Journal #8597

I've always been curious about these types of jobs. What exactly do you do? When do you do it? How much control do you have? Etc. Etc.
Details, please!

I'm literally just the lighting op for the show, so I'm programming the cues and on the day, going cue by cue as the show goes on. EUSOG, (Edinburgh University Savoy Opera Group, but they're now a semi-generic musical theatre society ) are putting on Little Shop of Horrors for the Edinburgh fringe for a fortnight, was at the dress run two days ago and It's looking and sounding absolutely amazing.

Most shows have one primary Lighting designer and potentially multiple ops, essentially the line of heirarchy is:

Director & LD meet, go through the script and discuss the lighting at various points in the script and when exactly said changes will happen. Depending on the venue, the LD will either be working with the venue's own lights or will deal with designing & placement of dry hired fixtures.
Once that's all done, the LD & OP go through the script and try and get as much physically on the desk as possible before a tech run.
The tech run is the bane of everyone's life, usually going through till about 3 / 4 AM. The show is performed cue by cue so the sound / lighting can perfect everything for the final shows.

Love doing this kimd of stuff. Don't get to do it often, but it's always a blast.

Tech run went on till 4:30, great fun. Show's looking really good, the venue has about 9 clay paky movers ( 3 alpha spots, 6 alpha profiles ) and they're getting completely abused. I didn't actually manage to get round to doing any programming as the venue had only recently installed an ETC Ion desk and were cautious of anyone accidentally fucking the entire desk and everyone's showfiles, so the LD had to communicate to the programmer via headmics. Was interesting to hear the guy reel off commands off the top of his head.

149 cues, absolute shitload, few more got added in and I accidentally missed one entirely so I'll have to keep an eye open tonight and make sure I don't miss anything

Update:Fringe is over, and so is the show. The venue had a brand new desk, an ETC Ion desk. Great fun!

The show went fantastically well, we got 2 5 star reviews, a four and some cuntbag gave us a 3. Sold out every single night. That one was a particularly shit review that said we were bad for "being too sensible". Whatever the fuck that means.
One of the 5 stars came from a reviewer known as "Two star tom", because he's incredibly critical, and barely gives out good reviews, so naturally we all got inebriated in celebration ( and I have a very low quality video of the director promising everyone a drink for the review.. that never materialised )

Overall, fringe was absolutely fantastic. Some of you guys need to come over!