Theatre

UCL Gayo Daejeon 2023

Production Manager and Lighting Designer

A showcase of a variety of K-Pop dance and vocal covers, performed by members of UCL K-Pop Society, held in the Bloomsbury Theatre, London on the 3rd and 4th of March 2023.

Info

Since its debut in 2022, I had been looking forward to working on this show in a different capacity in my final year at UCL. Initially selected as the Lighting Designer, due to the lack of a Production Manager in the early days of the production, I decided to step up and uniquely take on both positions concurrently. A high level of organisation and time management was necessary to ensure that things were documented, communicated and on time.

As the Production Manager I had many responsibilities, some are listed below:

Managed a production schedule for the duration of the show week
Evaluated the risks of the production and created a risk register and risk assessment for the production
Organised meetings between my crew, the producing society, the Bloomsbury Theatre
Tracked all expenses and ensured that the production was within budget
Acted as team leader for my crew consisting of a Deputy Lighting Designer, Sound Operator, Stage Manager and 12 more assistants working in these departments
Liaised with UCL Stage Crew to update the committee on the show’s progress and communicated any issues

I also had a number of other responsibilities as the Lighting Designer and these are listed here:

Designed a lighting rig with 121 lights within the technical capacities of the Bloomsbury Theatre, with a wide variety of tungsten, intelligent and moving head fixtures in Vectorworks
Hired an assortment of intelligent and moving head fixtures to enhance and complement my vision for the show using a budget of £2200
Created a comprehensive patch list with power planning, addressing, fixture + bar weights and more
Mapped all fixtures into Eos Augment3d – ETC’s integrated 3D programming environment
Pre-programmed pieces within the Eos offline software
Assigned various pieces to my deputy and assistant lighting designers and managed the progress of these to ensure delivery before the show week
Rigged and focused lights within the Bloomsbury Theatre during show week
Operated the show on an ETC Gio
Liaised with the Lighting Designers of UCL Dance Society’s production to share my rig design with them and provided technical support

Hasha Dar
Production Manager and Lighting Designer

crew

I cannot put into words how proud I am of my crew. They all were responsible for creating something so amazing and the audience response and reviews attest to this. To my fellow Lighting Designers and Assistants, I simply would not have been able to do even a quarter of this without your help. To my sound team, you dealt with things so efficiently and the sound mix was excellent! Stage management team did extremely well with making the show run so smoothly with perfect cues and perfect onstage cameos.

Your support and efforts were paramount in making this show a success and I am so proud and impressed by the effort, enthusiasm and the above and beyond attitude displayed by all of you. I couldn’t have had a better crew for this production. Thank you for making this production such a joy.

Lighting department:

Samathy Fung – Deputy Lighting Designer
Claudia Low – Assistant Lighting Designer and Follow-spot operator
Olivia Sam – Assistant Lighting Designer and Follow-spot operator
Yunha Kang – Assistant Lighting Designer and Follow-spot operator
Rachel Ngai – Assistant Lighting Designer
Krystelle Montanez – Assistant Lighting Designer
Aaditya Subramanian – Lighting Assistant
Bowei Zhang – Lighting Assistant

Sound department:

Angie Loo – Sound Operator
Maya Khurana – Sound Assistant

Stage management:

David Ramirez – Stage Manager
Ananya Ashta – Stage Hand
Sharif Khalid – Stage Hand
Heloise Wang – Stage Hand
Karthig Thillaivasan – Stage Hand

And a massive congratulations to UCL K-Pop Society! This show was an immense pleasure to work on, all thanks to your hard work. Thank you to Bianne and Dimo (Director and Producer), who listened to my ideas and put up with all my messages into various group chats. Thank you to Gauri and Anna (President and Treasurer of UCL K-Pop Society) who worked tirelessly behind the scenes (and on-stage!). A big, big thank you to all the leaders who provided their lighting requests and were amazing to work with during tech. And thank you to Shivali, who filmed the performances.

I would also like to thank the Bloomsbury Theatre Technical Team and Front of House Team (Julian, Chris, Malhar, Louise, Jason and Ellen), without whom the show would not be possible. And Students’ Union UCL and UCL Arts who provide us with the opportunity to do productions like these.