"Behind the Curtain" takes a look at the theatre students who do their work offstage. This part of the series follows a student who works with lighting. 

Austin Zimmerman’s theater experience is all about the spotlight. Operating it, that is.

Zimmerman is a sophomore design technical option major within the Ball State Department of Theatre and Dance. The department’s DTO major has a variety of concentration options for students, including lighting design, Zimmerman’s specialty.

A lighting designer is in charge of picking out the colors, focus points and drawing out blueprints for how the lighting will be arranged to sow the mood of the show. Lighting designers work with the director to understand how the lights should portray each scene or emotion.

It’s only Zimmerman’s second year in the department, but he’s already spent a summer interning at an upstate New York theater and worked on three departmental and one student-run production, although not always as the lighting designer.

Before he started his college career, however, Zimmerman attended Hanover Central Middle School and High School in Cedar Lake, Ind. Even though his school did not have the best technology, he took the effort to learn about lighting by teaching himself or asking other students.

“Physically, I was doing everything in the auditorium since seventh grade, and I slowly progressed each year and learned more and more by myself, and I realized when I needed to look at colleges [that] I really wanted to do theater tech,” he said.

He chose Ball State because of the nice people he met in the theatre department.

There are only 14 DTO students who concentrate in lighting design.

“I enjoyed the small number of people, because you don’t feel like a number but more [of] a family,” Zimmerman said.

Mickie Marie is the only full-time lighting professor for the theatre department. It’s the assistant professor of theatre’s third year working at Ball State, but he’s been fascinated with lighting for years.

“Lighting was something interesting because you are creating something with an intangible element,” he said. “You don’t see the light like you see paint. It’s all about reflectivity, and it has to have that something to reflect on, and that unto itself drew me back to this idea of a blend of science and art.”

Marie helps and guides students, including Zimmerman, with what they want to do in the future.

“[Zimmerman] is a great student. He comes in and works really hard. He is a sophomore, so he hasn’t had a lot of design opportunities, but the ones he has gotten, he’s taken advantage of them, which is want you want in a student,” Marie said.

Last year, Zimmerman worked mostly as an electrician, hanging up lights and focusing them for the lighting designer. He did design for the Busted Space show, “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play."

This summer, he interned at the Hanger Theatre in Ithaca, N.Y. He got to meet Jonathon Groff, the actor who voiced Kristoff in “Frozen.” Groff visited the theater as a friend of the director for the theater’s production of “Spring Awakening.”

It’s Zimmerman’s future job that he’s most passionate about. He wants to be a master electrician and projectionist, or someone who projects objects digitally on any platform.

For now, Zimmerman can be found working as the lighting designer for the Cave Studio Theatre Show, “Speech and Debate," which runs from Oct. 20-25.

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