Welcome back to the third entry in this series about the basics of lighting music.  First, we went over the different kinds of lights and their functions, next we went over shaping those lights into a light plot.  Now we’re going to get to my favorite part- building the palettes.  Creating the blocks to later turn into cues.

The Plot

In this file, I did a small-to-medium setup.  It’s actually a Capture Sweden made file that I’ve edited to be more useful to me.  Platinum beams, Rogue Outcast Beamwashes, Quantum Profiles and some Robe Esprit lights are the moving lights.  Here’s the plot.

Color Palettes

First- I’m going to suggest at least a trip through the color rainbow from Red through Pink and don’t forget White.  I prefer to put in the extra time to make each color of the rainbow at 4 saturations.  This is mostly because getting on site and realizing the Purple palette I was hoping would work but isn’t bright enough is easily solved by replacing it with Purple 75%.  You do you and if you have to make everything from scratch for this, maybe stick to the full saturation and white and then add others as you discover you need them. 

The Other Palettes

You need to know what kind of data to capture into your Position Palettes or Presets.  In Eos, Position Palettes (called Focus Palettes for no good reason at all) can only store position data.  To add in other data, you need to use a Preset, which can hold any parameter that a light has.  In my experience, the minimum you need to record into a Preset is Pan, Tilt and Zoom.  But between my experience and my own style, I also include Shutters and Prism.  Why Prism?  Because I had a terrible stop on tour that we never should have been booked in for many reasons- not the least of which is the ceiling was too low.  The moving lights I had couldn’t zoom big enough to blend.  So suddenly I needed to add Prism into my Presets and since I didn’t have that data in them in the first place- a bad day became worse.  So if you don’t know where to start: Pan, Tilt, Zoom, Shutters and Prism.  I have Beam palettes for Gobos, Gobo Rotation, Edge (called focus in every other console) that make me prefer to keep that data out of my Presets.

Highlight/Lowlight

A note if you’ve never done these kind of position palettes.  You will likely want to create custom highlight/lowlight palettes.  Several default highlight functions pull gobos and only bring up the light you are selected on.  With a highlight/lowlight, you can have all highlighted lights go to full/white (with no other changes is my preference) and a lowlight of 50% and blue.  This way, you can make sure your position palettes are symmetrical and balanced.

Make Some Content

I’m only offering these images in case you are new and don’t know where to start.  By and large, all of these images are one system of lighting at a time to make it easy to see what I’ve done.  Obviously, when you get to cueing, you will decide how many lights will be in what palettes and whether they will even be turned on on a cue-by-cue basis. 

Considerations

Again- these are general considerations.  There is no substitute for thinking through issues on a per-gig-basis.

• Pardon if this is super obvious, but make sure you check all of your moving lights before you start updating presets to make sure they pan and tilt in a consistent way.  Otherwise, you are going to be wasting time for the rest of the day as you forget which light tilts upstage when you rotate the encoder clockwise and generally make your life harder than it needs to be.
• If you are working with cameras, you MUST choreograph pretty much everything you and the camera team do so there are as few surprises on the day as possible.  So you might consider having alternate versions of each palette that look more or less the same, but are maybe further upstage or downstage so you can quickly replace a position that is temporarily messing up a camera placement.
• I did hang a center light (one of the Quantum Profiles), mostly to show you it’s kind of a pain in the butt to work with.  In an ideal world, I would have the center light operated as a remote follow spot to backlight the singer whenever I wanted and wherever the singer roamed to.  It’s also a pain for the numbering, so if you are going to do it, I wouldn’t make it part of the channeling of the system (like I did) and would instead maybe place it at the end of the numbering.  That way, odds and evens selections will work correctly in a symmetrical way and the programming can go faster.
• Notice Preset 11, which is named Broken (and it’s the seventh image of presets).  The idea is the lights look asymmetrical and “wonky”.  As I work to create beautiful and symmetrical looks, having a deliberately messed up one can refresh the visual world for the audience and make the symmetry look that much more beautiful afterwards.  Maybe you’ll never use it, but I always like to have it.
• Flyout- you have no way of knowing this, but the only parameter in this palette is tilt at 90 or higher degrees.  I usually have the preset on a fader and then- whatever preset/palette I’m in- I can have the lights fly out to the perms/ceiling while not disturbing the pan.  This prevents the flyout from being a “one look pony”.
• Don’t sweat the perfection too much during pre-programming if you are using pre-visualization.  It’s more difficult to judge exactly what the lights are doing in the virtual world. Comparatively easier in the real world.  I have had to learn this lesson at my own cost.  I hyper-fixate on my work, and wasting time in previs uses up time I could accomplish other things.  Sweat the finest details on the day if you have time.
• Related to previs- I find it very helpful to have pictures of each preset (much like I have here in this article) to help me remember what I was going for.  Sometimes things go so weird in the hang (it’s common to hang LED wash lights 90 degrees off, for instance) that having the image makes my tired and overwhelmed brain not have to work so hard to know what my goal was and correct things quickly.
• Never walk into your gig without as much pre-programming as makes sense.  
• Create as much content as you have time for in advance, but also don’t make so much content that you couldn’t possibly make it through it all on the day.  Time management is always one of the biggest keys to success.  Beautifully executed and moderate can be better than sloppy but plentiful.

That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll chat about the differences between busking and linear playback.

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Mark LaPierre is a programmer in film and television based out of Albuquerque.  He grew up in live entertainment and has been a designer/programmer for musicals, concert dance, live music, circus and corporate.  Mark is a proud member of IATSE and an ETC Eos trainer.  If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.