2nd August 2012
Demonstrating that the show lighting documentation system FocusTrack is not just for the biggest, most complex shows, the system is currently helping lighting designer Neil Austin re-create his Tony Award-winning design for the play Red in Los Angeles.
This acclaimed production opened at London's Donmar Warehouse in 2009, then transferred to Broadway in early 2010. The show collected six Tony Awards - Best Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play for Eddie Redmayne, Best Direction of a Play for Michael Grandage, Best Scenic Design of a Play for Christopher Oram, Best Sound Design of a Play for Adam Cork as well as Best Lighting Design of a Play for Neil Austin. The play become renowned on Broadway for achieving its lighting using an all-conventional rig that featured some fixtures dating back to the 1950s.
Despite the lack of moving lights, FocusTrack was used to precisely document the show's lighting in both London and New York, the system's ability to control the lighting console and trigger a camera to allow a precise focus plot to be carried out at high speed as useful with conventional lights as it is with moving lights.
The show is now being re-mounted by its original creative team at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where FocusTrack is proving invaluable to the lighting designer as he returns to a design more than two years after first creating it and adapts it to suit a set design revised to fit the Taper's stage. "FocusTrack was brilliantly useful," Neil Austin notes, "particularly sitting in a run through in the rehearsal room enjoying the show all over again - but trying to remember what the specials in each cue were used for! It is the perfect way of seeing how a show was lit, ideal if you're lucky enough to get to do the show again."
Red plays at the Mark Taper Forum in LA from August 1st to September 9th 2012. Further information about the show can be found here.
Further information about lighting designer Neil Austin can be found at www.neilaustin.com.
In addition to Red, FocusTrack is in use on countless productions around the world, including Evita, Once, Mary Poppins, Porgy and Bess and Sister Act in New York and Billy Elliot, Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera in the UK.