Lighting design plan - hanging document produced by master electrician
Scenic design plan - designer’s drawings
working electrics drawings for ibsen’s an enemy of the people - Lighting designer plan and scenic designer plan
Often master electricians will use designer plates as working documents to hang, cable, and focus the production. For my second electrician assignment for the Yale Rep, I experimented with reproducing the designer drawings with an eye toward load in, consolidating information where appropriate and splitting it out onto separate plates if needed for clarity, much like what we do as technical directors with scenic designs. The plan to the right shows the original TD layout drawing, which itself is four designer plates laid on top of each other to show the swing of the turntable at various points. The plan to the left is my hanging document for the overstage electrics, which combines both the TDs drawing and the props master’s storage locations. For this production, space planning was critical and having all available information at hand was useful for air space and stage space meetings.
Unistrut light bracket detail
Bracket detail drawings
Many times small hardware solutions such as footlight brackets will be left until the end when all conversations about them have been forgotten. To prevent this from happening with this production, I documented my relatively simple technical design for an adjustable light bracket as a half-size plate for my staff to have something to reference after the bulk of the show was hung. An unexpected benefit of this was being able to recreate this simple design easily without having to track anyone down to ask what we used for this show.
Center-line section showing boom callouts and house rigging information
Embedding house rigging information in lighting drawings
Institutional memory at educational regional theaters is very short. I knew when I began this project that I would need to include often-forgotten information on my working drawings to make the process more efficient. At the time I created this drawing, I also didn’t know who would be leading this particular crew, so including information that is easily lost, assumed, or just forgotten is key. While these electrics weren’t that heavy, it only took a small crew four hours to get it in the air.