The tech team (Emma, Larissa and myself) arranged to meet with Lucy last week and we planned out all the lighting states that we needed. From this we drew up an initial plot which showed which lighting states would cover which parts of the stage. In whole we had eight lighting states in total. From here myself and Emma went away and began to produce the documentation required. It was my job to produce the Lighting Plot. It’s important for a theatre company to produce a lighting plot so that can accurately communicate to the technical team what they require. Since the LX plan shows all of the lights at the same time the technical team can then assess what lights they need to put up or take down. In A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting Steven Louis Shelly explains that ‘The finished lighting plot is the map showing all of the lighting instruments… as well as their relative hanging locations in the performance space’ (2009, P. 199.) This was quite a difficult task as I have never had to produce any kind of technical documents before what made it even more difficult was the fact that I had not used Google Sketch up before. After struggling with this programme for a while I decided I would attempt to create the plot in Microsoft Word instead. Obviously Word is a slightly more clumsy way of making a document of this type, but I felt that as it was a programme I have used countless times before I knew my way around it better than I did Sketch Up. Eventually, after using a couple of examples and receiving guidance from Emma I was able to produce the lighting plot featured below:
Thanks for reading, Alex.
Works Cited
Shelly, Steven (2009) A Practical Guide to Stage Lighting, Elsevier Inc.