We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Ed Frearson and Tom shackleton, final year BA Production Arts students at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, who took on an ambitious lighting project for their graduation showcase. To help bring their vision to life, Ambersphere were able to loan them a grandMA3 console, giving them the opportunity to explore the different features.
Q: Can you give us a quick background/summary on who you both are, and what you’re studying?
E: I’m Ed, a final year student studying a BA in Production Arts, on the technical theatre pathway at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, with a particular interest in lighting design and programming for theatre and live events.
T: I’m Tom. I am also a final year student studying a BA in Production Arts on the technical theatre pathway at Guildhall, with a main interest in lighting and management.
Q: What made you want to get into the lighting industry?
E: For me, I used to play in a few bands in my secondary school and really enjoyed music growing up. Through this I discovered the possibility of working backstage, and I’ve been really interested in lighting ever since!
T: Like Ed, I also had a very musical upbringing, I had a great time in product design in school, working with electronics to build all kinds of creative solutions. I found lighting after playing in the bands for some of the school shows. A great way to scratch the design, electronics and musical itch.
Q: Can you give us a summary of the grad project that you worked on?
E: So for me, the project was exploring how collaboration works and is made effective between a designer and a musician in live events. I worked as the lighting designer and programmer, alongside EPM student Olly Rodwell to create a production design to accompany a set of music he would perform in Silk Street Theatre. Tom focused much more on the technical aspects of the graduation project, realising the design and vision, designing the systems, bringing it to fruition. He worked as the Production Electrician and Technical Manager overseeing and managing the planning, prep, fit up, tech, shows, and strike.
Q: What made you choose the grandMA3 platform for this project?
E: I was keen to do the project on 3 as it is not something we have available at Guildhall, and is being used more and more in the industry. I thought using the grad to get a better understanding of how it worked would be a really fun challenge and a great learning opportunity.
Q: How did recipes help you on this project?
E: Recipes were vital on our grad, the whole showfile was built on them. Every sequence was made with recipes, and while programming the show, I found using this workflow a lot easier when it came to making changes, which I was doing a lot as I was getting used to the software. It took some getting used to when I started, but I really liked how it changed my view on data management within the showfile. I found it a lot easier to visualise and modify cues, and as I mentioned earlier, making updates was generally a lot quicker.
Q: If you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?
E: It would have been great to have tried to integrate more show control aspects into the show design. Giving the DJ freedom to play whatever he wanted would be a really great next step moving forward, and would provide a great experience to learn more about the MA3 software.
Q: If you could add a feature request to the software, what would it be?
E: Sometimes I found that sequences set as ‘tops’ would trip over themselves in the code and misfire or not fire at all, especially when in quick succession. I often found myself having to duplicate the sequence and have to achieve the same sequence across two executors instead, which meant updating these hits would take double the time. Also, the ability to apply something like a BPM grid overlaying timecode would be quite interesting. Getting TC events lined up perfectly on the beat would be a lot faster with something like this in place.
Q: What was something that helped your workflow?
E: The final set was about 15 or 16 tracks, in about 40 minutes. While prevising, I worked linearly through the set, timecoding blank cues for the main stack, then going back through and coding in all the hits and specials sequences on a song by song basis. After I had all the main stack and hits in for a song, I would then go through and add in all the content to the cues. Creatively, I found this was a much more efficient way to work. By just bashing through getting everything into the desk with no data in the cues, it meant when it came time to actually populate the sequences, playing it back to check that ideas worked was a lot smoother because everything was already timecoded and in place.
Q: What are you top 3 grandMA3 features and why?
E: Recipes were amazing on this project and a real life saver at times. As mentioned earlier, the ability to quickly make changes and visualise cue content really easily was game changing for me, and something I really enjoyed working with on our grad. The selection grid was also amazing. We had quite a few Spiiders on the show, so being able to sort their pixels on a group by group basis was really cool. Being able to organise sequences in the timecode window into different groups really helped to keep the showfile neat and tidy, and again, when it came to editing events, it was very easy to locate sequences.
Q: What did you like the most about lighting this particular show?
E: I really liked the collaboration on the show. Tom and I were blown away by the industry support we received while doing our grad, and it was really nice to feel welcomed and supported as a student coming through.
T: I really liked working with the kit as we would in the industry. Accepting the hires, building the show, boxing it up and sending it on its way. Quick, fast, and efficient. It didn’t go without its challenges, but it felt like a really well rounded process I will be happy to look back on.
Q: Can you explain any parts of the project that you think worked really well?
E: I loved the track at 7:08. It is a total break from the bold and dramatic intro to the show and from a design perspective it was nice to draw more focus to Olly, the DJ, silhouetting him with floods of backlight. Really honing into the lyrics and vocals, I felt that this moment pulled the show away from being a ‘lighting show with music’ and really emphasised the artist and music on stage.
Q: Who supplied the Ayrton kit?
E: We were very kindly supplied 6 Rivale Profiles from Visual Elements, and 4 Diablos from SLX.
Q: Was there anything you particularly liked about the fixtures?
E: I enjoyed the zoom range on the Rivales, and the speed at which they moved from narrow to wide made for some cool programming possibilities. The size and speed of the Diablos was really handy when it came to quickly marking them in no time at all.
T: I found working with the Ayrton kit particularly pleasant. No faffing around with misaligned lenses, no need to get the screwdrivers out to poke around inside. Everything worked first try out of the box. The Rivale was a particular stand out, all matching exactly as they should be.
Tom Shackleton – Technical Manager, Production Electrician
Ed Frearson – Lighting Designer, Lighting Programmer
Ben Mills & Finn Irving – Photography
Guy Knox-Holmes – Programming support
Guildhall Recording and AV Department
Lighting Supply – Visual Elements, SLX
MA3 Desk Hire – Ambersphere