Flash Bang.

Seething, dear people! Seething!!

I was about to light an aged rocker the other night at work (the one where I'm a lighting technician with full creative license, not the one where I'm a slave to the customers' every want and need) and was told by one of their crew that I wasn't allowed to do this, or that, or even this, and not even a tiny bit of that. God no.

I love lighting, I love the set up, the co-ordination, the complete, unwavering, exhausting concentration and the technical stuff right down to the tiny details, but I cannot stand not being able to go wild with the lights (within reason, I wouldn't use lasers and strobe lights during a ballad or anything). My middle name is practically Flash-Bang, for God's sake.

[From LightingDesignOnline.com]

I had to stand there for four hours, flushing out the back of the stage with three colours in a cycle. No flashing drum-rise, no flooding out the venue with pink, purple and blue light, no filling the stage with a different colour from each side, pulsing to the music, just fading red, green and blue in the background whilst the front of the stage stayed white and boring. Hell, I didn't even get to use the smoke machine! The horror!

Muchos Grr.

Just wait until I get my pyrotechnics license and THEN they'll be sorry.

BOOM.