Adams Shakespearean Theatre - Utah
Michael Harvey teaches Lighting Design at Southern Utah University, where he uses LightFactory in two of their theaters. One is small, featuring not very many dimmers, and he was looking for a computer-based solution for that venue when he first found us. A purchase through Production Advantage made things go very smoothly for him, and the results were more than satisfactory. He then saw us demonstrating some of the more advanced features of the program at USITT in Houston. We spoke at that time about a plan he had to work LightFactory into his designs in the Adams Memorial Shakespearean Theater*, at the university, a space modeled after the Elizabethan theaters where Shakespeare and his contemporaries performed. This caught our attention as worthwhile to share with others, so we asked him a few questions after he bought his second license of the program recently:
Excerpts from Interview
Jeremy Kumin: Michael, you told me when last we spoke about some unusual physical attributes of your theater that made you very eager to try using LightFactory in it. Can you tell our readers about that?
Michael Harvey: Well, the theater has a booth that is two stories up, and the only way to get there is by climbing a straight ladder. I used to have to get the light board, an ETC Expression, and two monitors down from there each time we began cueing a show. It was brutal. Talk about an opportunity to break something. And then we could only cue at night, because of the open roof, making this effectively an outdoor space. Well, when we finished, I'd have to take the board and VGA monitors backstage to avoid theft or rain damage during the next day, and I'd be doing this by myself at 1 or 2 in the morning.
Tech table in middle of house with laptop running LightFactory
JK: I can see why you were angling for a better way to do things.
MH: Right, now I just have to tuck my laptop under my arm and walk away. It's really streamlining our nightly breakdown.
JK: You only do one major production a year in that space, but your school has a very active production schedule elsewhere. There are other ways you can use LightFactory during the year, aren't there?
MH: Well, the students are using that Limited Edition I bought for their small studio theater all the time, but you mean in our larger venue?
JK: That's what I had in mind; we spoke once about how it could augment your existing control board, let's talk about that some more.
MH: Sure, I plan to incorporate it as a specialty board into a number of other designs I'll be doing. It's so much easier to program a moving light using something designed to do that rather than a traditional console that is used for traditional fixtures. Which while you can do it it certainly isn't easy or intuitive. I don't want to completely remove our traditional console, we do a lot of work with moving lights during dance concerts and musicals, but I would like the students to still have exposure to a traditional console. So my plan is to use that other console to control our conventional fixtures and then integrate that with a midi trigger and hopefully get the two boards to work simultaneously together so we can use the Enttec LightFactory system to program and control our moving lights and yet still give the students exposure to that traditional console that they're more than likely going to run into in their career.
JK: The MIDI triggering is an elegant solution, a pretty advanced feature but one I've seen work, and I'm very much a fan of that idea, so that you can reduce the labor required to run the show.
MH: And that is the ultimate goal: to have a single operator and one set of light cues that the stage manager calls. I don't want to get into the scenario where I have two operators and they're calling two consoles. Hopefully we're going to get these two married together in some capacity
JK: But by the same token, it gives you the ability to have two programmers, which in my experience is a great way to get more cueing done during tech.
MH: It would be so much faster to program the moving lights with a system that is designed to program moving lights, as opposed these traditional consoles that you can set up, and write macros, and do all kinds of things to make it easier but it's never easy.
JK: That's very quotable, thank you!
MH: You're welcome. The multiple levels you have of control and pricing will help you get your foot in the door for a lot of venues that don't have a lot of money but may be able to grow their system as they grow.
JK: Michael, thank you very much for taking the time to chat today, in the middle of your pre-production time. We look forward to the pictures you're sending of the space.
MH: Have a great day.
*While the Adams is used by the Utah Shakespearian Festival as well, the shows Michael has purchased the program for are part of the university's Department of Theater, a separate entity.
Image courtesy: Michael Harvey
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