Sound & Lighting

To Tech our show we used a lot of the applications from the Macs in the grantry

Final cut PRO – This programme was used to edit all the videos together in the beginning section on the screen
QLAB– This was used for putting the sound cues into one place, I added fades, pre-waits and other effects to make sure these all ran smoothly.

Sound

In terms of sound for our performance we used tracks and put them into a Qlab file. However due to the pandemic we were unable to take pictures of the file but I do have the picture of the edited songs. It made it easier for the person controlling our sound and other cues. With our sound preparation it took some time to figure our a running order and to put in the right cues but due to the tutorials we had taken it went a little bit smoothly than expected in short notice. In total I want to say that we spent about 2 hours editing songs, we had to edit them because for some of our tract we didn’t use the whole song maybe just 2 to 3 minuets and again thanks to the techy’s for teaching us the software we were able to do this successfully. Even though the sound wasn’t at its best it still sounded great and the tracks on the running order worked smoothly. I think if we would of had the time our tracks would be more up to scratch and also our mics and overall sound would of been blended better, our voices are our main tool in the performance so if we had the chance we would of done a lot more sound tutorials to make sure we sounded perfect.

Sound for us as I said was a big part of our performance. From the beginning we started thinking about how we might do our sound, we started with think of basic structure which was creating our cue lab and editing we weren’t sure how many songs we would end up performing so what we did was create a Q-lab we were going to add to it and edit songs as we went along however with everything that happened we were unable to follow this structure as we would create a new timetable and allocate days where we would work on our tech.

The next element to our sound was Mics. When we performed in work in progress we used hand held Mics because we thought that is what we wanted, the idea was to come in and out of the performance world, when we held the Mics and sang we were in the performance and when out of it we would be our natural selves. However, when we performed we realised that the Mics we obstructing our choreography so Ben proposed that we use radio Mics we agreed with this because we did get negative feedback from the hand held Mics. So we changed plans but because of the pandemic we had to use hand held due to the radio Mics not being patch thorough and bkended to the room ect…

I was overall happy with the way we sounded, I do feel we could of been better but it couldn’t be helped. If I get to do this again I will make sure I have some kind of sound and lighting back up plan.

Lighting

We never got around to creating our lighting but we did play around with the equipment in the gantry. We made notes on what we might of had for the final performance. For the actual recorded performance we just had a basic house light wash to resemble a living room light colour, which was the overall idea. For us lighting wasn’t an essential, due to use singing throughout it was more about sound, we just wanted a basic lighting structure with a few spot lights here and there. We did get to play around with lighting as you will see further down.

For our finale basic lighting we used a basic cold and warm wash with whit and yellow colored lights but also hint of pink to try and resemble a living room light, however it did not go to plan the cold wash that contained the hint of pink was turned up a little to high, but I think that the audience still got the gist of what we were trying to achieve.

Our recorded performance lighting

playing around in the gantry

The first set of lighting we wanted to use was spotlights on the fridge. As stated before the fridge is a character and is good and evil we wanted to show that through lighting too. Using a white light when ‘Frenchie’ was good and using red lighting when he was bad. We use chairs at the time just to get the gist of how it would look.

List of potential ideas for lighting

In the beginning of the show use the house lights for audience entrance
Use a birdie under the TV cabinet to look like the TV is on
Two spotlights for eyes of food
spotlights on our entrance song coming out from the audience
rotating disco lights for the end rap