It’s amazing how Edinburgh Festival has changed. In my day you had to beg, steal and invent to get a show with no budget up to the festival and operating in a venue. Today it seems, if you are lucky, you can get manufacturers to loan their latest console or piece of kit, train you and your technicians for free and and offer full technical backup. Not only that, at the same time their distributors will furnish you with good quality food and alcohol! The streets of Edinburgh are no longer so full of half starved lovies who sleep on shelves in venue basements and run their lighting off homemade banks of household dimmers! Mind you I have no doubt there are still a few of those around.
Stage Electrics, which seems to have kit in almost every main venue on the Fringe, had their second successful Pie and Pint event up here in Edinburgh. Peter Kirkup from Zero 88 showed visiting tech’s on a break the Orb, the latest console from Zero 88. We will be reporting on its application from the Pleasance venues later this week, so please do watch this space. Paul Roughton of Stage Electrics says: “We have 1470 lighting units on hire up here 113 of which are movers. WE also have 39,672 meters of cable, 1,271.2 meters of truss, 6000sqm of staging and that doesn’t include what we have on Scott Mills the Musical!”
What is also impressive is that some people seem to be involved in more than one show in more than one venue concurrently. One such multi talented person is Zoe Hughes who it seems is acting in two shows and is responsible for the lighting in two others. She discusses her exploits in the film below.
