Brian Garrick - 2021

Artist's Statement

My name is Brian Garrick, I am a sophomore Theatre Design student at Utah State University. I focus mostly on lighting design in my major and I thought that using this aspect of theatrical design would be best for evoking emotion. My goal when starting this project was to choose an inspiring soft-spoken song as a form of encouragement, and that’s what I think I found in Wanderer’s Lullaby by Adriana Figueroa. The world of politics is noisy, abrupt, and most often crowded by opinions rather than facts. It is hard to talk about climate change without getting into a hardcore political debate. I wanted this light show to be a representation of the emotional deprivation we have shown towards our planet. We have spent so much time arguing the morals of making drastic change while our Earth has been left neglected and hurting.

At the beginning of this process, I wanted to incorporate a lot of different design software that I have been learning throughout the semester but unfortunately, that didn’t come to fruition. The software I wanted to use is still very new in development and quite pricy compared to the functionality. It took a while for our department to acquire both ETC Vision and Disguise, and we still have a hard time using them practically because they are in very early stages of development. I was going to use both programs but on the day of production, Disguise was not able to run properly, and with a lack of time, I used a dummy with a red rag around it to represent the Earth. The lack of content in the middle of the song was supposed to be a focus on the projections. The lab I used is not sound treated at all and we are located next to a scene workshop so there is a lot of background noise. Despite these limitations I am still proud of my work and I hope the message still shines through just as well.

The rotating suns are the countless days passing and the vibrant sunset colors mixed with blues represent the outside beauty of our planet and the internal sadness it holds. The song and its lyrics are not only meant as a motivator for the planet but also for us as people to make a change.

(The following link is a spreadsheet of my design process - https://tinyurl.com/dzz6sc28.)

Thank you so much for your time.