This semester's butt-kicking class

... is Intro to Lighting Design.  I did want to get a little familiarity with the basics of lighting design, not because I have any delusions about becoming a lighting designer, but so I can at least talk intelligently with lighting designers when I'm doing community theater.  I also wanted to develop a better idea of what I'm looking at in that respect when I go to see a show.

I'm developing a very healthy respect for what lighting designers do!  After finishing the latest homework assignment, I told the grad student teaching the course that lighting designers must be part engineer.  All the technical details—how many lights you can put where without tripping a circuit breaker, making sure the lights are positioned so that you have no "dark spots" or funky shadows on stage, angling the lights to highlight actors' faces but not blind them or the audience, ...—are rather intimidating in their numbers and complexity.

Part of our homework consists of attending the university's four main-stage productions this semester and at least one professional production and doing a write-up of the lighting design for each one.  My first write-up was pretty thin, partly because it was right at the beginning of the semester, when I was still learning what to write about, and partly because I was an understudy in the show, so when I attended, I was paying more attention to the person I was understudying than to the lighting.  I've since done two more, which I think were rather better.  The third one was on a professional production.  The lighting for that one was so dramatic that even the Chief noticed a lot of the things the designer did.  That one just about wrote itself.

We still haven't gone into detail about how to decide which instrument (that's what the lights are called) to use, but I imagine that'll come.  There's SO MUCH to know about lighting design that I can well believe that it's impossible to cover it all in an introductory class like this one.

Doing the most recent homework, I couldn't help thinking Dad would be so proud to see me using my scale ruler like a pro.  Here in the US, we use architectural (english) rather than engineering (metric) scale for theater, but you read them both the same way.