting design, I would get inspiration from the color palette of the original music videos for each song in the setlist, then apply it to stage lights, washes, and floor lights. A total of 52 cues were used, with some unused extras for backup in case the bands had alternate performances. The effects used for the fixtures were limited to intensity fades, color cycles, and zoom fans due to hardware limitations, but it kept things simple enough to keep up with the medium-slow pacing mood of the music.
After working on the lighting cues, I started on creating the visuals, utilizing Derivative TouchDesigner and Resolume Arena to create abstract visuals unique to each performance in the setlist.
Early in the production, we had a simplistic setup of a Phillips Strand Lighting 200 console. I was in talks with the studio manager in upgrading to a newer console. Unfortunately, the replacement console, the ETC Element, had some wiring problems, which forced us to map the lighting software to a keyboard and use it throughout the concert. Due to these problems, I was not able to work on the visuals until during tech rehearsals.
With hardware constraints, we patched all the lighting fixtures to the ETC EOS software and mapped all the functions to a keyboard to manually perform each cue during the event. As my team members of “All of The Lights Productions” operated the lighting cues during the performance, I created some dynamic visualizers and optimized a streamlined workflow to conduct real-time VJing as the band played.
The concert was conducted without any issues. The lighting cues were designed to match the tonality and pacing of each song, and each cue were labeled for their respective song segments and setlists. The real-time VJ (visual programming) was fluid and created to be dynamic, having multiple effects and edits placed as the performance went on to create an ever-evolving visual displayed on a projector. The responsibilities I had for this event were conducted with collaboration and teamwork, resulting in a high-end production that matched industry standard practices.
