Taniith’s Relto

There’s a difference between someone who designs lighting, and a *lighting designer* (besides the stars…). The former is the sort of person who is told, “well, why don’t we rent what we tried to rent last year… 5 moving lights and a board.” He might have thought enough about it to suggest getting two different types of moving lights; 2 of one and 3 of the other.

The LD, on the other hand, takes into account past experience, and reads the script before putting in the rental order. Then, he makes suggestions to better use the budget.

Which one do you think I am ;p? I was going to just take the first plan of 2 wash lights and 3 profile lights (the kind we had at Les Mis), but then I watched the movie (stop booing… its not like I went and saw the play!) and read some of the script and realized what a waste it would be to spend $250 to get an un-even number of moving lights. That $250 for a single profile light (for 2 weeks) could be used to get so much more equipment.

Now for those who don’t know (or have forgotten), Bradley Hall has 22 dimmers, and a fair few more lights than can actually be used on those dimmers (not a huge number, but enough). Looking at the ALPS rental card, one can see that a pack of 4 dimmers run off of a single Edison wall plug runs $20 a week. And renting individual lights is generally a matter of $3-$10 a week… the Par 64s I was looking at (the things you see in huge numbers at any concert) are $6/week. So think about this, for $250 I could have another moving light which is, admittedly, more powerful than a single light; OR, I could get 6 Par 64s, 4 packs of dimmers (which means space for 10 more lights after figuring in the Pars), and a fair amount of cable and adapters to boot…. all for that same $250.

Now I ask you, which one looks like the better deal? I’m still waiting to hear back from Marty about the idea, but I’m guessing he’ll approve (and if he doesn’t, well I can work either way, and its not like its my money or my show).

On another note, there’s another interesting story in the rental. He had me price out the 5 lights + the board we always rent. Now, this board is *ok*, but its a real pain to program moving lights on it. The problem is that a moving light controller is generally too expensive to rent. The irony here is that after I priced out the 6 pieces (each $125/week), he said that it was out of budget and that we’d have to move back to 4 units and the board. But wait, I had an ace up my sleeve. You see, those who are members of LNL at WPI can rent and borrow equipment, and we just happen to have a moving light controller. And what’s that? Dreamgirls goes up AFTER then end of the WPI school year? So I sent off an email to a friend of mine, who also happens to be in charge of rentals for the club (until elections in the upcoming term at least), and he quoted me a rough price of $40/week (subject to change with a new vice-president, but should be close to that). Let me say that again… we get a superior board for $40/week in place of the inferior board for $125. That was decided to be ‘in budget’ ;p.

To put this in even more perspective, this board is called a Hog 500. The higher up model is the Hog 1000, which ALPS rents for $450/week….. FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS PER WEEK, and we get the next model down for $40…. Good deal, yes? ;p

So hopefully everything will work out ok (knock-on-wood), but it should be a fun show. Lets just hope the actors can pull it off (don’t I say that every year? And what is the outcome every year? Oh well….).

Gee, I guess that got a bit longer than I’ve been writing usually. Hopefully I didn’t bore people to tears.

-K

So, here’s an interesting thing to note: He who skips fencing practices, gets shitty grade… he who skips a lot of fencing practices, gets a shittier grade than he who skips only some fencing practices….

Now sure, I be you’ve heard that one plenty of times, but its always a good thing to keep in mind…..

At least now there are two terms of totally ungraded fencing to be had, and next year I’m going to make sure I don’t have a class that meets right before every bloody practice…. particularly note one that goes for two terms in a row, whose names starts with “cal”, and whose name ends with “ulus”.

;p

-K

You know, at one point I had upwards of 7 readers (ok, maybe thats a bit of a stretch, but it got close)… ah, those were the days. These days, I’m down to two. And suddenly, it looks like I’m down to none. Of course, if someone reads this, then my theory is disproved, but if no one does then I was right (though no one will read it to know that I was right… or something).

I’m just going to assume that its because people are super busy this time of year and are spending less random minutes surfing the interwebs. I suppose the blog has also lost a bit of vigor since back in the day… not to mention that I don’t have such interesting stuff to write about anymore (trust me, I’m trying to get the interesting level to go up in my life, and its not just so I can write about it ;p).

So, hopefully someone reads this. I’m still here, and if you are here, then so are you… wait. O_o

Come mid to late January, there should be some major announcements! Or, there could be some major disappointments on my part; but then, aren’t those the interesting bits? Of course, wasn’t that what drew people in in the first place? To read about my disappointment (wow, thats depressing ;p). I mean, after the first few months, that sort of content fills half of the archives for a while. Well, technically its all private to people with accounts now, but Blogger didn’t have that ability ;D

Ok, this poast is getting weird… even I can’t quite follow my train of thought at this point, so I’m going to end it. Besides, I think that Chinese food is catching up with me….

-K

So, I had a pre-production meeting with Marty yesterday morning about working on the musical again this spring. Now, with a name like Dreamgirls, I was wary as to the quality of the show when I heard about it a while ago, but I’ve since changed my mind. It seems like a really fun sort of show, and certainly the type of show where I can really use intelligent lighting. For instance, here is a totally awesome song from the original Broadway run of it:

Now you know, that scene presents an interesting lighting set up…. more of a backstage/dressing room thing at first, then something towards the end of her son,g and then the other girls come out and it turns into a read song sort of thing….. which is where lits of fun moving color could come in. Now I just need to get myself to read the script.

Oh, and this year it looks like I will have much more freedom to actually work than last year. I will still likely work *with* someone, but I will have the ability to do the work myself most of the time, as opposed to having to rely on others to do it. After all, why pay me to sit on my ass all day, eh?

But anyway, back to vacation ;p

-K

So, yesterday I finished a nice update to my portfolio site. There are a whole bunch of small changes that make it a bit more user friendly of an experience, but the major change is that I added a traditional art section. I threw in most of what I did in this past term’s studio art class, along with a bunch of stuff from highschool.

I realized last night that I forgot to add the theater lighting pictures (that I picked out for the site a year ago…), but I can do that later. Also on the list is an expanded Resume/CV section, but for now its still just a one page pdf, albeit updated to reflect the present.

So yeah, feel free to take a look at the new section, and criticize my work till I cry……. ;p

-K

So, I ordered some Yu-Gi-Oh cards a few weeks ago (long story… just roll with it), and they arrived Saturday… but they gave me the wrong Deck. In fact, they gave me a deck that I would never buy given the choice. So I sent them an email, and today someone wrote me back to say that I would be sent the correct item, and he provided a tracking code already. Now here’s the thing: This guy didn’t give me his name, and he said nothing about how I should go about returning the other deck (I don’t even know their address). So, do you think this means I get to keep both decks? As I said, I would neve *pay* for this deck, but it has some nice cards mixed in with the crappy ones, and I’d be happy to take them for free ;D

I just don’t know if I can safely open it to look for said cards….

Thoughts?

-K

So, the three 750Gb disks in my Redundant RAID server (so I have 1.3Tb of space) will be free once this data finishes copying…. I never thought I would fill that thing up! It looks like I have to go shopping for a 1Tb disk to add in (why add another 750Gb disk and have to buy 4 1Tb disks at once later, eh?). I was hoping to hold off on adding the last disk for a while, but not being able to add anything to my server kinda makes for a problem, no?

Honestly, the sheer volume of hard drive space I own amazes me(think about how many computers I have, including assorted derelict and scavenged boxes, along with this server and my assorted external drives). It seems crazy when I think about that first laptop that my grandfather bought me years ago… it had 1.5-2Gb of hard drive space, and we all thought that was absolutely astounding. Not to mention the out Apple IIGS that whose external hard drive probably couldn’t hold most Word files.

Oh well, at least I’m home. Thats definitely nice. And I don’t have to worry about the new drive for a little while because I wont need to put anything on the server the rest of the break (mostly), and then it will be a couple months before I’m back…. besides, I already budgeted in a new version of Maya, and so I can’t really *afford* (heh heh) a new drive at the moment.

VACATION TIME! Here Shadow…. who’s a good Wii? Yes you are!

-K