Inner Space 2018

Inner Space 2018
Production	The Quest for the lost Prompt Copy
Performance Time
Performance Date	Thursday 1st of February 2018
Performance Times	10am - 7pm
Performance Space
Venue	New Athenaeum
Production Team
Production Manager	Neal Clark
Deputy Production Manager	Dale Gibb
Designer	Danielle Waldman
TSM/HOD	Lewis Douglas
DTSM	Sean Ramsay
ATSM	Nele Hähnsen
Head of Flys	Greig Buckley
Stage Manager/HOD	Jessica McKay
Deputy Stage Manager	Andrew Swarbrigg
ASM Lab	Madeline Hanton
ASM Circus	Cameron Kerr
ASM Jungle	Danielle Waldman
ASM Graveyard	Fiona Elliott
Advertising	Neal Clark, Nele Hähnsen
PLX/HOD	Jamie Murray
DPLX	Rhys Gaughan
LX Designer	Joshua Brown, Peter Goddard
LX Programmer	Matthew Craigen
LX Operator	Andrew Lynch
Sound Operator/HOD	Ronan O'Neill
Sound Designer	Meirian Hall-Jones

Design

Room 1 Lab

Room 2 Circus

Room 3 Jungle

Room 4 Graveyard

LX

LX DESIGN

The LX design for this year’s Inner Space proved to be more challenging than originally expected. The issue we had was that instead of lighting a conventional performance we were needing to light an installation which would do 2 things, help create the set as we had limited budget to make set and also to provide participants enough light to see everything within each room. Each of the LX designers was given 2 rooms with the jungle and graveyard being assigned to Peter and the circus and lab being assigned to Josh.

LAB

I discussed with the designer what theme to settle on and in the end we came to the conclusion that it should be based around a mad scientist’s lab. In order to recreate this I wanted to use a mix of browns and warmer, muddier oranges to represent candle light and also use a mix of gels in order to create what appeared to be moonlight. For the candle light I used a mix of L103 and L156 and for the moonlight I used L603. The candle light wash was to be the most prominent lighting in the room and was added to just over half of the fresnels used and was set at 80% of its intensity. The remainder of the fresenls had the L603 and were much dimmer set at 40% and were in place to provide more general lighting for the room. There were a number of profiles with the L603 which were focused on objects of importance (the desk, locker etc.). The profiles focused on the desk were to be very sharply focused to create the look that there was a skylight in which moonlight was shining through. The rest of the profiles focused on objects were just used for highlighting and had a softer more general focus as this was supposed to appear as spill from the skylight. Within the room there was a section which was marked off to show an area of radiation in which players should not enter until they had put on the hazmat suit. This radiation area would only be lit once players had the hazmat on and this was set to be cued by the DSM. For lighting this room, I used 3 15-30 degree S4 with L138 which is a lime green colour to symbolise the radiation. Each of these lights was focused on the area from above and was to have a very defined focused to help show where the containment area was. Finally I used 2 LED cycs which were used to flash blue and white to help create a lightning effect. These were placed at opposite ends of the room to create a full wash.

CIRCUS

The designer had made it clear that she wanted a more vintage feel for the circus room. With this I wanted to have the players in a red and yellow circus tent and my hope was to use the lights in order to do so. In order to make the tent, I had 12 fresenels in the rig above placed to be next to the walls of the room. These were to alternate between an L101 (yellow) and L106 (red) gel. These lights were then focused directly down and were to have their barn doors brought in to focus the lights to look like stripes. These would shine down the walls of the room and on to the floor and were meant to be clearly separated but due to time constraints I was unable to have these focused as I wanted. During periods in which the crystal ball was speaking, the wash in the room was set to dim and I had 3 profiles with L137 (lavender) gel in them. Each of these would have a gobo fitted with 2 being stars and the other being a star burst. The star burst was fitted to the profile which was placed directly above the crystal ball with the empty space at the centre of the light being where the crystal ball would be placed. This was to be focused so that the gobo was to be very clear and defined. The other 2 gobos were to be fitted into profiles in the corner of the room. These profiles were to be focused towards the centre of the room and were to provide a more general wash and were to have a softer focus so that the gobo appeared to be more blurred. As previously, due to time constraints only the profile placed directly above the crystal ball was focused and the other 2 were not used during the performance. I also had a moving head in the room which was to turn the same lavender colour and was to focus on the crystal ball when it spoke. This was to be a sharp focus and was to be brought in using the in built iris to have the light focus only on the crystal ball. The game designers wanted it to be clear to players when they had an answer right or not. They wanted to have a green wash when the answer was right and a blackout when it was wrong. To create the green wash I used 2 LED cycs which were set to flash when the answer was correct as well as a moving head which would turn green and swirl around the room. When the answer was wrong the room would go to blackout. In order to programme and cue this the DSM would cue the LX op to move on to the next cue if the answer was right and they would cue them to go to blackout if the answer was wrong. This allowed the lighting to stay in the previous state without having the op return to a previous cue. Finally, to provide general lighting in the room and also to light the ropes above, 3 truss booms were placed in the corners of the room. On each of these booms were 2 S4 Pars with WFL, 1 placed towards the top focusing into the centre of the room and the other placed closer to the ground focusing upwards. This was done so that the lights at the top could light the players in the room and the playing area and had straw and frost gels to help stop them being as blinding for players and to create a warmer wash. The others which were facing upwards were to be focused on the ropes overhead to help light these for players. However, this was changed last minute and the ropes were instead placed along one wall which meant the focus of the lights had to be changed. This caused an issue as it meant they were more blinding but due to time constraints this issue could not be addressed.

ISSUES AND LEARNING POINTS

There are a number of issues that arose through this process, things I would change and things that I have learned. The biggest thing I would change is the number of lights used in the design. I know if I was to do this again I would reduce the number of lights in the rig as I hadn’t realised how small the playing area was. After seeing how small the area was and seeing how bright it was with the number of lights used, I would use less lights and this would still allow me to achieve the look I wanted. It would also mean less time needed to be spent on the rigging of the LX bars and the focus. Up until this point I had never used Vectorworks and I had to teach myself how to use this using online tutorials. At times this was frustrating but it allowed me to create a scale drawing of the rig and the LX bars that were being used. However, the scale on the document I had appeared to be different from that in the venue as when we got into the venue lights were much closer than they appeared to be on the plan. Due to this the PLX had to spend a large amount of time setting bar heights in order to allow enough space for them. Another thing I have learned is that the LED Cycs don’t provide the type of wash I originally wanted. While they allow of the changing of colour that I needed I didn’t get the coverage I wanted and if I was to this again I would instead used the LED RGBW pars to create my washes. The biggest issue for me was that I was unable to focus all of my lights. This is due to numerous issues such as delays during the day and also the number of lights in the rig. As a result, in the hour I had I was only able to focus half of my lights and the lights that were focused needed to be done to a fashion were they were doing roughly what I wanted. This meant I wasn’t able to create the effects and looks required. While I was happy with the design I had on paper I wasn’t happy with the overall look I had in the end and if I was to do this again I would need more time for the focus to make the right look.