Orange Civic Theatre offers a diverse annual program including many local, national and international touring productions. On any given week, they could be hosting a musical, dance recital, comedy show or band.
Some performances, particularly live music, require a lighting console that suits busking and the venue’s current console was not designed for the task. Allan Brown from Centre State came to the rescue with an MA Lighting grandMA3 compact XT that offers the full system benefits of the grandMA3 system, housed in a compact and lightweight format.
Stephen Rangott, Theatre Technician, has been acquainting himself with the new console saying it’s certainly more intuitive when it comes to doing live shows like busking.
Stephen admits he has had no prior experience on MA consoles but he is gradually learning. He has been following the MA Lighting tutorials whenever he has spare time adding that he was working through the training and eventually got to a point where he thought he just had to jump in there and use it.
“I’ve tried it on one live show and it was a bit of a puzzle,” he disclosed. “At the moment, I’m doing more musicals where I can go through and program all the cues and work everything out as we go. With the live show, I thought I’d send a few lighting cues and things but it didn’t go so smoothly, however, it worked out well because it’s a comedy show, so a couple of errors played into the comedy a little bit!”
Stephen is impressed with the speed of the console’s GUI interface and that has prompted him to use it more especially when he has to make it up as he goes.
“I can very quickly just tap a few buttons and bring up a few lights which is so much quicker than typing in with the ETC, remembering what the channels are,” he said. “I can create a colour wash and add randomness to it in about 30 seconds, where it’s probably taking me five minutes on the ETC console and I can do that as we rehearse. Once you get your head around it and get it set up the way that you want to use it, it’s flexible and intuitive.”
Stephen comments that he is looking forward to exploring the 3D capabilities of the grandMA3 compact XT so he can set up a stage and lighting layout.
“Once you get them set up, you can tap on the stage and bring up a mover, point it where you want,” he added. “That’s kind of like one of my ultimate goals, but it’s still a little way off. If you’re lighting a band and someone’s moving, you can track them or quickly reposition just by tapping on a screen.”
The superior build of the console and its size have also impressed Stephen who comments that he can unplug about three cables on the back of the MA and fold the screen down, lift it himself and move it.
