2 Scene Crash and Burn

[beachcombah15]

So I just got back from a one hour tech at a school 2 hours away today. We loaded in our set, spiked it, and then continued to move onto lighting.

As this is for a competition this weekend, I was given the standard house plot and tech specs about a month ago. I then designed my lights for the show at school and programmed the cues on our Ion. After that, I make up 2 spreadsheets of my cues and channels so I could write down the levels at tech. did I mention the board is a Leprecon lp-624?

After finding out that the show was to be run on a two scene board, the scenes are pretty short, so I ended up with 17 cues for a 40 minute show. So how the tech ended up going was we loaded our huge set in (15 min), spiked it in the process, and then moved onto lights.

So I get to the board, take the house lights out, and I proceed to bring up my first cue according to my pre-estimated levels that I translated from the Plot at our school to theirs. Then the director says change this, this and that. She then says to me that it looks good to her, in turn, I write down the levels onto my final levels sheet. She then has the actors move to their 'second moment' and the process continues, we get about 4 or 5 cues in, and were told that we have 45 minutes left. I think to myself, sweet, we're doing great! Then about 2 or 3 cues later, the tech comes back and tells us we have 15 minutes left!!!! I was in disbelief, but continue on and really pick up the pace. So, I somehow end up getting it done in about 17 minutes or so.

Bottom line is, I don't know what happened in that hour to set me on that rampage. I don't know if it is a combination of having to write down the levels and somehow the time being off, or me slowing down a bit when I was told that there was 45 minutes left. What do you guys think? I really know it's a hard thing to gauge, especially if you weren't there, but I'd love to hear any thoughts on this. I think I'm just trying to avoid this confusion again.

Thanks!

[sk8rsdad]

It's hard to say not being you, and not being there. I know when I'm "in the zone" I lose track of time. If you find yourself in one of these time crunch situations again you can use a timer, or the alarm function on your watch, cellphone, pda, or whatever to give you reminders whenever you think you need one.

If you want to swap anecdotes, when I was in high school I did lights for a one act adaptation of "12th Night" for the Sears Festival that had 117 lighting cues in 40 minutes. I had to run it on a combination of an old strand A-B board, a home grown 6x1800W SCR dimmer with analog controller and a 12x6kW single scene autotransformer dimmer. Crossfades involved both hands and a foot.

[beachcombah15]

haha. yea, best part is, I had brought my watch that I use for reffing, but completely forgot to press start. Really bad move on my part...

Wow, that sounds pretty fun, how'd the foot work into that?

[sk8rsdad]

If I could find a picture it would be easier to explain.

Picture in your mind a big grey metal panel about 6 feet tall and 6 feet wide with 2 rows of 7 levers, each about a foot long, arranged side-by-side. The center pair of levers are the master faders for a group of 6 to either side. Here's some cheesy ASCII art.

I I I I I I T T I I I I I I

Each of the 'I' 's represent a dimmer and the 'T' is the master. The dimmers are mechanically coupled to the master. On larger variac dimmer systems the master would be a wheel instead of a lever, to provide more mechanical advantage, because it can take a fair amount of effort to move all 6 dimmers using the master.

The foot was used to work the levers when both hands were busy operating both electronic consoles, which fortunately wasn't on every cue.

[Esoteric]

Oh my (not so) fond memories of UIL Theater State Meets.

Mike

[ScottH]

Is the lp-624 the one with the one rotary encoder? I did a dance festival in Philly a few years back and it took at least 30 seconds to RECORD a cue...not build, record. You have to press the record mode button, rotate the knob to the cue number you want to record then press the enter button then exit record mode. Soooo annoying...thats what eats up all your time. I bet you did it in like a half hour on the Ion.

[beachcombah15]

Well then it's a good thing that we're not allowed to record to the cue stack; since theres 7 other schools going and it only holds 50 cues, theres no way we would all be able to record our cues on the board. It's all by hand...

[Esoteric]

Yeah, then you get to the State Meet and all your cues are prerecorded on on an Expression or Obsession II just waiting for you.

Mike