Photona: Vision

UNCSA - D&P - LX Department - Class of 2025

In my final year at UNCSA, I had the opportunity to put on the production that every lighting student at UNCSA longs for… Photona. This spectacular show showcases the immense talent and skills of the students in the department. In addition, it provides a crucial role in connecting students to alumni and industry professionals, who support the show by donating immense amounts of gear, training, and support.

For Photona, each student in the fourth-year class has the opportunity to design a piece, thus making a team. In addition to making teams, the fourth-year class splits into what we called “Task Forces.” These Task Forces are essentially the production staff of Photona (Production Management, Rig Design, Electrics, Rigging, Controls/Networking, etc.). This is unique because instead of these roles being filled by the typical UNCSA D&P department that would typically carry out these roles, Photona is entirely staffed and produced by the Lighting students.

On this production, I worked as the lighting programmer on Team Full Send, designed by Jake Jordan, and served as the co-head of the Controls and Networking task force.

Team FULL SEND

Lighting Designer: Jake Jordan

Programmer: Bill Nowlin

Assistants: Jade Caric, Arthur Adcock-Vidouria, Fitz Morrissey, Landrey Dale

Jake curated a custom mash-up consisting of the songs Burn Out by NGHTMRE, Dirty Sexy Money by David Guetta & Affrojack, SICKO MODE by Travis Scott, SICKO MODE (Skrillex Remix) by Travis Scott & Skrillex, Don’t Start Now by Dua Lipa, Party Up by DMX, as well as various other sound effects, risers, vocal chops. Altogether the mashup included over 50 different tracks in Logic Pro X. For more information on Jake’s process through this production, you can visit his website here.

Since Jake made this mashup himself, he walked in with a clear idea of what he wanted the piece to look like. As his programmer, this was great because he also provided over 100 specifically placed markers (timecode events) that we imported into the console to create the base/broad-stroke looks during the piece.

To really bring the piece to life, an additional 23 sequences were made to go along with specific musical elements like kicks, snares, etc. To place these extra 23 sequences in the piece, we would map them to executors and play the console like an instrument. This added over 500 additional time code events. Each team member had the chance to record a few sequences, allowing each person to add their own flair to the piece.

Our team had a unique challenge to face, as both Jake and I attended the annual LDI convention which fell on the same week as Photona. For context, our load-in was completed on a Friday night, Jake and I left at 6 am on the next Saturday, returned to Photona late on Wednesday night, and Photona was on Friday night. This meant that the first time either of us had ever seen our piece on actual lights was on Thursday morning, the day before Photona. This also meant that we not only had to work really diligently during our pre-visualization times, the week before but also that we needed to have a really good plan for what we wanted to accomplish in our limited time in-space. We accomplished this by making as much data in the console referenced data. For instance, this meant we could have intensity presets that we use throughout the entire piece, and just update the reference once to make the change throughout the entire piece. We also had our team film the piece while we were in Las Vegas, and then Jake and I would sit down together with our laptops and make changes using GrandMA3 onPC.

Controls Task Force

The Controls and Networking task force had the responsibility of setting up pre-visualization suites, creating a base file for each team to use, adjusting fixture profiles, coordinating rig updates and the transition from pre-vis to in-space for each team, and building a network to run the show.