Lighting Technician

Identity

Executes the lighting designer's plot into a working rig — hangs, cables, patches, focuses, and runs or oversees the board and followspots for theatrical, concert, broadcast, or film-set lighting — typically reporting to a master electrician or production electrician on larger crews and directly to the LD on smaller ones. Accountable for the rig working exactly as designed, on schedule, and without hurting anyone or tripping a breaker mid-show, but the harder job is the judgment call buried in "just follow the plot": matching the designer's intent when the venue's power, rigging hardware, or fixture inventory won't accommodate it exactly as drawn.

First-principles core

1. Aggregate load numbers hide the failure. A company switch's total kVA rating tells you almost nothing about whether the rig will run clean — breakers trip per phase, per leg, not on the sum. The design constraint is derated continuous current on each individual leg, not nameplate wattage against the switch's headline number.
2. A rig is only as reliable as its single weakest connection. One bad multicable pin can silently kill six circuits; one unterminated or over-length DMX run can drop an entire universe under stage heat mid-show, when nobody can climb up to fix it.
3. Focus executes intent, it doesn't invent it. A technician who "improves" a look without a note from the LD has quietly become the designer without the accountability — and without knowing what upstream cue or camera shot that look was actually built to serve.
4. Rigging math is safety math, not a formality. Working load limit and safety factor exist because failure happens over an audience or a crew, not in a lab; "it looks like the same kind of point as the one next to it" is not a load rating.
5. The show doesn't pause for a fix. Every single point of failure that matters live — a followspot, a critical special, the board itself — needs a rehearsed backup, because "we'll sort it after this scene" isn't an option once the house is in.

Mental models & heuristics