Follow Me Faders...

(Or, how to cope with performers that wander about without a followspot on a budget)

I've been dabbling in automatic followspots for a while, trying to make my own hacky solution as I don't have the budget for the likes of ZacTrack, Blacktrax, Follow-ME etc.

Indeed, I've got a little iPad based followspot tool, but that requires lots of time to set up in Augment3d, it's a bit of a work in progres that I hope to release some day.

For a recent show I found a much simpler solution with a couple of faders to cater for a little movement along a horizontal axis that I was actually quite surprised works.

Note that it can't replace a true followspot, but for this particular show a solo singer who started in a centre stage spot moves about the stage a little left and right, and it works perfectly for that (and that isn't an uncommon situation!)

First, record your cue as normal (whether the actor's position is in a palette or not doesn't matter for this although in my example this is preset 100 DSC) with the initial point of the actor. For convenience, i've put all the lights that are used to point at this actor in Group 10 in the examples below.

Secondly, have the actor move to the extreme stage right of their original position, and move any lights focussed on them to this position, record this (focus attribute only) as a focus palette (in my example this is FP 100.1 SR) e.g.

[Group 10] [Record] [Focus] [Preset] 100.1 [Label] SR

Next, have the actor move to the extreme stage left of their original position, do the same again, and record (Focus attribute only again) this as focus palette 100.2 SL

[Group 10] [Record] [Focus] [Preset] 100.2 [Label] SL

In Fader Config (Tab 36) select a pair of spare faders and set these to target your new Presets as follows with the options shown (you may also want to set Param filter here to Pan/Tilt);

Now you have a pair of faders that allow you to 'pull' the focus of these fixtures left and right as appropriate. You can even use the 'other' fader without resetting the first one (although this does result in a bit of a drift compared to lowering one fully before raising the other)

The example below was captured using ETCnomad offline, obviously this works a lot better with physical faders or a real console.

There you have it, a simple primitive followspot in seconds on any stage.