Watson

That's too bad, especially given their prices.

Absolutely. And can you get comps?

Your pride is entirely justified. Congratulations.

And you're not alone. Thanks.

Thanks. I shall!

I just wanted to daw the line under this thread and thank everyone for the varied thoughts and advice: hugely valuable and much appreciated.

I wonder if you've seen this? The Royal Opera at Covent Garden's website has a fascinating behind-the-scenes offering, permitting you to choose any one of seventeen camera viewpoints (with sound) during a performance and one available choice is of the DSM. It is, as you say, very impressive. I can't link directly to any one view, but here's the main page: "Our camera cut" gives a nicely chosen overall view, and the DSM's closeup cameras are number 2 for her face and number 3 for an over-the-shoulder shot: Here come the Valkyries!

Your timings (both pre- and post-lunch!) are fascinating, thanks. That makes excellent sense: I've just been going through the script doing exactly this.

In that sort of case - actually, perhaps it applies to all cases - do DSM's call cues fractionally in advance of the necessary timing, to allow for any possible ears - brain - fingers delay? Or is that period of time so microscopically short that it can be discounted?

Now that must have been fun, at least in retrospect...

Yes, I realised this almost as soon as I posted that. I know that a uniform order is the standard. But what's the best way to indicate if one cue should indeed taken very quickly after another rather than simultaneously? A "Wait one second then..." comment, or similar? Ah - I've just seen your later remark: OK, thanks for that. That's fascinating, thanks. It's way more complex than anything I'm working with at the moment. As I said, this is a small scale festival-type play which won't be touring with its own staff: most of the time it will be a question of getting in, playing, and getting out on the same day and we expect that a single resident technician will run both sound and lighting, working directly from a cued-up script which he or she will have seen for the first time just a few hours before the show. Simplicity is vital. Many thanks for your thoughts.

That seems sensible; thanks.

OK, makes sense. Thanks.

My only rejigging was to avoid having cues right at the top of any page. Doing any more than that would have put the page count right up and also resulted in a lot of oddly distributed blank space. Ah, it isn't. I've been wondering about whether or not to put the script into a ring-file-type folder (given my remark earlier about the cramped conditions often encountered) or leave it as simply secured with a single butterfly or bulldog clip so the pages could be separated if that were preferred.

Sunray & Sandall, thanks for those points. I've been rejigging the layout of the script to avoid having cues right at the top of a page, but a "Q.n next" (or perhaps "Standby Q.n" if it's still soon) at the foot of each page is clearly a good idea. Sunray, your reference to "the first tech rehearsal" served as a salient reminder that with this production we're likely to get only one, and that with a crew (probably of just one person) who was concentrating on a completely different show yesterday and is possibly already thinking ahead to another one tomorrow. Another reason to make everything as plain and simple as possible.

That's something that hadn't occurred to me; thanks. Right, thanks.

Gareth, thanks for reinforcing the single-line-for-simultaneous-cues point. The colour-coding seemed like a good idea, the only possible practical drawback being that some of Word's highlight colours print far more opaquely than they look on the screen: yellow and green are the best I've so far found. I rather like your use of coloured text.

Thanks for that, Gareth.

Thanks.

That's obviously better; thanks. This is a touring show which is intended to play for either single nights or very short runs at different venues, where we will have to use lighting rigs which cannot be re hung - doesn't that make preprogrammed lighting impractical? But having said that, I don't know the details of how QLab handles lighting cues. That's great advice, thanks. I welcome your bluntness. I just found this example online: it uses "Sound Q" and "LX Q" which is clearly completely unambiguous: Script page

This is the "roomful of experts" effect again. I think the fact that I used SFX must mean I've encountered it enough in the past to make it instinctive. I don't doubt that SND is out there but as I said, I've never encountered it. No offence, Gerry.

I missed the 78 era but worked with people who'd used them - and on live broadcasts too, which must have been nerve-wracking. "You don't know you've been born with your 45rpm EPs and your slipmats," one of them said to me...

I'm very familiar with those terms, having done both jobs at the BBC's radio drama department. Do you have the same background? Yes, I saw something similar when I was searching round, though those examples were on a single page using a two-column layout. My admittedly limited experience of control booths in small venues has been that space is at a premium and and working from an A4 script opened so two pages were visible could be tricky, I tried to reproduce that single page idea but the result seemed to me to be rather messy and unsatisfactory. Your point about giving the operator space to add notes is a very good one though, thanks.

Thanks very much. Does placing a sound cue and a lighting cue on separate lines make it sufficiently clear that they're to happen simultaneously? That's interesting; is it the industry standard? When I was searching around online for examples of how to script cues, I found SFX for sound in almost every instance. I don't recall ever seeing SND, but differentiating sound and Special Effects does make good sense..

Gareth, thanks; clearly, that's excellent advice: you confirm what others have said. I just tried to upload an image of the first page of my script to ask for comments. But unfortunately, though I tried with both a JPG and a PNG scan, I'm getting an error message: You are not allowed to use that image extension on this board. Ah: I just found a thread on this very problem. Trying again... If this works, any and all comments, criticisms or whatever will be very welcome. Thanks.