In my junior (2022-2023) school year, I worked from September to March on, our next MS/US musical, Little Shop of Horrors. For this I designed a much more efficient plot to provide actor visibility, creepy looks, and high- energy chases, with our limited fixture inventory. This show had a dual level set, with blocking putting the chorus and plant actors on the scaffolding upstage, where we had no spots that could reach. As a result, I placed two blades flown downstage on either side, that would provide visibility on the side scaffolding, with two Hotstiks hung midstage to hit their center counterpart. The rest of the set was a turntable mid upstage used as two different backdrops, and a main playing area extended by buildouts over our steps in front of this. In School of Rock, our electric’s dimmer plug arrangement forced us to turn on all spots at once, but for this show I acquired extension cables allowing us to assign two spots to Stage Right, Center Stage, and Stage Left zones, each. This permitted separate control of each zone’s light. To the electric I additionally attached four Hotstiks-- two focused dson the turntable and two on the playing area in front. Finally, I placed two Hotstiks and two blades on each side of our center buildout, to act as uplighting. 

Like in School of Rock, I first designed some looks for each location in the show, and assigned them to cuelists. However, in addition, I made cuelists with starting looks for each song, involving general washes from the electric’s Hotstiks. Finally, I programmed a color chase from the uplights and the scaffolding Blades/Hostiks for virtually every song, again on their own cuelists. I found and trained a sound designer/operator this year, so I would be running the lights. As opposed to having a directions sheet for myself as in School of Rock, which I believed was unintuitive, in this show I laid out a page of cue lists with columns for each scene in the show. For the columns’ headers I used copies of the location cuelist applying to that scene, named it a description of the scene, and then placed the cuelists for the song(s) contained by the scene, below the “header.” In some areas of the page I placed cuelists to be used as general emotional hits. For easy change of location cuelists’ intensities as well as chases’ speeds, I attached my midi keyboard to our onPC setup and assigned its dials accordingly. I essentially busked the show from this cuelist page and my keyboard.

After reviewing the footage, I regret the decision to create uplight chases for most of the songs in this musical, but make the excuse of mid junior year academic pressure putting a crunch on my ability to test, record, and improve my design. The chases casting on the actors distracts the actors from their movements and the audience from the actors, as the light is both from a very unnatural angle that should be left reserved for specific moments, and from one that partially blinds the actors. I initially placed the uplights to be used for the creepier scenes of the show, outputting red, and should have stuck with this use. But despite this mistake, I am proud of the work I was able to do with this show, specifically the stage-wide washes. It was an awesome opportunity to work with what our director interpreted as very abstract and ethereal settings, and I think I provided some awesome looks, empathetic to the scenes with my washes. In the folder below you will find screenshots of my cue list page for this show, clips of a performance, and the playbill.