Live Design Online: Jeff Brink, a movie industry professional (Local 52 NYC Electrician) and film drone operator, began working on Blackout App because of his frustration at programming lighting for film in nontraditional spaces where the programmer is trapped behind a console. The Blackout Lghting Console is an app that allows lighting designers to program and run lighting from an iPad, using its intuitive interface and freeing the operator to walk around the set.
5 comments:
I appreciate the utility of a controller like Blackout but I think that this article may be slightly overstating its abilities. While I think that a mobile and simple controller to control a handful of color-changing fixtures on a film set is useful, I think that for any production happening in a fixed venue or any live production, I would want the reliability of a dedicated console. Ipads are wonderful devices but they are not designed for constant uptime like consoles are. Consoles also have the ability to implement live tracking backups, which is not something that something like Blackout can do. It seems to me that blackout might take a useful place in replacing rigs on the order of scale of a Nomad Puck, but I would still prefer the full-featured interface that Eos offers. Eos also has the ability to be remotely controlled from an iPad, giving you the best of both worlds. You can both walk to the console when you need to do some heavy programming and take an ipad into the set when precise adjustments of color and intensity are needed.
This is a really interesting innovation. While overall this is a product tailored to the film industry and the mobility naturally needed in lighting for film, it does seem like a useful alternative to the usual big lighting consoles when needed, and as evidenced by its impressive user list, it does work, and works well. Some of the most interesting new products come from folks inside the industry who see a natural hole in the market that others might not. There are plenty of partial hardware substitutions for components of big lighting desks that programmers use to make their workflow more streamlined like modded keyboards, programming wings, stream decks, DIY encoders, etc, etc, but far less different platforms that allow the flexibility that this article says Blackout offers as a platform. This is a really interesting product that I’d love to experiment with and will certainly be keeping an eye on in the future.
This seems like pretty cool technology and I'm surprised I had never heard of it before. I can definitely see it being pretty useful in the world of film and TV, but I think it is less so in the world of theater. While consoles can be large and clunky, many smaller ones offer a much better workspace than an iPad. The screen of an iPad is relatively small, and I feel that the lack of a good keyboard or faders or physical buttons would just make the programming process much slower. Also, the fact that EOS consoles have the ability to remotely connect to a tablet makes this technology less useful, particularly for theater, as a console can be used when lots of programming needs to be done, and this can be switched to an iPad when portability is needed. I guess that Blackout may be more optimized for the iPad though which could make it better in some cases.
I love new lighting technologies on the market, and it's really exciting to see this already being used in film and tv productions. I'm not sure how useful this would be for stage productions, and I think that it could be better for a blackbox setting where the performing space is being viewed from all sides at the same time. I think that shows in traditional proscenium theatres like the Chosky don't really have a use for something like this, and a dedicated board with actual physical buttons seems like it would be much faster to program on. That being said- I do like how the UI is more modern and fresh than the stale ones of the current lighting consoles. Even a small update to the UIs of EOS and GrandMA could potentially lower the skill barrier a lot when it comes to programming. That being said, I really think that movable consoles are the future of movies and tv, and I'd love to be able to use one of these.
I can always appreciate new and innovative solutions to old problems. For the longest time theatre and film sets alike consistently use ETC lighting consoles which like the article points out are big and bulky. And so the solution of an app to control lights instead of a big console is a really innovative solution that fits really well on a set where you want to be able to walk around to see what’s going on. The only thing is that ETC already has an app that connects to it’s console and you can do whatever you want from it. Granted, I will always be more than happy to accept more competition into the space, competition will always end good for the end user. However, I just don’t really like the framing that this app is the first one to be able to replace the big and bulky lighting consoles as others have already.
Post a Comment