et cetera...: Being a freelance Lighting Designer can often feel like being a mountain climber. Every month (or couple weeks, if you’re a workaholic), you’re walking into a theater that you may or may not have worked in before, with people you may or may not know well, and attempting to put up a show in, usually, no more than a week. Hopefully you reach the summit, you celebrate a well deserved opening, and – not long after – you find yourself behind another tech table, at the base of another mountain, staring up at the peak, starting a new climb all over again.
3 comments:
This article gives a really interesting perspective on lighting designers being free lancers not in New York. I think that all free-lance designers should read this article as it makes some very good points on how to save time and work with new people on a lot of different shows. One major suggestion the designer says is to have templets. While he was saying that a lot of the things in the template are the job of the programmer, the programmer might not have time or have the right skill set so he wants to be prepared. His reasoning for creating these templets is to help save time in tech and thus will help him and the whole show as to now keep slowing down in tech. I think every department can find ways he like did to create templates or other means to help new people and the designer up to speed during the tech process. I am excited to see how these changes can be implemented across the board!
This article gave an interesting look at some of the problems faced by freelance designers that others may not have to deal with. Constantly moving venues and working with new teams for every show creates difficulty, as would be expected; each theater has different equipment and different levels of skill within their technicians. I think the idea of making a template file to speed up the programming process is a great idea- even if it may be seen as doing part of the programmer’s job. From my point of view, anything that makes the tech process easier and more streamlined is a fantastic development. Who wants a tech to run long if there is something that could be done beforehand to mitigate that? Having an Eos template file prepared beforehand is a great example of this, but it doesn’t just have to apply to light designers; I think there are strategies that could be used by people in many areas of tech that could use this same principle to make the process of freelancing more streamlined and simple.
I believe that lighting designers should and need to take more responsibility and involvement in the programming of their board, as well as educating those below them. Building a template file is a good step in the right direction, as it helps to standardize the process, which helps make learning easier for everyone else involved in the process. I also believe that the design should be more vertically integrative than it has been previously. i believe that the designers should and need to be more involved in the nitty-gritty of the design (hanging, focusing, etc.). I believe that this is an important part of the process, which is often overlooked by designers, and that board ops and master electricians are taken for granted. Obviously, they shouldn’t be wholly responsible, as if that were the case, master electricians and board ops would not have jobs, however, they should be more involved than they are now.
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