Arendelle

Every scenic surface in this production is a projection screen. The cyclorama, the four canvas legs and the proscenium surround carry the entire visual world of the show, and they do it at 13 to 19 foot-lamberts. That is dim — dimmer than a single Source Four at full, dimmer than one LED PAR from an eighteen-foot trim.

So this plot is built backwards from a conventional musical rig. The usual instinct is to fill the stage with light and then find the picture. Here, light that lands anywhere it was not aimed is the enemy of the design, because it does not merely look untidy — it raises the black level of the projected image and flattens the contrast the whole show depends on.

Three consequences follow, and they shape every choice below.

Shutters are not a nicety, they are the specification. A fixture that can be cut is worth more here than a fixture that is brighter — which is exactly what the revised rental delivers. Eight Elation Fuze Max Profiles bring four rotating framing blades apiece, so for the first time in this plot every automated fixture can be cut off a projection surface. That single change rewrites Sections 04 and 05.

The rig lives low. Most systems will sit between 35% and 60% at their brightest. Crews used to pushing faces up will find this uncomfortable for about a day, then stop noticing.

Geometry beats intensity control. The best answer to spill is a position from which spill is physically impossible. Two of the systems below have that property, and they are the ones to lean on.

All depths are feet upstage of the plaster line, all heights above the stage deck. The correction that the cyc sits at 30′ rather than 29.6′ puts the line sets on exact one-foot centres, so line set n stands at n feet — which makes every number below checkable with a tape.

The stacked Epsons on line set 14 throw upstage and down to the cyc at 30′. That cone is a solid object as far as this plot is concerned. Anything inside it prints a hard shadow across the surface carrying every pale image in the show.

Clearing line sets 14 through 29 of soft goods and scenery, and flying Electric 4 for the run, resolves all of it. Put that on the run sheet as a standing note, because the first person to fly something in to that empty space during a scene change will not understand why the cyc suddenly has a stripe down it.

Seven systems, each with one job. The discipline that makes this rig work is that no system does two jobs, because the moment a wash is asked to be a special it stops being cuttable.

Your actors stand on the house floor, three and a half feet below the deck, across the front of the stage. Nothing else in the house can light them, so all eight EclipseFS commit here: four per side from the followspot positions, 18.9° down over an 85.6′ throw. With the 14° tube that is a 21′ pool at 13.3 fL — two units on an area gives 26.6 fL, which works but has less headroom than the fixture it replaces.

Here is the thing worth understanding, because it is a gift. The stage deck is the shutter. A beam aimed at someone standing below the lip is travelling downward; if you cut its top edge at roughly seven feet above the house floor, the beam strikes the apron at +2.7′ — downstage of the first legs, and nowhere near the cyc. The apron face and the deck block it before it can reach a single projection surface.

The catwalk at 40′ and 25′ up gives 21.9° at mid-stage against the spot positions’ 13.8°. Steeper front light means less of it carries past the actors onto the cyc, which is the entire game. Five acting areas on 10′ centres at +8′, each from two 19° Source Fours — 17.3′ pools, generous overlap, and every unit has a shutter barrel.

Use the 36° units for the apron and the downstage blend, where the throw shortens and a 19° would scallop.

Top-cut every unit to 10′ at its area centre. That holds catwalk spill below 3.1′ on the cyc — inside the band the projection design already reserves as its darkest. Leave them uncut and the same wash climbs to 14′, which is the middle of the ice palace.

Five P-56FC on Electric 2, five on Electric 3, wide lens (103.7° field). At a 12.2′ drop that is a 31′ pool — at 10′ centres they blend into a true blanket rather than five discs. About 33 fc, which is still above the projection, so they run low.

Order ten 7.5″ beam shapers. A PAR has no shutters; barn doors are the only thing standing between Electric 3 and your cyc. And the Electric 3 units aim straight down or slightly downstage — never upstage, or you are lighting the screen directly.

The VL1100 TSD is an automated ellipsoidal with framing shutters, a 1000W tungsten lamp and an IGBT dimmer. In this show that combination is unique: it is the only mover in the building that can be cut off a projection surface, it is 3200K so it sits beside the Source Fours without a colour argument, and being tungsten it dims to a true zero in silence.

Do not spend them on colour washes — the R2X units do that better. Spend them on the moments where one person has to be isolated against a full-stage image: Elsa alone at the top of Let It Go, Anna freezing, the Act I curtain.

This is the change that improves the plot most. The Fuze Max Profile is an 800 W RGBMA LED making 21,000 lumens at CRI 92, tunable 2400–8500 K, zooming 7–53°, with four rotating framing blades indexed ±60°, gobos and an animation wheel.

Every restriction the previous rental carried is gone. It can be cut, so it can point at a leg. Its colour matches the tungsten side of the rig, so it can join the front light. It is LED, so it dims to zero and does not run a lamp fan through the quiet numbers. The rotating blades matter more than they sound: a straight shutter cannot follow the raked edge of a leg panel, and these can.

It is dimmer than the hybrid it replaces — roughly 143 fL against 211 at a 20° beam from 30′ — and it is heavier at 76.3 lb. Neither matters much: you were never going to run these at full in this show, and the weight is a rigging note rather than a design one.

The rental moved from nine shutterless discharge hybrids to eight LED framing profiles, and the lip wash from Ovation Rêve E-3 to Prolights EclipseFS. The first is a straight upgrade for this show. The second is a trade.

Most of this plot is ordinary work. Four numbers are not, and if they are wrong the projection design fails no matter how good the content is. Walk these with a meter and a tape, at trim, before anyone starts writing cues.

The projection carries the colour of the world. The lighting carries the colour of the people, and the two must not both try to tell the audience it is winter or the picture turns to mud.

Keep the front light close to white. The EclipseFS and the R2X are both tunable; run the front systems between 3000 K and 3400 K for the warm world and drift to around 5000 K for the frozen one. That is a temperature shift, not a colour wash, and it lets the projected image supply the saturation.

Put the saturation overhead. The P-56FC top wash is where deep ice blue, aurora green and the finale’s warm gold belong — on shoulders and the deck, not on faces, and never bounced back into the screens.

Gel the Source Fours conservatively. They are your only fixed-colour system. A light correction and a light frost is usually enough; the tunable systems do the moving.

A starting allocation. The recurring discipline: when the projection is doing the work, the rig gets out of the way — and the numbers where the rig takes over are the ones where the projected image should simplify to a field of colour.

Three things this plot assumes rather than knows. None of them blocks hanging, all of them should be settled before focus.

• The distribution of the 15 Source Fours and 15 PARs across Electrics 1–3. They are counted as a base layer here but not assigned. Once inventoried by position they should take over the top-light gaps between the P-56FC pools and free the R2X units for colour.
• Followspot pickup points. The EclipseFS units share the spot positions; confirm the operators have clear sightlines to the lip and to centre once the fixtures are hung.
• Horizontal lens shift on the ELPLX02. Vertical is ±10% in Native 4K — that is ±2.57′ of trim adjustment, which is plenty. Horizontal is unconfirmed, and it decides whether the two Epsons converge optically or entirely in warp.

This plot is generated from the same venue numbers as the projection design, so the two stay in agreement. Change a number in one and re-run both.

Twenty-four radio mics is not a channel-count problem. The Avantis has 64 input channels and a GX4816 stagebox carrying 48 preamps. It is an attention problem, and the answer is to split it in two.

The console decides who is open. The operator decides how loud. Every scene carries a level map — the mics for the people in that scene ride up, everyone else parks 15 dB down, over a one-second crossfade — and the operator never hunts for a channel. What they hold instead is five group faders that never change meaning all night:

• DCA 1 — Principals
• DCA 2 — Ensemble Male
• DCA 3 — Ensemble Female
• DCA 4 — Orchestra
• DCA 5 — FX returns

Beside them sit the music, SFX and announce faders. That is the entire performance surface: eight faders, the same eight in Act I scene 1 and in the bows. A student can learn that in a week and get good at it in a run — and “bring the boys up a bit” becomes one move instead of six.

A sixth DCA, DCA 6 — Monitors, sits on the build layer rather than the performance surface. It holds Aux 1 and Aux 2 together so one fader fades both monitor zones, and nobody touches it during a normal run.

Every input lands on the GX4816 except the three that live in the booth. Each block of channels routes to one audio Group, and each Group is controlled by one DCA. Groups are where the bus compression lives; DCAs are what the operator touches.

A Group is a real audio bus — the signal passes through it, so you can put a compressor across it and hear it work on the sum. A DCA is a control link: it moves faders without the audio passing through anything. This design uses both, and the distinction is what makes the bus compression possible.

Two different things, easily conflated. A Mix is fed from channel sends — it is how you build a monitor balance that is different from the house. A Matrix is fed from LR, Groups and Mixes — it is how you take something already mixed and send it somewhere else with its own level, EQ and delay.

Monitors, surrounds and the subs are Mixes because they need their own balance. The fills and every distribution feed are Matrices because they are all derived from a mix that already exists. The flown arrays come straight off LR.

Five M1Ds lie on the apron deck and follow its arc, one at the apex and two pairs either side, each aimed along its radius from the arc centre. The apron is a 50′ chord, 15.2′ deep, so its edge is 8.2′ from row 1 on the centre line, and at ±21′ the edge is only 5.8′ downstage of the plaster line. The seats form a fan centred about 7′ farther upstage than the apron arc: a narrow centre block of about ±17° between two aisles, and two wide side blocks out to about ±50°. Row 1 is 23.4′ from plaster and the rows are 3.2′ apart.

Layers A and B are the show. Principals live on A, ensemble and orchestra on B, and both carry the same five DCAs on the right-hand bank — so the operator can reach every group from whichever layer they happen to be watching. Everything else is build and maintenance.

Three things about that layout are worth naming, because they are what make it teachable.

Sub and Main never move. Faders 11 and 12 of the right bank carry them on every single layer. Whatever the operator is looking at, the two faders they might need in a hurry are under the same two fingers.

The five DCAs repeat on A and B. DCA 6, the monitors DCA, lives on layer E only. Those are the two layers the show actually lives on — principals on A, ensemble and orchestra on B — and from either one the operator can reach every group without changing layer. The gap at faders 7 and 8 is deliberate: it separates the four vocal DCAs from the FX DCA so the hand does not find the wrong one in the dark.

Layers C to F are build and maintenance, not performance. Playback and announce on C, the FX rack on D, monitors and matrices on E, group masters on F. In a good run nobody visits them after the house opens.

Set every channel at tech to the level it should be when that performer is speaking, and park everyone else 15 dB down rather than muted. Each scene then recalls the level map for the unit — who is up, who is parked — with a 1.0 second crossfade. Nothing snaps. A performer entering mid-scene rises over a second, which is about how long it takes an audience to stop noticing a change.

Parking at −15 rather than muting is what makes the fade work. A mute is binary and instant; a level glides. It also keeps the room tone continuous instead of twenty-four ambiences switching in and out under the dialogue.

Set the crossfade once in the show settings and leave it. Longer than a second starts to feel like the desk is lagging behind the script; shorter stops sounding like a fade at all.

The Avantis automixer is built for panel discussions and worship — rooms where nobody knows who speaks next. A musical is the opposite: you have a script. An automixer gating twenty-four channels is always a beat behind the line, chewing first syllables and pumping the room tone under the ensemble.

Use it in exactly one place if at all: the ensemble lavs in big chorus numbers, where the intent really is “whoever is loudest” and nobody has a line to protect. Keep every principal out of it. The level map is doing this job better already.

Hairline lavs into flown arrays over the same stage is the least forgiving gain structure in live sound. Three things buy back margin, in the order they are worth doing:

• Placement beats EQ. Hairline at the forehead or a cheek boom gets you 6–10 dB over a chest mount, plus far less costume rustle. Budget the tape and the time.
• The level map is free gain. Twelve mics at working level and twelve parked 15 dB down is close to 3 dB of system gain you did not have to fight for. This is the quiet second benefit of scene-driven levels.
• High-pass hard. 110 Hz on adult lavs, 140 on the children. Nothing musical lives below that on a lavaliere and everything problematic does.

Ring the system out with the cast on stage and the set in place. The canvas legs and the cyc are large soft surfaces that change the room noticeably from the bare stage you rehearse in.

Three smaller ones

The outer front fills sit under a projector ray. FF-1 and FF-5 stand at ±21′ on the apron, where the lowest FOH ray to LEG-*1 passes about 0.95′ above the deck. An M1D lying flat tops out at 0.59′, which clears it by about 0.35′. Raised to the 4.5′ centre the earlier plot showed, it would cut into the beam and shadow the foot of the panel. Keep them on the deck, and check the clearance after the projectors are lensed. Section 05 has the geometry.

The spot booth is getting crowded. Two surround cabinets, two followspots and eight Ovation Rêve E-3s now share that position. Confirm the speakers do not sit in a Rêve’s beam or block a followspot operator’s sightline to the stage lip.

Nine rented hybrids idle at 40 dB(A) each. That noise floor is a lighting decision with an audio consequence, and it is one more argument for the six-fixture rental in the lighting plan. The quiet numbers in this score have almost no orchestration under them.

Twenty-four channels across two manufacturers and three frequency ranges. That is workable, and it is workable specifically because the three ranges can be pushed apart into blocks that barely interact — but it will not coordinate itself.

Put the Shure on the ensemble

The ULXS4 is a capable receiver and it is also the oldest, analogue link in the building. It has no scan-and-deploy workflow worth the name, and analogue companding on a hairline lav is a step behind the EW-D on both noise floor and dropout behaviour.

So the sixteen digital packs go where a dropout costs the most — all fourteen principals plus the first two ensemble — and the eight Shure carry the rest of the ensemble, where one channel briefly hashing is covered by nine other voices.

The rest of it

• Coordinate as one set, not three. Sennheiser’s Wireless Systems Manager and Shure’s Wireless Workbench each handle their own gear well and neither knows about the other. Coordinate the larger Sennheiser inventory first, then enter those frequencies into Workbench as inclusions before solving the Shure — or do the whole thing in one tool that accepts a manual inventory.
• Scan with the LED rig powered and running. This plot adds a great many LED fixtures and their drivers are broadband RF noise sources. A scan taken under worklights tells you nothing useful.
• Three antenna paths, not twenty-four whips. The two EW-D ranges can share a wideband distribution; the Shure needs its own. Budget for two distros minimum, with paddles out in front of the racks.
• Log every pack to a performer, a channel and a frequency, and keep the sheet taped inside the rack door. Three systems means three battery types and three ways to be handed back the wrong pack at interval.
• Batteries are a consumable. Twenty-four packs over a two-act show is forty-eight changes a performance if you swap at the interval — and the analogue Shure packs will not warn you as gracefully as the EW-D when they get low.

Roughly ninety scenes: one per song, one per dialogue block, and one for each moment where a principal enters or leaves the action. Number them to match the script’s page or cue numbers, not sequentially, so an insert does not renumber the show.

Every scene is a level map. Building one is a mechanical job a stage manager can do from the script — who is on stage in this unit, who is not — which means the show file can be built and proofread long before anyone touches the console. Set the crossfade to 1.0 s globally so nobody has to remember it per scene.

Every return lands in Group 8, GrpFX, which sits under DCA 5. One fader pulls all reverb out of the show at once — the single most useful control on the surface when a scene suddenly needs to be close and dry.

Three dedicated reverb pairs is the point. A single shared hall forces the orchestra, the chorus and a solo line into the same room, and the first thing that suffers is intelligibility: the leads drown in a space built for forty voices. Separate instances let you put the orchestra somewhere large, the ensemble somewhere medium and a principal almost dry, all in the same cue.

Four things this plot assumes rather than knows. None blocks the build.

• The array’s actual hang position and height. The delay values in Section 04 — 20 ms centre front fills, about 15 ms outer front fills, 7.75 ms subs, 22 ms surround — were computed from the design hang at roughly 25.5′ above the house floor, with the arrays on the centre line. Re-measure once the arrays are flown; a foot of trim moves the fill and sub figures by about a millisecond.
• Whether DCA 6 can hold the aux masters on this desk. The monitor zones keep their own outputs and balances, and one DCA fades both. Confirm on the console that a DCA accepts Aux 1 and Aux 2 masters before the show file is built. If it does not, the fallback is a mono matrix over both, which gives one fade but sums the two zones into a single signal.
• Where the arrays are tuned. They come straight off LR on Console 11–12 with no matrix, so system EQ and delay for the room sit on the LR output and tuning the room touches LR. Re-check that against the master fader and any LR processing before the show file is locked.
• Whether the pit needs four orchestra mics rather than two. The orchestra is in the 16′ pit. If it is open across its full width and the band is more than a handful of players, a single stereo pair over the middle will favour whoever sits under it. Channels 31–33 are free, so this is a decision you can defer to the sitzprobe and still act on.