Renovation Project for Black Box Theater
The Public Education Institution at Santa Monica, CA
April 2025
​​
This project involved renovating an outdated Black Box Theater for a public educational institution. The theater serves as the primary venue for drama instruction and theatrical experimentation for the school's theater department students. The theater's original dimmer system had suffered permanent damage, leaving all electrical equipment suspended on the truss dependent on portable power distribution units stored on the second floor as the sole power source. Due to budget constraints, I was required to continue using the existing power equipment, and it was impossible to redesign or reconfigure the theater's original electrical circuits.
Additionally, the theater's lighting configuration and mounting positions were chaotic and required a complete redesign with new permanent lighting plots. The requirement was to create highly versatile lighting designs suitable for the vast majority of educational stage lighting applications. However, the budget prohibited the acquisition of any new lighting equipment, and I was instructed to utilize all existing fixtures.
​
Below is the renovation plan I developed and executed as the project lead of a six-technician team:​​
​​
Enhanced Lighting
This renovation included a redesign of lighting, utilizing all available fixtures to maximize fulfillment of lighting requirements.
Creation of Standardized Assets
During this project, we conducted comprehensive measurements of the venue and created a complete set of paperwork, including lighting plots, ground plans, elevations, and a 3D model.
Cleaner Cable Management
We conducted comprehensive measurements of the venue and created a complete set of paperwork, including lighting plots, ground plans, elevations, and a 3D model of HC. These provide technical documentation for future maintenance and upgrades.
Inventory Management
We have registered the inventory of lighting-related items and planned the storage locations, including the latest updated inventory list and cable length classification, and color comparison table. We print out the comparison table and post it next to the cabinet where the cables are stored for future inventory management.
Safer Wiring
Given that this theater is located within a public educational institution, I placed particular emphasis on the overall safety of the theater. We converted the power cables from stage pins to Edison connectors. Most now use 20-amp Edison connectors in yellow to distinguish them from the black 15-amp Edison connectors. The upgraded connectors maximize wire load capacity, greatly improving electrical safety.
This was the only portion of the overall plan that required budget expenditure, utilizing only 60% of the anticipated cost.
New Lighting File in the Console
We have created a new console file for the new plot. Recognizing that most users of this theater are not stage technicians, I specifically simplified the console file to make it accessible to anyone with limited knowledge of ETC lighting consoles, ensuring it is fast, efficient, simple, and fully functional. The file contains the Magic Sheet, creates Groups by fixture type (for quick selection), and creates several commonly used faders. We have backed up the file to prevent accidental loss in the future.