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Light on the Subject
By Steven L. Shelley
A Brief Practical Guide to
Lighting Paperwork,Part 2
In last month’s article about lighting paperwork, I examined
the categories (graphics, lists and forms) and classes
(public, private and infrastructure) of paperwork, as well
as the function of various pieces of paperwork and best
practices for distribution and storage. The article ended with
a long description of what types of paperwork needed to
be included in the public packet. If that sounds like a lot of
information, it is. Feel free to check out last month’s article to
refresh yourself before we dive into the final part of a lighting
paperwork packet, the Private Packet.
Private Lighting Paperwork Packet
The Private Paperwork Packet is comprised of documents
I create for my own use. I rarely give out copies of these
documents. Their purpose is more for my own personal use,
and they are tailor-made to primarily be comprehensible to
me. If others understand them, that is fine. But their primary
purpose is to act as shorthand memory storage for my needs
and no one else’s.
My Spike Groundplan show the detailed measurements
for each point on the stage as designed for Patti LuPone, who
requested that the relationship between her and the rest of
the stage picture be consistent and relative to the edge of
the stage. These spikes and any adaptation of them were
set only by myself and the stage manager, so there was no
need to send this information in advance or to share it with
anyone else.
Focus Digital Pix (Figure 1) is comprised of miniature
digital photos of fixtures focused into the back of the
translucency. Once the show opened, I photographed
each channel during light check and then imported them
as JPGs into a single VectorWorks document. I found that
the black and white photos provided better contrast and
didn’t require a color printer. These
photos reappear on the Hang Plots.
The tour’s schedule was sporadic;
there might be two or three weeks
between engagements. Reviewing
four pages of these photos, the night
before a load-in, got the focus visually
back in my head much faster than
old-school written focus charts.
Hang Plot Downstage (Figure 2) is
an expansion of the downstage four
overhead electrics in the light plot.
Starting in the lower right hand corner,
(1) the title block (and contact sheet)
indicates cell numbers and email
addresses for the company’s traveling
staff. In the lower right-hand corner
(2) the legend identifies the fixture
type. The scale bars (3) are drawn next
to each electric, in order to expedite Figure 2
measuring during the hang. For system fixtures (such as
backlight PARs), the plot showed channel, color, bulb type
and bulb rotation. For fixtures containing a gobo, I imported
images from the Web sites and listed their name, number
and proper orientation. For special focus fixtures (6), I created
a miniature diagram underneath each fixture. I found
the focus for the template system in channels 10 through 12
difficult to remember, so I created a groundplan detailing just
that system (7).
Hang Plot Upstage (Figure 3) expands the fifth electric
and all of the deck gear in the light plot. While using many of
the drafting techniques from the Downstage document, this
page relied much more on the digital photos to detail the
focus on the white translucency. Figure 4 shows a close-up of
channel 48. While the red circle (1) shows the hanging location,
electrical and gobo information, the digital photo above
(1a) shows the focus photo. I placed white ovals and numbers
on the photo to help visually match the unit number and
approximate beam placement.
Figure 1
16 May 2008 • www.stage-directions.com