I hear a lot of beginner and intermediate programmers say they struggle with practicing because they need someone to ask them to program things.  Welcome to a new series called “The Ask”.  I’ll provide you with a request (as close to verbatim) that I’ve gotten on set.  You spend a week or two thinking/working on it, and I’ll tell you how I solved it.

The first one is from a series I worked on.  A character is going to set fire to their own house by igniting a bunch of stuff above the mantle. The character is a fairly wild and unpredictable person, so the action HAS to be tied to their movements- whatever and however they decide to set the fire. (Also, they ran it only once during staging, so it’s not gonna be easy to follow.)

There are three titan tubes on top of the mantle in M126.  Make it so the fire comes up as the character moves from camera left to camera right- and in any timing the actor chooses each time.

If it’s helpful: I program Eos as my platform, and that’s what I solved it on the first time.  But I can easily see at least two ways to solve it across multiple platforms.

Hope this is fun and helpful.  Ask me question in the comments if you need to.  In the answers, I’m going to stick to as close to what my gaffer said to me as possible.  If you need more info that I feel would make it too easy for some, I’ll DM you. And I won’t tell you what show/episode/time marker this comes from until later.

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

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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, an ETC Eos trainer and an enthusiastic trainer of many other platforms and subjects.  He offers Zoom console training as well as in person.  If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.