Okay from the status point of view, this is very important as we are talking about stage craft here. Let me define the terms that we use these terms come mostly from the world of theater, but they are equally applicable to any stage where there is a performance going on. First of all, one side of stage from the other, this is stage right or camera or house left, this is stage left or camera or house right. Obviously, the camera or house position is as seen from the audience and the stage left or right position is as seen standing on the stage looking towards the audience. This is a very common mistake and it's quite important that you get it right to avoid misunderstandings which can be embedded Also, this edge is the downstage edge. And then the stage is the upstage edge.

This is easy to remember because of course the great the theatrical term, upstaging means to walk behind somebody traditionally theater stages of slope to write. And to upstage somebody means to appear taller. So that's the terminology, it does vary. Some of the Europeans have some fabulous terms, which I'm sure that you'll be coming across in your careers. And what I'm going to do now is I'm going to make a few marks on the stage just to define exactly how we are going to orientate our stage equipment today. First thing to do is to decide where the center of the stage is.

Very often you may want to do this in consultation with your lighting department because disagreements about the center of the stage can be quite tricky to resolve after the fact. This room is a particularly good example of asymmetric room. That is to say that the center of the room is not the center of the stage. So we have several things that we need to think about, we need to think about the lighting trusses here, where the center of that is where the actual middle of the stages and where the middle of the room is, and we need to make a compromise between them. Once we have agreed on a compromise, and in this particular room with this particular stage, I think that the center is just here. This is not quite the middle of anything but to compromise between all three of the of the real centers of the room, and it's going to serve us quite well.

This means that we can measure from the center to get the pie stacks equidistant from each other. And we can make the stage look symmetrical. We also know that This for example can be the middle of the drum kit should the drum kit be in the middle of the stage gives us something to scale from. It is also important to think about where singers or where the star of the show is likely to be standing. And this of course, it's not right on the downstage edge because there is some amount of sound equipment that we're going to be putting on the downstage edge of the wedge monitors, microphone stands at various guitar pedal boards, effects, all of these kinds of things need to be taken into consideration. So in the real world, I would say an intelligent thing to do would be to mark about a metre and a half or maybe two meters from the downstage edge and put a little cross on the floor.

Just like this. This is a realistic estimate of where the popstar is going to be standing. Therefore the place where all of the special lights need to be focused where the monitors and the microphones Stand needs to be pointing towards. And this leaves us some amount of room for all of the instruments that the band bring with them. Generally speaking, a drum kit is going to take up something of the order of two meters from the rear of the stage should be about here somewhere. So, as you can see, there is a reasonable amount of space left for performance.

Those are the basics of stage orientation. And there are various other things that it is worth taking into consideration. For example, safety railings around the side of the stage, which side of the stage he accesses from. in this situation, as you can clearly see, we only have one set of stairs on and off the stage there is no access and the other way around. So obviously, this area needs to be clean and clear of any obstruction for the artists to be able to get on and off stage quickly and easily. It is also important That the technical stuff the monitor engineer and the mute, the instrument technicians have got a clear view of stage and some form of access to them.

It is also worth possibly thinking about some health and safety requirements, maybe being being able to access for example, or manage distribution, or all of the kinds of equipment that can fail during the course of the show. It's important to make sure that you can access it quickly and easily. Should such a failure occur.