I'm still pursuing my lighting education endeavor, but it definitely comes in spurts (giggidy). A couple of weekends ago I modeled my office in Vectorworks, along with the half-dozen lights that I own. What's neat about that is that I can import the model into the console, and the software can "listen" to the output of the console and visually render the output. In other words, what happens on the computer is what happens in the office. That's not as fun, but still.
So the next step is to build out a virtual rig with a bunch of fixtures that cost $10k each on trusses, and once I have that, I can program stuff against it. I obviously can't outfit an arena with the real thing, so this allows me to try and be creative as if it were for real. I don't know that there's anything exotic I can really do, as most big shows these days are several rows of lights at various heights, kind of surrounding the "box" over the stage. Sometimes they're curved or circular trusses. More and more, there are a lot of video components, which I could get into, but that feels like a secondary skill. I could create video patterns in After Effects, and use those as the basis for pixel mapping across a rig. That could be fun, and frankly a shortcut to trying to figure out the math patterns to otherwise make it do stuff.
I've watched a lot of videos of various shows, and I've noticed the EDM people mostly just try to blast you with seizure-inducing mayhem across hundreds of fixtures. Understandably, those shows don't exactly have a lot of dynamic range or subtlety in the music, so I guess that makes sense. Pop and rock seems to have more interesting stuff, and a lot of it even, wait for it, attempts to illuminate the artists. And then there's more quiet genres that mostly intend to create a mood, not a light show. The best thing that I've seen in person lately was Lindsey Stirling's Duality tour last year. That was legit.
I'm having fun with it still, but again, I haven't played consistently. I still find myself having to relearn things that I thought I already knew how to do.
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