James Calliss (Theatre Technology)

Biography

What's been your highlight during your time at Guildhall?

My highlight at Guildhall has been the Projects allocation. Working in the lighting department as Production Electrician and one of the programmers. It was a great experience doing multiple projects in a short turnaround on two different consoles (MA2 and Eos). The Moving Screens part of the allocation was a great chance to do more work on MA2 and had 5 different timecode tracks to program. It was a very enjoyable and varied allocation where I learnt a lot.

What other passions and projects have you enjoyed exploring during your time at Guildhall?

I loved working as a technical assistant on Hyde and Seek at the start of the year. This allocation had a heavy focus on automation and automation programming which I have a great interest in. Seeing the ways that automation interacts with lighting especially in the live events industry is something that I really enjoy finding out about. I also enjoyed drawing the ground plans and all the cad for this production. This helped when looking at visualising the different heights for the projection screens as well as assisting PM with the mark-up.

What are you most interested in working in after you graduate?

I really enjoy working in Live Events and TV so want to continue pursuing this as a lighting programmer and technician. Lighting for music is something that really interests me, and I look forward to doing this more once I graduate.