Tech & Talent

Whether or not the light show had “more smoke than a Snoop Dogg concert,” as SBO Sam Meikle joked, is up to debate, but its merits as a perfect finale to the Highland Talent Show is not.
The light show was the brainchild of Highland junior Drake DeWeerd. And who would have guessed the Elsa was the catalyst for it all…sort of. He was a part of the tech crew for the play Frozen Jr. at Clayton Middle School. This proved to be a transformative experience for him.
“I was hanging out in the auditorium, doing the stuff for that. It was just like, wow, this is kind of cool,” DeWeerd said.
During his freshman year, before it was an over glorified pile of rubble, he went to SPA focusing on light design. This piqued his interest even further, accelerating his development to the point it’s as of now his profession of choice.
As much as he learned from SPA, a large part of what he knows on the subject is self-taught.
“I’m three and a half years into my lighting journey, and a lot of it is self-taught,” DeWeerd said.
Behind an unsuspecting blue metal door in C-Hall is a seemingly out-of-place hallway. Walking down the hallway, it opens on the right to a grand view of the Highland auditorium stage.
In it is a small table with two monitors and a large keyboard-type device called a lighting control console. On it is a seemingly endless array of slides and buttons, all controlling a different lighting effects for the stage. Through this console, everything can be controlled manually. Though for a light show, this simply isn’t feasible.
The remedy for this is automating the entire process through hundreds of effect cues at different time stamps; this is by no means a walk in the park.
“In total, it took a month-and-a-half of planning, and then two weeks staying [at school] from 3:15 [p.m.] until about 10:30 [p.m.],” DeWeerd said.
The process all started with finding the perfect song. He had a different song in mind until a fellow light designer suggested another one.
It ended up being perfect with the producer willing to do a joint project, giving the rights to be able to spread his light show performance throughout social media.
The song catered to all his needs, proving to be the perfect fit for the show.
“I decided on that [song] because it had a nice beat, nice rhythm. There’s a lot of parts where I can add cool things,” DeWeerd said.
After finding the song, the next step is to start to map out his creative vision for the show.
“I listen to the song 10 or 15 times, and I write down points in the song where I want specific things to happen,” DeWeerd said.
He listens to the song, slowly realizing his artistic vision; he slowly fills out a form pertaining to an effect and its corresponding time. This process of figuring out the separate effects, their order in relation to each other, and the time in which they occur takes up the whole month and a half of planning.
Once the light show is generally mapped out, the tedious process of fabricating the automation of the show begins.
“The full cue list is 517 cues. In that four-minute-seven-second song, I used a total of 15 different effects,” DeWeerd said.
This culminated in a jaw-dropping performance, much larger than the sum of its parts. Smoke filled the stage with slowly building EDM music blasting through the speakers. All 15 effects helped tell a story and evoke the feelings the song created.
One notable section was when smoke had filled the entire stage and then three powerful columns of light pierced through it. It revealed the smoke in the light and appeared like water flowing through an ethereal cone.
The light show was a breath of fresh air, making an old auditorium with outdated tech feel new and on the cutting edge. Whether you were at the talent show and saw the light show or not, one thing is clear – everyone needs to remember the name Drake DeWeerd.