Van

So my First full week back at work after a three week furlough! Can't say I didn't make up for lost time. This last week was supposed to be the week that I received drawings for our first show of the season, All My Sons. On a quick side note, I just want to say I'm so completely Jazzed about finally getting to do this show. AMS is my all time favorite Miller piece and, I feel his most relevant in modern times. While Death of a Salesman will always be an American classic I think there are a lot more timely topics covered in AMS. Anyway, I got my drawings and as part of our over all austerity program the size of our sets has really been reduced. I was actually able to get all my working drawings cranked out in just a couple of days. I got materials ordered, delivered and received and started installing a new masonite floor on our main stage deck. In addition to getting all this done I was asked by our Managing director to put together / design a solution to our new front of the building dilemma. Our new front has a covered U-shaped driveway, perfect for Valet parking. Well when we renovated out new lobby two years ago some plans were made to turn the big curved wall into a sort of Cyclorama, to receive color washes and possibly video projection. Well we ran short of money and time and the most we got was a S4 HMI fixture with an Apollo glass gobo of our Logo mounted in it. We had some old Colotran mini-zooms lying around that the ME didn't want so we hung them as well. Over the last couple of years we would change gobos according to the season, or, if we could find something relevant we install special gobos for the run of a show. The hang positions are outdoors they are very well covered and in no way exposed to direct "weather" but the liquid atmosphere of Oregon finally got to the mini-zooms and they all gave up the ghost at the end of last season. No parts availible for them so no extra gobo looks, just a big white wall with our logo on it.
I did some measuring, consulted some old, and recent, posts on CB did some thinking some scheming and consulting with our scenic designer made a call to Gordon Perlman, who spec'd out whole dimming system and helped oversee the installation and came up with an idea. We're going to install three small video projectors and design some really cool graphics and visuals to shoot on the wall. At present the idea is to have one on the most visible, but smallest available projection area, and then I'm going to combine two on the other wider area. Luckily all the power < constant> and dimming circuits are already installed. conduit and boxes were install for low-voltage applications but I need to pull cable in them. My plan at present is to pull cat 5 and run the projectors off of KVM switches. Two cheap Linux boxes with Open Office Ought to do the trick as we just going to make fancy Power Point show to loop.
Get this all I had to do was spec everything and hand it off to an intern! Once he acquires everything I'll install and configure it. And all this in one week!

Yeah I'm starting off the year with fun, for a change.