FocusTrack On
Broadway, On The Road
Show lighting
documentation system adopted by two high-profile
shows
18th November 2009
Two new high-profile theatre productions have adopted
FocusTrack, the production lighting documentation
system, to help record their lighting before in one
case moving across the Atlantic, and in the other
moving at high speed around America.
The acclaimed Donmar Warehouse production of
Hamlet, directed by Michael Grandage and
starring Jude Law, used FocusTrack to document Neil
Austin's lighting design during the show's sold-out
run at London's Wyndham's Theatre. This precise
record of the lighting was then used as the basis of
re-creating the show at New York's Broadhurst Theatre
- a regular host of FocusTrack documented shows,
having also accommodated both Les Miserables
and Equus in recent years.
FocusTrack's record of the show made it easy to
re-create the show lighting while accommodating
changes in the rig made both to allow the lighting to
become more precisely focused, and because of the
different layout of the new theatre. Once the New
York lighting was complete, associate Pamela Kupper
and programmer Rob Halliday used FocusTrack to create
precise documentation of the New York show lighting,
allowing production electrician Jon Lawson and show
electrician Thomas Lawrey to maintain it over the
show's successful Broadway run.
Elsewhere in America, FocusTrack has been adopted to
document the lighting for the new US tour of Rodgers
& Hammerstein's South Pacific, based on
the successful production at New York's Lincoln
Centre and once again directed by Bartlett Sher with
lighting by Donald Holder, who won the 20008 Tony
Award for Best Lighting of a Musical for the
production. Produced by NETworks Presentations, the
tour opened in San Francisco and is now moving
quickly across America, often with stops of just a
week.
The touring crew of Thomas W Ford, Patrick Johnston
and Dirk Van Pernis together with associate lighting
designer Karen Spahn used FocusTrack to automatically
generate lists of which lights were used in which
focuses and in which cues in the show from their ETC
Eos showfile, and then to photographically document
the show lighting with FocusTrack driving the console
to turn on the right light in the right place for
each picture. FocusTrack now offers an easy to use,
precise reference for each focus in each touring
stop.
With their high-speed yet high-profile tours,
NETworks are long-standing converts to the advantages
of FocusTrack for precise, easily accessible show
documentation, having previously used the system on
tours of My Fair Lady and The Wizard of
Oz.
Further information about Hamlet can be
found here; further information about
the South Pacific tour can be found
here.
Offering support for show import from ETC Eos, MA
grandMA and Strand 500-series consoles - and now wit
support for multiple cuelist import on Eos and
grandMA - FocusTrack is in use on productions
worldwide. Further information about FocusTrack and
SpotTrack, its companion software for managing
follow-spot cuesheets, can be obtained elsewhere on
this website, or by visiting booth 820 or attending
the Art of Programming session at this year's
LDI Show in Orlando, November
19-22nd.