The End of an Era

Today marks the passing of a brilliant theatre artist, Lighting Designer Tharon Musser. I wish I could comment more on her impact in the craft of lighting design, but I want to leave that up to Kendall Smith in an upcoming interview. Ken served as an assistant to her for a time and to this day I still hear him say in the theatre, "Tharon would do..." It saddens me to have never met Tharon but her stories, and her designs will live on. In fact, there is currently a book out on Tharon's life and work put together by several of her assistants if you care to look it up and give it a read, I enjoyed the read. It's been a while but I'll try and get a mini review and link up for it here soon.

Have questions you want to know about Tharon and her work? Leave a comment and I'll do my best to ask.

First Open Forum

Alright guys, so this is more just to get people to start coming here and start off with something that generally creates a good discussion. I am going to ask 3 questions below and I would love it if you guys respond, more a thing out of fun. Please feel free to respond to each other, and please note that to Lighting Designers these can sometimes be personal questions - so please play nice.

1. When I say blue on a cyc, what color do you think

2. What angle can't you do a show without (F/L is a given, but lets be honest folks there are far more exciting things)

3. When I say forrest what's the first template that pops to mind

These are really general questions I know, but things that are always fun to answer (an maybe questions going out to our potential design interviews). Feel free to answer simply, or if you want to give us your reason why, share. Look forward to the discussion. Also, there aren't a lot of followers yet - invite your friends to the discussion and to follow me on twitter @afgld for updates.

Off to a focus, hope the ensuing conversation is fun.

First Interview Confirmation

So I have already sent out some requests for interviews and have had a response so far. Donald Edmund Thomas, one of my close mentors, will be one of our first interviews. Donald is a brilliant designer who does predominantly Opera and Theatre design for companies all across the country. I am putting together a questionnaire now for a basic profile on Donald which will probably cover posts over a week or so. I will also be doing an interview with Donald about the opera he and I worked together on, the world premiere of Cyrano with Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit. For more information on Donald see http://www.donaldthomaslighting.com/ and send any questions you might have for Donald my way.

First Post

So, I am kind of stealing this idea from a friend of mine who is a Sound Designer. Give me some time, but the idea is that this will eventually contain the following.

-Interviews with professional designers with information such as Specific Designs and concepts for a specific show, Background and History in theatre, etc

-A collaboration of ideas - IE Open forums to discuss everything from technique to resumes to interviewing and networking

-Interviews with professional non Lighting Designers and how they like their process to work with (or maybe without) a lighting designer

-An area for you to post questions you may like to ask the followers of this blog

-Product reviews from myself, and of course others may tag on their thoughts

-An open help forum for Lighting Designers and their use of vectorworks and LW. We all have tips and tricks and be able to share them may help others

-Which brings me to hopefully interviews with people like John McKernon to discuss LW (maybe I can get something for the LW5 release)

-And hopefully more

I would really like your feed back on all this. If you would like to start a thread let me know and I will see what I can do. This is all still in the planning phases and the more input I can get from you the better. If your up for an interview, shoot me an e-mail with a website I can go to get some background and we'll see what we can do.

Andrew