Stage Lighting Design
Other than a couple of lamp design projects as an Industrial Design undergrad, I really first got into lighting as a church volunteer. What started off as helping out with fabrication for stage set designs turned into creating lighting and controls designs for a 1000-seat auditorium and leading a team of other lighting techs and stage set builders for periodic stage refreshes.
Christmas 2018 stage design for Turning Point Church
This was the first major redesign after moving into the new auditorium and it addressed some of the weaknesses of the original design without adding any equipment other than some truss and hoists. We traded some height for wider coverage of the stage, which resulted in fewer camera angles or seat views with empty backgrounds.
The new design added a lot side- and back-lighting versus the previous stage. We also got the majority of the lighting and power off the floor, which made co-existence with the musicians a lot easier.
I modeled the fixtures and rigging in Solidworks, building off an assembly I built when we moved into the new auditorium in 2016. Screenshots of the final design were the basis for wiring schematics and address assignment in Illustrator (backed up by a big spreadsheet!)
This was our first tear-down-and-rebuild in the new auditorium and was an important benchmark for how fast we could do it. Thanks to good planning and lots of hands, we tore down on Sunday afternoon and were fully functional by the next Friday.
Conference Lighting
This was a stage set I designed for a conference held in the Westin Buckhead ballroom in Atlanta. The concept was for a flag motif, so the stage background was made of 13 horizontal stripes grazed from each side by narrow-beam batten fixtures. The conference logo was suspended a few feet in front of the backdrop and lit from above to allow contrasting colors on it. The lighting was rented from Magnum in Atlanta, and I built the backdrop and installed it at the event. Control was DMX via a GrandMA2 Light console, also rented from Magnum.
The wall was designed in Solidworks and constructed in thirds - vertical studs had notches for each of the 14 horizontal slats (making 13 "stripes"). The horizontal slats had curved front edges with grooves to accept 1/16" opaque white HDPE strips cut to the width of each stripe. We built each section on the ground, lifted it into place, then slid the HDPE sheets in from each end.
I cut the horizontal slats out of 4x8x.5" MDF sheets on my CNC router. This was the first project on the new router and required cutting eight full sheets of MDF, so it gave me a good chance to establish a workflow for processing sheet stock.
All wrapped up and ready to transport to the conference. You can see the studs in the background. I spent all available time getting the CNC functional and then building the stage, so I didn't get to build road cases for these until the next conference 6 months later - transportation was a little dicey this first time!
2016 New Auditorium, Turning Point Church
We moved up from a 300-seat room to build on a 1000-seat auditorium. Planning for the lighting design began in February and we moved in at the end of September. This was my first chance to choose lighting and controls equipment, create the controls schematic, and manage an installation from scratch. This was also my first time working with integrated video content AND the GrandMA2 lighting control console - a major crash course in stage design and operation!
One look from the Christmas 2016 program. In addition to getting familiar with programming and show operation using GrandMA2, I learned a lot about animation and graphics creation in Adobe AfterEffects to create content for the background LED panels. We eventually moved to using more 3rd party content, but I created almost everything from scratch for the first year or so.
Using Solidworks and the architectural drawings for the building, I built an assembly of the stage and used it to calculate fixture placement and focus to communicate to the installation team. The design concept was mostly worked out in 2D using Illustrator before moving to Solidworks.
This was an early system schematic that I used to communicate with our system integrators. The design changed a good bit after this to accommodate their standard practices, but it was an effective tool to communicate our desired control capability.
Christmas 2015 Stage Design with Pixel LEDs, Turning Point Church
This was the second from-scratch stage set design I did for Turning Point, and it was the first to incorporate standard LED pixel tape. I also reused the 15-channel halogen dimmers that I designed and built for the previous stage design.
Pixels were WS2812b tape driven by DMXKing ArtNet->pixel controllers. We fed them content via ethernet from a laptop running LightJams VJ software. The laptop also received ArtNet triggering commands from our lighting console, a Pathway Controls Cognito.
The pixel background filled up a lot of space and also provided a really good amount of back lighting for performers. This freed up all of our other fixtures to dress out the higher areas of the stage.
A cool look from later in the life of this stage design. This was my first foray into animating with Adobe AfterEffects, but I also created a lot of static looks in Photoshop.