Take The Mic Australia’s production of High School Musical recently played at Melbourne’s East Doncaster Theatre (allowing over 75% capacity of COVID restrictions) with Jason Bovaird of Moving Light Production in charge of the lighting design.
With a very minimalist set on stage the lighting needed to be able to tell the story through the use of transition of light and shade. That can also become a dangerous medium as it can also be over lit whilst not concentrating on the story of the show.
After having an enforced year off, Jase wanted to bring to the stage a new way of lighting shows saying that in the past, he was known for being extremely “flashy” in his lighting designs! This time he wanted to be able to tell the story a lot more through focussing on the characters in terms of using movers FOH as specials to highlight the moments.
“High School Musical can lead a lighting designer to put in hundreds of cues with chases etc and that can distract the action on stage,” said Jase. “I went for more of a dramatic telling story rig and only used fast high paced cues in the big production numbers.”
Director James Terry was very definitive in what he wanted in each lighting cue and together they worked well in achieving the final lighting design.
“It’s wonderful when you work with a director who knows how to use moving lights,” added Jase. “A large part of the design was having floor upright truss in each of the corners that had a moving light on top of each and two LED cans as the sidelight and uplighting the truss.”
The main set element was the High School Musical large sign at the rear of the stage and a lush red velvet curtain. The sign became the symbol for whenever Jase went into “concert feel” utilizing lighting the sign and when it wasn’t lit it created a naturalistic feel to the show pulling it back into reality land.
“This needed to be the focus of many scenes so it needed to be rigged early in the bump in,” said Jase. “We were running a full dimmer rack for the sign and being able to have individual control of the sign allowed me to be able to create great chase sequences when needed in the big production numbers.”
The colour palette we went for was whenever we were in school, theatre room or gymnasium scene was a very pastel tone feel in the lights with cross wash having a tungsten feel of straw to create a room full of sunlight,” explained Jase. Whenever we went into “dream moments” or “dance concert” moments I added saturated colour and lots of backlight and sidelight. I also had eight multi pars in a narrow beam that gave the feel of a rock concert when they went into a big ballad or strong dance numbers.”
Jase’s biggest challenge was the fact that none of the lighting bars lowered to the ground to be able to rig the lights. This meant that he had to go with a smaller compact moving light rig.
“This is where our LED ART Spot 200 came into great use as well as our LED Art 8 watt cans and the ShowPRO Pluto 2000 moving head wash range,” he said. “The LED ART series of moving heads are a wonderful lightweight moving head weighing only 12kg which is great when you can’t hang heavy moving lights in the air. The output of these lights is excellent being a LED-based globe it is very punchy. The other challenge we faced was that because we had so much floor stuff we were running out of patch points around the room so the use of running lots of looms came into play around the venue.”
The rig consisted of 32 x LED ART 8 watt 6 channel cans; 16 were as a backlight colour wash on stage, 12 were on the upright truss as sidelight and four were lighting each of the truss stands on the floor. On top of the four upright truss stands were four LED ART 200 spot moving head to create a high and low effect in the design. FOH there were two LED ART 200 spot moving head and LX 2 had four more. LX 3 was stacked with another four LED ART 200 spots, eight Pluto 2000 washes and eight 575 Multi pars with narrow lenses. A mixture of 1200 watt Selection Fresnels was scattered on FOH 2, LX 1, LX 2, LX 3.
“The movers on FOH did much of the picking up performers and highlighting the action,” explained Jase. “The movers on top of the truss were used for focussing on hard sidelight for the performers and creating a “roof-like” feel over the stage The movers on LX 2 and 3 created heavy backlight and various gobos as texture on the floor. The Plutos are a wonderful light and the zoom on them is excellent – being 8 degrees to 70 degrees allows you to use them for highlighting areas and focus.”
On the floor uplighting the red velvet curtain was eight Phillips SL 150 range cans, a unit favoured by Jase for their good zoom function allowing you to either have a strong beam up the curtain or a wide lens.
The rig was controlled by MLP’s ETC Ion lighting console running over two universes. The whole rig is supplied by Moving Light Productions and through Lighting Lab, a company MLP has formed a partnership with this year as the main production and lighting design company for them.
This production was pre-plotted on MLP’s new Capture visualisation programme that was purchased during “lockdown” from Clearlight Shows Australia.
“I purchased this for the business with two universes to test it out and I used High School Musical as our first test case,” remarked Jase. “It worked like a glove. Having the ability to be able to pre plot the show before you walk in the theatre is just a huge advantage and given in these type of shows where the bump ins are quick and plotting time is minimal, you want to be able to be ahead of the game before you arrive. The only real difficulty we faced was that the programme didn’t have the spots in the library at the time of pre plotting, but an email to Capture solved that within 24hrs.
“Once we arrived at the theatre, all we had to do was update the positions of the movers on stage. Its the way forward for myself and the business as when you are doing back to back productions you don’t have the time to be spending 40 hrs plotting in the theatre. The other great thing is that the director can see each cue and what it looks like by taking snapshots of the monitor for them to see. Being such a short season I operated the show to take the pressure of the stage manager for having to call the 350 or so lighting cues. I knew where every cue went so it was easier for me to operate.”
Jase has a busy February coming up touring Matador to Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre and then the show moves to Adelaide to headline the Adelaide Fringe Festival in The Octagon Tent through till March.
“I have a very busy 2021 with several big shows and hopefully a major commercial musical pencilled in for the middle of the year. Not to mention our 35 or more school productions beginning in March!”
Director – James Terry
Choreographer – Lachlan Purcell
Musical Director – Anthony Barnhill
Lighting Design – Jason Bovaird (Moving Light Productions)
Sound Design – Marcello Lo Ricco (LSS Productions)
Costume Design – Betty Auhl
Stage Manager(ish) – Nik Morris
Head of Lighting – Jack Pryce (Moving Light Productions)
Lighting Crew – Brendan Osbourne, Oliver Moore
Photography by James Terry
