Vicky Brennan recently programmed the lighting for Stephen Ward: The Musical at the Aldwych Theatre on a Ti desk. The show's set was complicated and required custom circular lighting trusses for the lighting fixtures. That created a challenge for the lighting team, who had to devise a plan to number the rig so the lighting designer, programmer, production electricians and show crew could all understand it.
Ti's Magic Sheets function was the answer. "Being able to dispense with a large and cumbersome paper plan and not needing to have a laptop nearby with the plan open on it, meant that I had the information literally at my fingertips," says Brennan. "Ti's multi-touch screens meant that I could pinch and pull the plan to focus in on the useful areas to ascertain the relevant channel information."
Stephen Ward's lighting rig included moving lights, LEDs and conventional fixtures rented from ETC dealer PRG. Some of the fixtures were new to some of the staff, but Ti's troubleshooting allowed the in-house staff to quickly identify and fix issues. Says Brennan: "Because of the way the desk handles fixtures, using real-world values in terms of degrees of movement, size and angle of indexing for shutters and gobos, I was able to deal with a variety of fixtures from different manufacturers with a high level of familiarity across the rig."
Like Brennan, Davis has also gained a lot of experience on Ti since its introduction in 2013. Some of the shows he's done with it are Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Pyjama Game, The Ladykillers, Dirty Dancing and the Olivier-Award-winning Jeeves and Wooster. "I've been using Ti on pretty much everything I've done over the last year," he says. "The big difference with Ti is that it feels like a really luxurious experience. At every stage you get more of everything - more processing power, more user definable keys, more output capacity, and in particular, more screen real estate with the two enormous, high-resolution touchscreens."
Most of the shows Davis works on include massive mixed rigs that require a lot of data handling over the course of a long production period. That's when Ti is the most useful. "Ti is extremely enjoyable to use, because it has so much screen space available," describes Davis. "It makes managing large rigs - with the inevitable large number of presets and palettes that they entail - incredibly easy."
(Jim Evans)
