Wearable Lights for Stage

Project Summary

In this project I designed custom wearable lights for GOOD, a contemporary adaptation of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan by Duke Theater Studies Artist-In-Residence Rebecca Wahls. I joined the production as a member of the cast, but got involved in the tech side after proposing my wearble lights for the costume design of three Goddess characters. This was a very engaging albeit stressful project. I enjoyed contributing to the characterization of the Goddess characters by designing the lights in their costumes. It was also wonderful to see a project of mine find a real use on stage!

The 3 Goddess characters. They comment on the action of the play,
often through musical numbers.

Control

The lights are controlled over DMX, the industry standard communication protocol for stage devices. To communicate from the stage manager’s light board to the bands, I constructed a small transmitter built around a serial adapter (for the DMX signals) and an ESP32S3 (for processing and broadcasting to the bands). The transmitter had some physical controls and a display for selecting things like addresses and blacking out the bands.

Transmitter assembly. I think my real skill is not engineering
so much as it's fitting things into small enclosures.

Goddess Designs

The director/actresses already had a general idea of what the Goddesses’ costumes were going to be, and it was my responsibility to carry those ideas into the design of each set of lights. Each Goddess had a solo number that was heavily inspired by a different real pop star, and those songs/artists informed design and characterisation.

Sarah: Club Goddess

Sarah’s Goddess was the last set to be completed due to delays in the rest of her costume coming together. Her solo number was a love song inspired by Celine Dion, and her costume was the most casual with just a silver blouse and black jeans. The actress, Sarah, asked not to have anything tight on her throat because it would constrict her singing. When the look was completed, our director Rebecca said (complimentarily) that Sarah’s goddess looked like she belonged at the club.

On the “love” theme, I made her a large pendant heart out of 3 round PCBs with 7 ws2812b LEDs each, as well as a battery and a microcontroller I designed). The whole thing is housed in a 3d-printed enclosure with a translucent TPU diffuser.

She also wore a belt with a heart “buckle”, made from a 4W RGB LED and another microcontroller, battery, and 3d-printed enclosure with a TPU front. The belt is made of two arm bands from my abLED project, one flipped upside down, so that the “buckle” can stick to the velcro on one end of the band. The other sides of the bands connect to a strap that forms an actual belt.

This character even interacted with the audience at times!

Sophie: Punk Goddess

The information I had to go off of for Sophie’s Goddess was that her costume had fishnets and a leather blazer, and that her solo number was based on the band Paramore. I figured there was only one correct direction to take this outfit, and that was as punk as possible.

The centerpiece of the look is a dense string of ws2812b LEDs in a fairy-light package that has had a really messy, metal jacket chain built around it. The chain was handmade from aluminum craft wire that I cut and bent into almost a hundred links. The strip terminates at a reciever box in her pocket that has the microcontroller and some 18650 batteries.

The character also wore lighted leather bracelets made with ws2812b led strips and a TPU cover that diffused the light through spikes for a punk look. These bracelets only had the strip, and a wire ran from them to a seperate bracelet further up her arm that had the battery and microcontroller.

This design might be my favorite.

Louise: Head Goddess

Louise’s Goddess was implictly the head Goddess, kind of in charge of the other two. Her costume pieces were not too specific in theme, with plenty of glamour and sequins for a powerful and feminine look.

I had her wear 5 arm bands from my abLED project, modifying them with extra long clasps for fit, as well as adding foam tape in some spots to make them more comfortable. The undiffused dots of the LEDs worked well with the sequins and implied a kind of glittery starlight power. To learn more about the bands and their design, check out my abLED project.

Since she had 5 bands, Louise put out the most lumens of the Goddesses, which was fitting for the character!

Spot the red cuff piece that extends the band to fit Louise better.

Lights In Action

Working with my lights in a real performance was a fantastic opportunity and I learned a lot about designing for other users and making tech accessible to other artists. For example the actual lighting design was done by our lighting designer, while I had to make the wearable lights appear on their light board as a standard stage light (albeit with some interesting parameters).

I built almost everything involved with the lights from the ground up – the microcontroller reciever pcbs, the wearable lights themselves, the transmitter, all the code – and that meant I had a really thorough understanding of the system. We were blessed to see absolutely no unexpected behavior throughout the entire rehearsal process and across 4 performances, and I think that’s a result of how many components I had my hands on. Of course, there were tons of bugs and issues dring development, but by the time it was ready to be deployed in the theater I knew everything that could or would happen because I’d had my hands on everything.