Getting going on the 2018 Light Show

Once I put my Light-O-Rama order in, it didn’t take long for it to arrive. When it did my motivation started to pick up around planning for this years build; this includes the planning the physical build, the conversion of my existing sequences and creating any new ones I’m going to add.
I have ambitious plans this year for the amount of musical Sequences I have in my show. As I mentioned in a prior post I want to add the entire A Twisted Christmas Album  as well as the Original Now that’s what I call Christmas Album, which was the background of our family Christmases from when it was first released in 1985. All this new material as well as converting my existing sequences to run on this years layout is a large undertaking. In addition I wanted to get some of the lights up earlier and add a few Halloween songs.

Last year I had around 45 mins of sequences with 1 min of non musical sequence between each song to stretch it out to an hour before repeating. I want to remove the non musical breaks this year as people would often leave after about 15-20 seconds of no music.  This year if I execute my entire plan I will have around 2 hours and 30 mins of music sequenced. Ambitious but I’m determined.

The first thing to do is build a plan to help me keep on track:

Once I had my plan built I hit the conversion motion hard while camping on labour day long weekend.

Week one was all about converting last years sequences, then add some of the sequences that didn’t get converted last year and start building the new ones.  The conversions didn’t go quite as smooth as possible because of how I changed some strings to be a single string of 100 rather than 2 strings (and channels). Overall it went pretty fast as most of the sequence carried over from the LED to RGB and adding the new stings to groups also inherited the sequence at the group level. For two features I had to create new props, the big spruce and mini trees. For this I kept the old props and moved them into the sky (the kids like this in the preview and suggest I should have lights floating above the house), maintaining them allowed me to create nice pixel tree props for each and kept the historical sequence as reference.

For the mini trees I created a motion row for each colour (Red, Green, Blue, White) that I had on my LED mini trees to allow me to quickly copy the entire row of the sequence for each colour. I created a custom grid just for the mini trees to allow this conversion to happen really quickly.

I took a similar approach for the Spruce tree, although this didn’t work quite but I could quickly apply a similar effect to what I was doing in the LEDs.

My approach to conversion is to get it converted as close as possible then move on, as time allows later in the season I will revisit the converted sequences to enhance them. Converting the new sequences I created last year for my RGB lights was much quicker than converting the ones that had initially been built on the LED props then converted to RGB last year. This is because the RGB are usually effect based across a group where the LED sequences are prop focused on/off to beats and changed in music tempo. This is why about half way through last year I stopped converting and started building new sequences from scratch.

Once I had my existing sequences converted it was time to begin creating the new ones. As I get into sequencing it takes me about an hour to sequence a minute of music, but starting out it was taking me about 3 hours per minute. This is about the pace I usually start at and then I get in the groove (or lazy and become less picky). I was panicking a bit at first when it was taking about 3 hrs a min, I had also made the 1 hr connection to a song not a minute so the backlog of sequences looked daunting. I did get my groove back though and I’m now clipping at about an hour per min of music. The weather has also been pretty lousy (late October/early November like, with snow and temperatures below freezing) so we have been house bound (when not at the hockey rink), this has given me some time to work on creating new sequences.

So far my progress is looking pretty good.

In addition to building my plan for sequencing I also built out my physical build plan. I am starting much earlier this year for three reasons:

1. According to the Farmers Almanac we are in for a lot of snow this year.
2. I don’t want to spend an extra $350 on a boom lift like I did last year.
3. I have moved our traditional light up party forward a week.

The one thing about moving to the RGBs is it takes much less lights so hopefully the build is easier, faster and warmer than usual.

So far my plan is progressing surprisingly well, I don’t know how I have found the time to get ahead but I’ll take it as I know I’ll be behind soon enough.