Week four: South Coast and Tech

This week we went to South Coast to take a look at architectural lighting and store fronts. It's amazing how time you can tell if any timing went into the planning of the store's design. For example, Rolex's high angle lighting made it intimidating to go into, very powerful and statement worthy. Whereas Sony was bright and flashy, advertising its sleek tech and colorful innovation with lots of bright screens flashing their product. For some stores, dim lighting made them look more mainline, where others were bright to look more professional. Both sides of the intensity scale looked good, if it was for the right sort of store. As a commercial lighting designer, it's essential to know what products are being sold in the store you're going to light, and the stores reputation. You aren't going to want to light Tiffany's in hot or colorful lighting. Tiffany's had a really nice touch of dividing into two rooms, a "Diamond Collection" room, and a regular jewelry selection room. The diamond room had cooler tones and had top lights on the display cases to accentuate the crisp beauty of the jewels. The other room was warmer, and comfortable.

I'm in tech right now, and it's been crazy. I stayed really light last night to hang, focus, and rough cue. I got a lot done and it was truly a learning experience. Not realizing, I soft patched into a previous show, causing my cuing to look really interesting. I was so confused as to why it didn't look how I wanted it to. Thank goodness I noticed pretty quickly. I'm glad I have lots of sheets written to help me stay organized between the different instruments I need, where they're located on my plot, and what channel they're on. I'm not sure what they're called here, but in high school we called them "schedules". I wasn't required to do them by this class, but I whipped up some quick ones because I remembered how helpful they were in the past. Being new at this I needed all the help I could get. I used a lot of what I learned from watching Stacie, using my hands to check for height and an even wash, and learning how to effectively direct people (Jamie the SM is familiar with the light board so I was really happy that she was the one helping me). It was a long night but we got a whole bunch done, and Martha seemed to approve when she came in today! I thought that the cycs needed 6 of the 24 dimmers, but today learning that wasn't the case was one of the best gifts I could recieve because I separated by down light systems by hot and cold so now I have more versatility when directors ask for things, and also I can see more of my vision come true. It's all coming together, so we'll see how it goes from here!