Lighting, Sound & Stagecraft

For Halloween Escape Room

OSRAM

It is interesting to know that Osram Licht AG which is a German based, create normal household lights/bulbs and also bulbs for Moving Head Lamps for Theatre. The Company started out creating normal household bulbs then branched out to create other kinds of bulbs for different LED lamps.

My Plan for how I will Light and use Sound in the props room in the Theatre:

As the Backroom/Props Room does not have a Lighting rig or sound speaker in the room I will have to make a few ideas for the room. My First plan was to use a speaker and one LED light, I was going to try and work the music from the tech box but we had an issue with the Bluetooth connection from the room as it was crackly and not clear as ambient backing music. 

So I had to change the plan so that one of the acting team (Sam) would play the music from the (train room) and cue the music so that all of the rooms would have ambient/backing sounds in the background to give an eerie feel for the pubic who would be travelling through the escape room. The other problem with the backroom is that I will not be able to light it with 15 Amps Lights so I will have to use the LED Lamps with the AC Plugs, the negatives to using these Lamps are that they are really problematic when trying to change the lamp colours as there are sliders to change them on the back. 

In the other two rooms I have also come into a lot of problems with that the lights were bleeding over each other so in the train room my direction was that it was lit as a dark red and in the Mannequin room it was lit as Dark blue but with this came difficulty as i would have to focus them and set the lights intensity down so that you could still see the puzzles but also not see the colour of the lighting in the other rooms.

After a couple of weeks of building set and working out the puzzles myself and the Stage Manager had discussed that the lighting will have to change prior to what she visioned before as when we had a practice run through one of the team who ran through it so at first we discussed using the birdies as they are small and compact so we can keep them out of the way and people can still have enough space in the room. so we looked at the puzzles with these and it was still not the best, so instead I took the executive decision as Deputy Stage Manager & Lighting tech and choose to change the colour by adding some white to the colour through the ML Controls on the lighting board.

There was also some problems with the green in the toys room in the props cupboard as you couldn't see much in there and so i tried to add another one of the LED Lights and hoped that it would be able to help but still it wasn't enough and then as the management team we all discussed what was the best course of action. Myself, the assistant stage manager and the Stage Manager all decided that the bet course was to change the lighting but as they were very awkward to change I brought up the idea that it would work if we added a white light to the room through one of the LED's 

Halloween escape room

So i cued the Lighting in an event that I was ill which this had actually happened so I think that it is always a good idea to make a plan just in case of something happening. But because I was off I did make an error with the fact that I did change the lighting way too early but because they were already in the tunnel so nobody really noticed. 

With the sound board there was another issue with the fact that the ambient sounds for the train room were not working at all, which i believe that it was corrupted which I changed to the mannequin room ambient sound as fast as I could so that the rooms still had music playing throughout the room. If I were to do this again I would download the audio to another site something like Youtube so that I know that the audio would work smoothly.

Critical Evaluation of the Lighting in the show:

I think that as a whole my role as Lighting Operator had some ups and downs and there is definitely room for improvement, For the first room when operating the lighting we had to change the lighting to change how the mood was set in that room so adding the white light gave a calm feeling to the room with the existing green which also improves the mood of the performance as a toy room is where you would feel most safe in a factory, the green also meant that the characters in that room fitted in as the crocodile outfit was also green which made more of a jump scare in that room. The lights I had to use were the P64 LED Plus which were very useful in this situation the reason for having to use them were that there was no way of using the other lights which was the biggest downside to it on the back of the lights it had sliders which were very difficult to find out which lever did what in the end I was able to do so. If I was to do this again I would definitely try to find some other lights that I had to light up that room as it was very difficult to do with the P64's I would most likely use the birdie lights even though they do not change colour like the LED's they have a better intensity and i am also able to dim them through the dimmer packs that  can be plugged into the normal AC sockets.

In the second room we chose a Dark red light to begin with as the red light senses danger the reason we chose this is because it was to build the tension up as this was one of the hardest rooms for the puzzles, to begin with we had the lighting just as dark red which was very effective with the actors but when we added the puzzles it became an issue as the puzzles were not visible so I chose to use the Birdie lights as they are brighter and we can dim them or make them brighter to the level we need them to, we then realised that it was more visible but still not the best so speaking with the stage manager i recommended added some white light to the red lights through the ML Controls which we both agreed was the best option and this became very effective for the audience to interact with puzzles to see, 

I also had the intensity of the lights down so the room was not light up so much as it would not have the same effect as if they were at the highest intensity, I had also chosen to add a slow zoom as it usually takes people a second to think wait have i seen something so it kinda confuses them for a second which with strobe you would have to be careful due to medical conditions. If I were to do this again i would use the generic lights like Par-can's and Fresnel's to give a bit more lighting into the room, when I went to see a performance at riverside studios I had noticed that they had done this to add some extra lighting on the stage which i felt that was very effective to see the performers.

In the final room we added a blue light which gave a cool and cold feeling to the performance in this room i had used the Pointe Lights, 2 Diamond 7's and 1 Diamond 19 which filled the room in this room the intensity was down to the lowest I could do it to so that you could see the performers but not notice that the jump scares were going to happen it also didn't bleed through to the pother room. When operating the lights I realised that people had not seen that there was a jack in the box in the corner and the fact there was another actor hiding behind the mannequin. If I were to do this again I would also put some movers on the floor just to give more lighting in that room the only downside would be that it could become more of a trip hazard than a help.

When they had completed the puzzles and had left the room I had blacked out the theatre to add effect as the door slammed then put the house lights straight up. I think something that worked very well was the fact that we had the headsets to work out when the audience left so that I could ques off each room and that if there was an issue I was able to use an emergency lighting that I had qued using All Par cans, Fresnel's and Profiles available with the Movers all light up to 100% in case of any sort of medical emergency's or that if someone was frightened of the actors. we could then move everyone through the emergency exits we had already made. 

When controlling the lights I could not see into the rooms so I had to go off of the cues of the actors which i believe wasn't that effective but if i were to change this I would create a CCTV based sort of thing attached to a TV into the tech box which we have done before so that I can change the lighting immediately without need of help from the acting team.

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