School Of Rock

In 2017 I was asked if I wanted to help with the lighting for the School Of Rock Production at Twyford. Fast forward to July 2018, and the production is shown over 4 nights to the parents and students of Twyford CofE High School. This production was one of the most ambious productions Twyford has ever pulled off.

In case you have never seen School Of Rock, in brief its about a guy called Dewey, who gets a phone call from a school – intended for his flatmate. He lies to the school and ‘becomes’ a teacher. He teaches a class and starts a project with them called Battle Of The Bands. They rehearse for Battle Of The Bands until parents evening, where it becomes apparent to the parents and the school that Dewey lied about being a teacher. Even though the kids now don’t have a teacher and the parents are furious, the children jump on a bus with Dewey and put on a rock concert at Battle Of The Bands. If you haven’t seen it then its highly recommended.

When I was asked to help with the show, I began to put together a CAD drawing, designed in Vectorworks Spotlight, of the performance space in Twyford that we would be using. From there I started putting together a lighting design and plots. I tried to make the plots simple so that the technical team at Twyford would be able to understand them and see the vision that I was trying to produce. The Lighting design went through several revisions. After I was happy with the design, I started to produce paper work, which included an overall plot, zoomed in plots to each truss and a DMX plot to show what mode and address each light should be on.

As soon as I heard we were doing School Of Rock, I messaged one of my closest friends in the lighting industry, Thor Saether. I was able to get some help from Thor, who at the time of the show worked for Ambersphere – however he now works for ULA Group. Both Thor and Ambersphere assisted my vision by supplying a large majority of the lighting equipment for the show. These included the following: Ayrton MagicBursts, Ayrton MagicPanel-Rs, Ayrton NandoBeam S9, Ayrton Ghiblis, Claypaky Sharbars and Claypaky Axcor Beam 300s; all of which will be talked about later on in this post.
Due to the amount of lights that we were using we had to be extremely careful with how we powered everything up. In total we used 134 Amps just on intelligent lights and staging. All together including dimmers we were drawing at least 276 Amps, which is a lot for a school show. I put together an excel spreadsheet and spent hours juggling where about fixtures were powered from. We didn’t have a three-phase supply which caused a few issues later on during the production.

Before the show, I started to put together a EOS show file as we would be running the show off of an Ion. I created a few magic sheets, which incorporated custom fixture symbols which I created especially for the show, to help speed up programming of the show. When it came to the show, we actually ended up using a combination of the ETC Ion and Avolites Quartz. We were using 5 universes of lights however the Ion could only output 2 universes due to software limitations which was ashame. I ended up giving universe 1, which held all of the generic dimmers to the Ion. Universe 2 was shared by both desks and universe 3 onwards was solely the Avolites. To get both desks to share universe two I used the DMX Merge functionality on the Avo desk. The Ion outputted Universe 2 over sACN which was connected to the Avo which also outputted Universe 2 over sACN, however it had an internal loopback. The Quartz would output universe 2 from either stream depending which desk had a higher sACN priority at that time, on a physical output at the back of the desk. Universe 4 and 5 were outputted via Artnet to the MagicBursts located on the floor.

The majority of the lighting was programmed over a single staggered run through on one day. The day after was show day. As the week went on, the show was refined and by Wednesday it was looking and running well. To add to the complexity of the show, we also had a revolving stage and a motorised truss which was dropped at the concert in Act 2. The truss used 2 single phase motors to lift and drop the truss. Due to the revolving stage we had to add bars along between trusses to provide side light to the stage. Amongst setting up the lighting for the show, I also created and planned the cue list for the stage revolve movements.

So before I finish this post I wanted to talk about my experiences with all of the equipment from Amberpshere. They are all such amazing pieces of engineering and I would happily use and spec them on events again.

Claypaky Axcor Beam 300

During the show we used 4 Axcor Beam 300s, and wow they packed a punch. The beam provided by the LED source was amazing and clean. Without any haze you could still see the beam through the air. They were fast and had a good set of gobos in them. They also use very little power which is perfect! The Axcor Beams are basically LED versions of the Sharpy.

Claypaky Sharbars

I’ve been wanting to use these fixtures for a while and I was not let down. Each bar produce 6 tightly collimated beams which can be zoomed and individually coloured. Each beam can also be panned individually which allows for awesome aerial effects.

Ayrton Magicpanel-Rs

These are also another set of lights that I have had my eyes on for ages. So when Thor said that there was a possibility that I might be able to use them for this production I was so happy. I love the MagicPanels so much! With a little haze and either a chase or a pixel mapped effect on it then they produce great beams through the air.

Ayrton NandoBeams S9

These aren’t a new light but they definitely are a workhorse and a half. The Nandobeams are separated into 5 concentric rings. They produce a good range of colours from pastel to saturated. In the production we used these for back light and they worked really well.

Ayrton MagicBursts

The magic bursts are one power hungry light taking up 6amps per unit, but with great power usage comes blindness. These pixel-mappable strobes pack a punch. They have a ton of inbuilt chases which speed up programming. They also have a reflective plastic covering the LED array which allows you to bounce beams off of the panel.

Ayrton Ghiblis

And finally, a light that I would happily spec on any gigs. The Ayrton Ghibli is a nice LED profile. Ayrton has managed to fit just about everything you would want into the moving head profile: Shutters, zoom, animation wheel, CMY colour mixing, Colour wheel, Static gobo wheel, rotating gobo wheel, etc. The gobo choices are a really good mix of gobos which could be used for both theatre and concerts.

Thank you Thor and Ambersphere with your help on this project!