Creating Other Paperwork

Although your plot might be a thing of beauty, there are still several other elements of paperwork that your ME will need, or at least want, to allow him or her to hang your show. Others you may want for your own use. These include the:

Inventory
Rental List
Hang Plot
Cardboards
Hook-Up Sheet
Channel-Circuit Map
Dimmer Check Worksheet
Magic Sheet

Note that the CAD programs will produce much of the paperwork for you. This is a good thing.

Inventory

One of the first things the ME will need is a complete inventory. This should, at a minimum, list all the lighting units you will need, along with any relevant information. For instance, if you are listing PARs, you should list what bulb types you will need.

You should also list all the accessories you will need, e.g. the number of floor mounts, booms to be built, sidearms, tophats, barn doors, etc. If you can specify how much cabling you will need, so much the better. Most spaces will have a "standard configuration" for each type of unit, e.g. a certain type of lamp and with a C-clamp. Any departures from this should be noted.

The ME should look through your list and make sure that all the items you require are available. Any missing units should be added to the rental, if possible, and if the ME simply can't provide, you may have to edit your plot again.

Rental List

If your inventory includes any rentals, you should separately specify all the equipment you think will need to be rented. You will probably already have contacted the rental outfit to reserve your equipment and get pricing, but the ME should carefully cross-check and make sure that you aren't missing any units, cabling, or accessories that you will need. When the rental arrives, he will be in charge of ensuring that the rental list you specify matches that from the rental company, and that the standard accessories (gel frame, C-clamp) are all included as well.

Hang Plot

The hang plot is a list, in one place, of all the units you will be hanging, sorted by position. It gives basically the same information as the hanging cardboards, but for all the hanging positions and with some additional information.

The hang plot is used to quickly determine which units will be needed for a particular position, to double-check where they should be hung, to figure out what accessories they should have, and to double-check the circuiting for each unit.

Cardboards

Cardboards are a ½" or larger scale plot of each hanging position separately. I usually plot out a full ½" scale plot, and then cut out each position and spray-mount them to posterboard. On a typical ¼" scale plot, some information is left out like the circuit number, wattage, etc. These are included on the cardboards, the cardboards are given to the hang crew, and then they have all the information they need to hang each unit in the correct position, circuit it correctly, and put on any accessories.

Hook-Up Sheet

The hook-up sheet lists all the units by position?????

Dimmer Check Worksheet

In a soft-patch system, the board is usually set up by default to have a one-to-one mapping between dimmers and control channels. Even after you patch, some boards have the facility to operate on dimmers directly. For this reason, having a list of each dimmer in order with a list of the units that should turn on when you power up each dimmer is very useful. Also, the ME should check this sheet to make sure that you aren't overloading any dimmers.

Channel-Circuit Map

The purpose of the channel-circuit map is to show how the patch will be handled. There are two basic patch designs, one where the circuit numbers are independent of the dimmers, and you choose which circuits to patch to which dimmers, and the other where circuits are tied to dimmers but you decide which dimmers to tie to which control channel (if you have a physical patch system but also decide to do a soft-patch, as you might in the Ag, you are on your own). Obviously, if you are patching circuits to dimmers, the sheet name changes to dimmer-circuit map.

Really the only information you need on this sheet is the channel (or dimmer) number and the circuit number, but it is helpful to include the position and number of the instrument as well, so you know what units should turn on for each channel. Once the patch is done, this will serve to do a basic dimmer check, although sometimes it is preferable to do an actual dimmer check where you bring up each dimmer separately, independent of which channel it is patched into. The map should list each channel in order, with associated dimmers and units.

Magic Sheet

The magic sheet is a quick, graphical list of the lighting systems you will be using. Basically, you want to represent the stage, and the washes that are pointing at it. For each wash, you then list which channels are used to create that wash (preferably, the channels are listed in some "useful" order, like their arrangement in space). The best way to explain a magic sheet is by example...

The magic sheet is absolutely essential when it comes to cueing the show; you will refer to it constantly to help you remember which channels you used in which washes.

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