Little Green Swallow - ALD

**The images used in the journal are for illustrative purposes and the original source files and images for full review are attached on Moddle

Research

For my allocation I researched both the show and creative team so that I was fully informed before I began working on the production.

Creative Team

I knew Rory, the LD for Little Green Swallow, already as he is a Guildhall alum who I was able to shadow both on Così fan Tutte at Guildhall, as well as at Opera Holland Park while in first year. He works primarily on operas and musicals and was nominated for a Knight of the Illumination award for his lighting of Così fan Tutte at Opera Holland Park (See reference 5).

I had previously worked with Martin in second year on Angel Esmeralda. Martin works part-time at Guildhall as a Resident Producer and so is experienced in teaching and mentoring but also maintains a professional presence in the industry. Martin directs predominantly opera and has directed a number of shows at Guildhall as well externally for Opera Holland Park and Mid Wales Opera among a number of others (See reference 6 & 7).

Dick Bird, the designer for Little Green Swallow, also works predominantly in opera and has worked with Martin on a number of different shows. Dick has worked internationally, having recently designed Les Pecheurs Des Perles at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He has also designed at the Royal Opera House and the English National Opera (See references 8 & 9).

Little Green Swallow(L'augellino Belverde in itlaian)

In 1994 Jonathan Swan was commissioned by Musica Nel Chiostro (Batignano Opera Festival) in Italy to write Little Green Swallow (See reference 1 & 2) which is based on characters in the Carlo Gozzi’s tale The Love for Three Oranges written in 1765. The festival founder Adam Pollock created the English singing translation which will be performed by GSMD this year and which was first performed in 2005 by GSMD. The show was subsequently performed by British Youth Opera in 2014 (See reference 3 & 4). I was lucky enough to be able to watch the archive video of the British Youth Opera performance which was very helpful in getting a better understanding of the show visually. The show is a fantasy tale of a little green bird who is actually a king under a spell. The tale follows the adventures of a dysfunctional royal family who must go on dangerous quests encountering singing statues and magic along the way.

Journal 

Week 1

I spent the first week of this allocation largely waiting for our plan moving forward after the last minute government announcement that we would be required to work from home. I spent the week doing some research into the show and communicating with Jack about where we were at in terms of moving the show online. I arranged a meeting with Rory for the following week as he had other work commitments in the first week. I practised my skills in Vectorworks as I would be responsible for producing the section & front elevation as well as making updates to the plan. I attended a number of different meetings throughout the week and as the week progressed it became clear that although the Dramas would be reorganised into the Easter break and next term the Operas would go ahead as planned, albeit online.

This would change my role somewhat as I originally anticipated taking a lead role on Capture as I would, as the ALD, have been responsible for documenting the show. However as this become the show, Jack took over producing the Capture file with Jon and the programmers and I focused instead on putting together documentation for Rory and communicating with the other creatives whenever necessary.

Week 2

I spent the start of the second week working on largely the same objectives as the first week, trying to keep in constant communication with other members of the LX department and piecing together what exactly we would producing in the upcoming weeks. On Monday I met with Rory and he was able to give me a clear picture of his goals for the production now that it had moved online. We would be focusing on plotting states for each scene which would then be mixed in at the end with the other material put together by the other departments. I was able to watch Jon’s Capture refresher which gave me a better idea of the online work flow we would be using.

Rory had sent me a link to his LGS dropbox folder which I spent some time looking through as he had added a number of different examples of paperwork and documentation from previous shows to give me and an idea of how these should be laid out. I started work on the section and front elevation on Wednesday using some of the examples Rory had provided as a reference. Having never made a section drawing or front elevation on Vectorworks before putting together these documents took some time. One particularly difficult part was the variety of different angles and accessories that were used for the Source 4s in the drawing. I had worked out a technique for creating 3D snapshots of the fixtures but the process was time consuming and the resultant models tended to be very expensive processing wise, likely due to high number of lines. The process involved positing the lights in 3D space and then converting them into polygons => a symbol => and then eventually a lighting instrument. After doing some research online about possible options I discovered Savvy Section Symbols, which dramatically improved the quality of my section symbols. It provided easy to interchange views from almost every angle with almost any accessory and clamp etc.. and allowed me to create much more accurate fixture symbols. Although I still had to draw a new symbol for the pirouettes as they didn’t have any 3D symbols available anywhere. I was able to complete the documents before the end of the week and after Rory reviewed them I went ahead and distributed them so that they could be used by the rest of the LX team and TM to put together the Capture file.

Week 3

I spent week 3 further refining and working on the LX plans, making a couple changes where necessary. The week was mostly quiet and so I spent some of my time further practising my skills and watching through interviews that Rory had done with a number of different lighting designers.

Week 4

In week 4 I met with Rory so that we could have look at how the cue/shooting list would be constructed. We decided on a layout which included a visual reference and gave ample room to include detailed shooting notes if these were required. I spent some time putting this together using the documents provided by Adam and the various visual references provided by Dick. We had asked for a walkaround the Capture file however it kept getting moved back and so I decided to sit in on the sessions on some of Thursday and Friday to make sure that the we were on schedule as we had very short time windows next week. At the beginning of Thursday it was looking a bit concerning as there were some issues with the patching, however by Friday morning everything seemed to be pretty much on time. I arranged with Jack for Rory to have a look around on Friday afternoon and overall the rig seemed to be in good shape.

Having spoken to Rory further about our plans for upcoming tech weeks it became clear that the rest of the creative team wouldn’t be able to spend a lot of time in our sessions. As a result Rory asked me to have a look at potential options for how we could render out our work as we went along and then distribute it for review and feedback. I had a look at options for exporting from Capture and it seemed that a direct export would be the most suitable option as it offered the best quality and allowed us to directly create video files which could be sent easily (See reference 10). We agreed that there should be couple of different camera angles of each scene so that we could capture the depth effectively. After reaching out to the rest of the creative team it became clear that Teams would not be a suitable option as many of them did not have access the shared files on Sharepoint and so I settled on using Dropbox instead.

Week 5

In week 5 we began focus on Tuesday which got off to difficult start as there were a number of different issues which hadn’t been addressed before the start of session. Some instruments were positioned incorrectly and a number of frosts etc… were missing. After some time was used at the start to resolve these issues we began focussing. As we focused the lights I would take a written note as well as a screenshot of the focussed light so that we could refer to the exact focus later without needing to use Capture. I made sure to have a plan available throughout the session so that I could assist Rory allowing him to concentrate on actually focusing. He offered me the chance to focus a couple of the sidelights which very useful as actually describing to the programmers what I was looking for was surprisingly challenging. Although they were relatively simple focuses it was interesting to have a shot at calling a focus as this is something that I’ve never done with the support of a professional and so I was able to learn a lot from Rory’s guidance.

It was an interesting change of pace working as part of the creative team as I am very much used to focusing on the technical aspects of the production and so giving input on the design of the show was a great learning experience.

Wednesday was a challenging day as the discovery was made at the start of the morning that we had been using a malformed Capture file where a group of lights had been moved to wrong place which hadn’t been noted on Tuesday as we were focusing generics and the issue involved moving lights. This incident highlighted a number of issues with the Capture file as well as the file naming structure as a whole. Overall we probably poured about half the day into reconstructing the Capture file into it’s previous state.

Although I wasn’t involved directly in the storing and making changes to Capture file. This was an important reminder about the value of detailed and frequent backups as well as attention to detail, which may not have entirely prevented this problem, but would have certainly helped resolve it in a much more timely fashion.

Throughout plotting sessions myself, Dan and Ed recorded detailed cue information into an online Airtable (visit this link to access it) which the LX team had access to. This provided a useful reference while plotting with the intention that it would provide detailed notes of all the LX activity over and above the separate paperwork that I was producing (as we worked I also added cues to the cue list created by myself and Rory). Throughout the week there were a number of different changes to the LX which I made sure to action as soon as feasibly possible in order to ensure that Rory had an up to date plan while plotting. This also provided the added benefit that I never found myself having to make major changes to the plan at once as I was only making small incremental changes as we went along. I also created a changelog to document the changes made at each version of the document so that Rory could quickly and easily follow the changes made at each version.

Week 6

In week 6 we continued to work through plotting as before. On Monday Rory gave me the chance to design one of the states with his support. I was initially apprehensive as I wasn’t sure how I would be able create something acceptable without more time to plan. However, although I found the experience challenging, I enjoyed pushing my boundaries and it was incredibly interesting to get a feel for the pressure an LD is under during a tech/plotting session. It’s very much not something anyone else, myself included, are normally aware of. From an outside perspective it seems that they are simply calling out numbers and describing what they want but there is much more to communicating clearly your ideas and trusting that the lights you have used will do what you intended them to. It was also interesting to get feedback from Rory about the best way to communicate with the programmers. Initially I tended to explain in technical terms how to achieve something but Rory explained that I was better to explain what I was looking for and let the programmers focus on the technical execution of what I was trying to achieve.

Throughout the week the reference images that I took as we went along proved invaluable in diagnosing any issues we had with the Capture file and helped to confirm any unusual disparities between what could see and what we had expected to see.

Towards the end of the week we decided that since we were nearing the end of the week we should put together some kind of document which provided a quick visual overview of the scenes we had plotted for the other creatives to have a look at. I offered to create an LX Storyboard in InDesign which would provide a comprehensive document with all the information relevant to each scene including the scene number, a reference thumbnail as well as a link to the folders which contained the example renders of each scene.

On Friday I had scheduled time with Ed and Dan to have a look at capturing focus and preset images which I could then collate into a document further down the line.

Week 7

After a meeting relating to scene changes on Friday of week 6, it was clear that we would need to build scene transitions as although we hadn’t originally intended to show any scene changes. The positive reception to some of the scene changes created with automation meant that we would need to create lighting transitions to support these.

Rory tasked me with spending the first few days of week 7 working with Dan and Ed to work on these so that we had changes across the scenes throughout the show. As our states were plotted as static looks it would be more challenging than usual to tie them together as many shared common lights and so we used a technique that Rory explained which involved subtly ‘dipping‘ the fixtures which needed to mark so that they could discreetly move to their next position without creating unsightly ‘live moves‘. I spent these days working with Ed and Dan to create these transitions and dips as well as working on small number of outstanding notes we had at this point. As the number of cues seem to grow dramatically throughout these couple of days following more of a typically theatre cue list, I asked Rory if I could put together a more concise and condensed cue list which followed a more traditional theatre layout as our current one was not optimised for the cue list that had evolved out of added scene changes. I went ahead and put this together on Tuesday and it proved to be particularly useful for myself, Rory and Adam who were able to use it as a quick reference for LX cues. I also made sure to keep it up to date, updating it as we made changes in the session, ensuring that we had a current working document throughout the process.

Thursday turned out to be a more challenging day than we had originally anticipated. Originally pencilled in for rendering we ended up spending the day largely finishing notes and further refining the scene changes instead. This meant that we had to work even harder on Friday to get everything done. However, we were able to get all the renders finished and I was able to distribute them both in email and in the LX Storyboard for the creatives to review. One particular issue that cropped up was a technical limitation with Capture that hadn’t cropped up until this point. As Capture only records DMX data when recording for export, we weren’t able to export with automation natively from Capture.

As we had originally intended to export individual states this hadn’t been an issue up to this point. We opted to use OBS to record a high quality screen capture of the output window. This didn’t preset a massive issue as we were using one of the VDLP workstations which have high spec video cards which can create a high resolution output in realtime however this would have been a major issue had this not been the case.

Week 8

By week 8 the process was starting to wrap up as most of the team were now working concurrently on other projects and so we decided to allocate Thursday as the end point after which further changes could not be made. We would work through the notes from the renders sent out in the previous week and then render the final versions on the evening of Thursday.

Throughout the rest of the week, I spent time refining paperwork and putting together the focus and preset notes from the images captured on week 6.

By Thursday the list of notes was long and it became clear that we would need to work incredibly quickly in order to meet the deadline. We spent the morning working through TM notes with the afternoon spent on LX. Martin and Dick joined to review it in early evening. This proved challenging as they had a large number of new notes to add and the scale of some of the changes meant that we would be unable to realistically make the changes and finish rendering that evening. As a result we instead opted to move the rendering session to following Tuesday.

Bibliography

1. Jonathan Dove (2020) L'augellino Belverde, Available at: https://www.jonathandove.com/laugellino-belverde.html (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

2. (2021) The Green Bird, Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Bird (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

3. Sadlers Wells (2014) British Youth Opera — The Little Green Swallow, Available at: https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2014/the-little-green-swallow/ (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

4. George Hall (2014) The Little Green Swallow review – British Youth Opera displays a wealth of talent, Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/10/the-little-green-swallow-review-british-youth-opera-peacock-sadlers-wells-london (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

5. Rory Beaton (2021) Rory Beaton Lighting Design, Available at: https://www.rorybeaton.co.uk/ (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

6. Guildhall School of Music and Drama (2021) Martin Lloyd-Evans, Available at: https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/music/staff/teaching_staff/department/6-department-of-opera-studies/358-martin-lloyd-evans/ (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

7. Martin Lloyd-Evans (2021) Martin Lloyd-Evans, Available at: http://www.martinlloyd-evans.co.uk/Site5/Martin_Lloyd-Evans/Martin_Lloyd-Evans.html (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

8. Dick Bird (2021) Dick Bird: Designer, Available at: http://dickbird.co.uk/ (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

9. United Agents (2021) Dick Bird | United Agents, Available at: https://www.unitedagents.co.uk/dick-bird (Accessed: 1st January 2021).

10. Capture Lighting (2021) 14 Snapshots and Video Rendering, Available at: https://www.capture.se/Manual/2019/snapshots-and-video-rendering.html