RENT Photo featured on JimOnLight's Blog

A photo of RENT at The Stage at Island Park (formerly Fargo Moorhead Community Theatre) was featured on JimOnLight's most recent Sunday Flickr Post.

Light Plot for Wait Until Dark

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Newer Rendering for Wait Until Dark

Here's a teaser of what the lighting design for Wait Until Dark will look like.  I've seen it in rehearsal a few times now, and can tell you that this rendering is really close to what it actually looks like.  Once I'm out of tech I'll post this alongside a photo from the same angle.

Mercury-Vapor Lamp

For Wait Until Dark, I want to have the effect of mercury-vapor streetlights outside the window, and not the  phosphor coated versions which are more white.  These versions of the lamps are hard to come by today, but they were really prevalent in the 60s. 

Mercury-Vapor Lamp on the side of a machinery shed near Bathgate, ND.

My grandparents farm still has one of these lamps in working condition, and fortunately I took a photo of it a while back.  From the photo I was able to come up with a gel combination that would re-create that light.  Combining R364 and R93 produces a very similar color with slight exaggeration of the green.

Rough Rendering for Wait Until Dark

This is an initial rough rendering for Wait Until Dark.  The rendering is done in WYSIWYG and the furniture for the most part is from Google SketchUp's 3D Warehouse (you will notice the fridge from yesterday's post).  I still have work to do on it, but I like the quality of light so far.  I'm looking forward to seeing it realized.

WYSIWYG and Google SketchUp

As I am working on renderings for Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott, I started looking in the library of WYSIWYG R26 and was disappointed by the lack of standard furniture and appliances.  Never fear though: Anything made for Google SketchUp can be imported into WYSIWYG!

Need a retro refrigerator?  How about this one:

This fridge happens to be based on the exact model the theatre has in stock.  Need the door open?  In this one case, not a problem:

Not bad for my first find.  I'm also finding their furniture library to be impressive as well.

To import these files into WYSIWYG is easy.  First download the file from the Google 3D Warehouse and then just go to the file menu, click on merge, switch the file format you're looking for to SketchUp, find your file and merge.  Follow the on screen instructions, and the object will now be in your file.  I find it useful to first make the object into a group so it moves in unison, and then rotate and move it into place.

In case you ever need to light the outside of a building, as long as it has been added to the 3D Warehouse, you can import those as well.  Just be prepared for your system to work very slowly and save often.

CSU Ballroom and Dataton Watchout

I now work for the Centennial Student Union on the campus of Minnesota State University, Mankato.  The ballroom is currently undergoing renovation, and as part of that renovation 17 projectors are being installed for seamless projection around the entire room, to be controlled by Dataton WATCHOUT.  I'm looking forward to learning and working with this exciting technology when the ballroom comes back online next month.

From the Dataton website:

Dataton WATCHOUT multi-display production and playback system lets you orchestrate stills, animations, graphics, video, sound and live feeds in a single impressive show across multiple display areas, soft-edge or scattered. WATCHOUT is fully scalable, software-based and requires no proprietary hardware.