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‘ETC’s Emphasis saved my marriage’
The family that designs together, stays together? ETC’s Emphasis lighting control console is a solution to many lighting professionals’ needs, but Emphasis apparently has another use: it may be the answer to maintaining a designer’s peaceful home life. Steven Smith, lighting professor at Minnesota State University at Mankato, claims that ETC Emphasis is helping keep his marriage happy.
Every year, Smith designs an average of ten shows for the university and sits in on four or five student shows, which means that at any given time, one show is on stage, one is being programmed, and three more are in production meetings. A lighting designer might look at that schedule and imagine countless hours spent in the theater designing cues and soft patching, complete with endless production notes taken at long, stressful technical rehearsals. That’s not the case for Smith, who swears by his ETC Emphasis console.
“Before the University had Emphasis, I would spend eight to ten hours in the theater programming shows. Now I do the majority of my soft patching and drawing at home with my family. I made a 3-D image of MSU’s two theaters on my laptop and am able to very simply copy and paste lights onto lighting positions and begin designing cues with Emphasis Offline Editor. I can program 300-cue shows in a couple hours. While many people think that Emphasis is just for pre-cuing and viewing, I use it for all the preprogramming infrastructure that is needed to program complex shows. All of my soft patch, submasters, groups, focus points, and macros can be done offline at home on my laptop. The time that many people spend in the lighting booth doing this preprogramming is spent looking at a computer screen, not at the stage anyway. Most of this can be done virtually. I’m able to make it home to have dinner with my family.”
Since he’s not trapped in a theater programming shows, Smith is able to spend a lot more time at home with his wife Christina and their two little daughters Aria and Cadence. “Too many lighting designers think that in order to be good, you have to spend a lot of time in the lighting booth, but a good designer needs to have a life on the outside. With Emphasis, I’m able to stay home with my family on Saturdays, take my wife out occasionally, and my kids know my name.”
Emphasis’s simplicity and ease of use also make it easy enough for four-year-old Aria to help design the lighting for Smith’s shows. She chooses color and texture schemes that Smith admits are sometimes better than his own choices. “She’s not burdened with any formal training in lighting design so she just plays.” She knows where a lot of the buttons are and can record and activate cues with her father’s help.
Some of the shows done at MSU are done in the 250-seat black box theater, which uses either the ETC Express or ETC Expression lighting control consoles, depending on the needs of the show and the skill level of the student designer. Says Smith, “In my classes, I train my students on ETC equipment, beginning with Express and Expression. My theory is that if you have quality equipment, your students can learn. The students are able to design, hang, and focus the lights themselves as well as record and run their own cues. They start by hand drafting and using the Express console, which has many sliders and is very tactile and intuitive for a beginning student. As they become more adept at working with Expression, the advanced student can move up to Emphasis. I teach them how to use visualization software and 3-D drafting.”
“Recently, MSU sent a dance piece to the American College Dance Festival (ACDF) held at Iowa State University. I downloaded the ACDF rep plot from the Internet and in one hour drafted the plot in my virtual theater in Emphasis. After I showed the lighting cues to the choreographer, the show was ready to go. I never set foot in the theater to see the piece onstage. I just emailed the cues to the Lighting Director at Iowa State. The cues were in the board when the dancers arrived, and they looked just like the ‘virtual cues.’
“During tech week, while most lighting designers are nervously scribbling countless pages of production notes, I sit stress-free without any notes, because I am able to immediately change the lighting with Emphasis per the director’s requests. I use ETC’s virtual facepanel software loaded on my tablet PC. My tablet is networked into the Emphasis system, and I have access to every button and display that the light board operator has. During a tech rehearsal we rarely stop for lighting issues. It’s faster for me to make the changes on my tablet than it is to write them down. Directors love to see instant adjustments of cues!”
This year, MSU will have eleven major shows. Currently, Smith is working on The Crucible, which requires a lot of heavy lighting for the dark theme. Says Smith, “I drafted a complete set for the show in 3-D and brought up cues to show the director what the stage could look like, all before buying gels or arranging lighting rigs.”
Soon, MSU will put on Will Roger’s Follies, which is a proscenium show using eight followspots, 22 moving lights, and 40 color scrollers. The set consists of a giant staircase made out of glass blocks, with ETC Source Four fixtures and ETC Source Four PARs underneath. Smith already had the lighting and the set planned using Emphasis, before the students needed to begin working, saving them a lot of time. MSU also has two shows, Frankie and Johnnie and Private Eyes, in production. “These two shows are being done in rep with changeovers every other day,” says Smith “With Emphasis, a student designer was able to figure out which lighting fixtures the shows could share.” The student was also able to experiment with angles and throw distances in virtual 3-D before hanging a single light.
Despite the hectic schedule of producing 10 or 11 shows in nine months, Smith is calm. “With Emphasis, I’m not going to become one of those lighting designers who talk about their failed marriages or how they missed their kids’ childhoods because of too much time spent away at work.”
Emphasis apparently lends another unexpected dimension to the meaning of ETC’s already dedicated ‘customer support.’ Is Emphasis the marriage-counselor console of the 21st Century? It just might be.
21st April 2005
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