Rob
Halliday, Lighting Designer & Lighting
Programmer
Rob Halliday has been working as
a lighting programmer and lighting designer for
more than fifteen years. His work as a
programmer has been seen on productions in
London and around the world, including, recently
Shakespeare in Love, Bend It Like
Beckham and Merrily We Roll Along
in London, Billy Elliot in Holland, the
New York productions of Evita,
Red, Hamlet, Equus,
Mary Poppins and others and, further
back, such legendary shows as Les
Miserables, Miss Saigon and more.
His lighting design work includes the
acclaimed dance show Tree of Codes around the
world, Daddy Cool in London and Berlin,
the award-winning UK and US tours of My Fair
Lady, the US tour of The Wizard of
Oz, Buried Child, West Side
Story, Hello Dolly and others at the
Leicester Curve, Goodbye Barcelona at the
Arcola, as well as many shows at the Royal Academy
of Music, LAMDA, Guildhall and elsewhere.
Rob also contributes regularly to a wide range of
lighting-related publications including Lighting
& Sound International, Lighting &
Sound America, Live Design, and the
UK’s Stage newspaper. Many of the best
articles from the period 1994-2006 are available in
two books, Entertainment in Production
vols 1 and 2. He has also taught at colleges
including LAMDA, RADA and Rose Bruford in London
and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
FocusTrack was born out of his need to record
precisely what lights - particularly moving lights -
got up to during shows so that the look could be
maintained on tour and re-created around the world.
“In part, this is because my memory is so
terrible,” he notes. “With one show using
twenty moving lights I could just about remember. Now
that shows are using hundreds of moving lights, I
find I just can’t!”
Over the years, Rob has used a variety of techniques
to record the focuses. “I always start with the
show programming: using preset focus groups almost as
labels so that you can get an idea of what a light is
meant to be doing just by looking at the screen. Once
we'd finished making the show I'd then trawl through
the console, noting which lights were used in which
preset focuses in which cues and entering those into
a simple database.”
With that information, a precise focus plot would be
made, originally by hand-drawing the position of each
light in each focus on the stage. “The advent
of digital photography changed that approach quite
dramatically,” Rob notes, “and since
Oklahoma! in New York we've used digital
pictures, one per light per focus, to keep a very
precise record of what each light is doing. However,
we then ended up with hundreds of digital
photographs; figuring out which photo belonged to
which light became quite hard work!”
Which is where FocusTrack began. “The two aims
of FocusTrack were to find a way of getting the
computer to figure out the list of when and where
each light was used automatically - it seemed crazy
for a human being to be doing exactly that kind of
repetitive, tedious work when that’s what
computers are so good at - and then to have the same
system able to keep track of the order the pictures
were taken in so that we always knew which picture
corresponded to what.
“Along the way, we figured out that - on Apple
Macs, at least - we could have FocusTrack control the
console directly, so it could actually do all of the
work of turning each light on and off in turn!”
The result, now, is a system that dramatically
simplifies the task of creating a complete, accurate
record of the show. “On a big show, it used to
take me a day or two of just trawling through the
showfile figuring out what I had to photograph, and
then taking the pictures involved lots of juggling of
a laptop, a camera and the lighting console. Now I
feed the showfile into FocusTrack, let it figure out
what gets used where (which it does much more quickly
and a great deal more accurately than I ever
managed), then just sit in the balcony with my laptop
connected wirelessly to the console. FocusTrack turns
each light on in the right place in turn, I take a
picture. Even on a really complex show like Billy
Elliot, we can focus plot the entire show,
conventionals and moving lights - 1653 picture sin
total - in just under three and a half hours,
including waiting for sixteen changes of scenery on
stage. That averages to about eight shots per minute,
or one every 7.5 seconds.”
Over time, FocusTrack has started to manage more
information than just details of what the moving
lights were doing. "Once we had that, it seemed silly
not to be able to focus plot conventional lights in
the same way," Rob notes. "Once we started doing
that, it seemed silly not to add other details about
the rig - patch information and the like - and to
have FocusTrack be able to import that information
from the console. Then, since it had the Cue List, it
seemed silly not to be able to add pictures to that,
too. None of it's really been planned; it just keeps
evolving as I - and now its other users - find new
things that they'd like it to be able to do!"
"The most gratifying thing is that, having built a
tool for myself, it turns out to be useful to other
people, too!"
And the most ironic? "A long time ago, I did a degree
in computer science. Though I spent a lot of the time
mucking around in the theatre, my final year degree
project was in databases. Then I left all that behind
for a life in theatre. It's funny that most of my
time is now spent dealing with computers in one form
or another, and that FocusTrack is essentially a big
database project. Even more scary was that I actually
found myself enjoying working on it!"
Rob Halliday’s website >
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