Godfather Death Tech Rehearsal

My first encounter with Godfather Death was back in 2004 (I was 16 at the time !) - It was one of my first plays with Blackwood Little Theatre and certainly my first experience of a One Act Play. 

If I am totally honest I don’t remember a lot about the Lighting of this play the first time around, I obviously didn’t care much for drawing rig plans and keeping records of what I was doing in my younger days.  I do remember the play at the Congress Theatre, Cwmbran and having to light the large rotating moon using a follow spot as there were no other spare lanterns, it wasn’t ideal but we had to work with what we had - at the start of the play the follow spot swung around the Theatre a few times trying to find it’s intended target !

The Lighting design this time around is fairly simple and a lot of the play happens in an intentional shadow, there is a lot of blue at low level with just a touch of front light to create a facial shadow. I have experimented with a number of different tones of blue throughout the rig which seems to be effective, especially at the beginning of the play. I have chosen color from the LEE Filters 700 series and specifically a shade of blue which is designed to be at it’s best at low light levels designed by David Hersey the Lighting Designer from Les Miserables, Evita and Cats in the West End !

The challenge with this play from a lighting point of view is to compliment what is happening on stage and create specific moods in a quite sympathetic way, but the action all happens quickly therefore not a lot of time to build cues and states.

Yesterday was Technical Rehearsal and as the play is part of a One Act Festival there are strict rules as to what can and can’t be done technically - the biggest challenge is the one hour time limit to plot cues and rehearse all things technical. Our Tech hour flew by but luckily it all went well and Vic, myself and the cast used every second of the hour to get all our cues in the desk and walked through.

All we can do now is look forward to next weekend when we can see if it all works !

Aneurin - Technical Director BLT