The Tuning your Palette – Lighting, a session held during the 2008 Annual Conference in Houston, Texas is an example of the type of interesting and informative sessions which are already in the planning stages for the 2009 USITT event in Cincinnati.

Photo/Tom Thatcher

Vickie Scott
Lighting Vice-Commissioner for Programming

The beautiful city of Cincinnati, Ohio has a strong link to those things near and dear to all of our hearts. Cincinnati's annual 20 Days & 20 Nights Festival of Arts & Culture is a funky, non-stop arts extravaganza. The Cincy Fringe Festival is 11 days of performance, arts, film, music, and just about everything in between! The Festival of Lights at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens annually flips the switch on over 2.5 million dazzling lights and more than 100 lighted displays in the city's longest-standing holiday tradition. Celebrating its river heritage, Cincinnati is the home of the world's largest paddlewheel festival (think Showboat). Heck, Cincinnati is even the home to the world's oldest Bock festival, BockFest, which, in addition to a lot of terrific beer, pays homage to the time when Cincinnati was one of America's most prolific brewing cities.

With plans for 16 sessions plus a full-day Professional Development Workshop, the Lighting Commission intends to keep up with the Queen City and its boomtown history by offering conference-goers variety and spice with the lighting session programming for the 49th Annual Conference & Stage Expo. Kicking off the conference with the full-day PDW, Photographing Your Lighting Design, participants will have a hands-on opportunity to learn and hone tips and tricks for photographing their lighting design. With Architectural Dimming and Control, today's leading lighting professionals will examine the different philosophies and directions in architectural lighting design. For the lighting designer, magic sheets are one of the most important pieces of paper at the tech table. In Magic Sheets AREN'T Magic, a panel of professional lighting designers will discuss how they lay out their magic sheets and why it works for them.

Lighting Networks 101.101.101.101 will offer an introduction to the set-up and troubleshooting of lighting networks. LD/Programmer Communication, unofficially titled "Pimp My Show!" will give insight into the essentials of communication in contemporary lighting design by exploring the communication process and vocabulary between the lighting designer and the lighting programmer. Entering the Workforce/What's in Your Toolbox? will bring together industry professionals from the many facets of lighting design to discuss differences and skills needed to enter theatrical, concert, opera, industrial, and theme park lighting design. Alternative Light Sources/Tricks of the Trade will take us beyond tungsten versus halogen.

Dealing with projections and media servers in productions is an issue that has become more and more important in design. With the session Media Servers, "It's not your Momma's slide projector anymore!" High definition television is here. Learn the tricks of the trade for lighting in HD by attending Lighting in High Def. Last, but certainly not least, have you been appointed to be your own supervisor? Are you an LD/TD/SD/SM/Etc.? In the session Other Duties As Assigned, people with experience of "multiple responsibility disorder" share their solutions.

The Lighting Commission has an action-packed, fun-filled conference planned. By the way, be sure to have some Cincinnati-style chili while you're in town for the conference.

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