Hang Cards
- Thread starterlighttechie5948
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I use Vectorworks and have a pre-made drawing called "1-4 Electrics Hang Sheet", set to go. I print in 11x17 so the drawing is scaled and created for that format. I can get 4 electrics worth on 2 pages, then cut it down (scissors) to the 4 pages required. Each sheet has the required info in terms of what unit hangs where, numbers and type per position, an instrument key, scale bar for spacing as well as only the dimmer info the units require, plus any notes as needed. The page orients to hang on the upstage side of my electric raceways, so unit 1 is on the left of the drawing. I don't put channels and color as that just gets the electricians confused as well it's not required to get the unit hung.
The drawing attached is the basic rep restore plot. When I do a re-hang, I simply delete these units from the drawing and cut/paste from the new master plot, then do a Rotate horizontal and vertical to get the orientation of the fixtures correct.
I have a separate sheet/drawing for my flying ladders as well another in 8.5x11 format as 7 pages for the FOH coves, box booms as well as a position called Juliette Pars. The FOH units stay hung so all I put on those sheets is color info and sometimes special focus notes such as "special" or "MC"
All the assorted hang sheets have their instruments linked to the Lightwright file, so data can be readily transferred
SB.
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From what I remember of the hang cards I've seen, they were literally sections of the plot cut out and taped to cardboard backing. Easy peasy.
That being said, I'm a personal fan of the hang tape over the hang card. (For those unfamiliar, a hang tape is usually calculator tape with the fixture information [fixture number, type, dimmer number, and color/gobo] written at intervals where the fixture will hang. If you want to get really fancy, I've seen some people have it all printed out on stickers. Tape it to the pipe, walk away.) I like it for two reasons. For one, now everyone knows exactly where everything hangs without measuring, guessing, or astronomy. But more importantly, now you don't have to worry about someone walking away with the **** hang cards! It does take a little prep work, but in my experience it makes hang go a million times faster.
Best of luck!
That being said, I'm a personal fan of the hang tape over the hang card. (For those unfamiliar, a hang tape is usually calculator tape with the fixture information [fixture number, type, dimmer number, and color/gobo] written at intervals where the fixture will hang. If you want to get really fancy, I've seen some people have it all printed out on stickers. Tape it to the pipe, walk away.) I like it for two reasons. For one, now everyone knows exactly where everything hangs without measuring, guessing, or astronomy. But more importantly, now you don't have to worry about someone walking away with the **** hang cards! It does take a little prep work, but in my experience it makes hang go a million times faster.
Best of luck!
Most of the times I've used hang cards, they're just sections of the plot cut out and taped to a piece of cardboard. The more savvy MEs will make the text look similar to SteveB's hang card, with larger text and only the necessary information. However, for hanging plots, I generally prefer hang tape over hang cards, for many of the reasons Stephanie mentioned. Lots of times, it's just adding machine tape with Avery labels exported from lightwright that are stuck on the tape at the appropriate place. I've also seen jute webbing used with the Avery labels, but that's usually more trouble than it's worth unless you'll need to hang the tape many times, like for a tour or rep plot. The jute can stretch pretty easily, the labels require staples or a layer of J-Lar to keep them in place, and it's just more expensive.
Back in the good old days, we used what Steph has described, an extra copy of the plot, cut up and taped to the pipe.
One issue you run up against using this, is the plot is almost always drawn with stage left on the right side of the paper. If you need to hang the hang card-cut-from- the-plot, on the upstage side of the pipe, the units are shown in wrong order, with unit 1 on the right side of the paper. Thus there's great potential for the electricians to hang the pipe backwards. It's a PITA to have them figure out that unit 1 wants to be on the SL side of the pipe and hang accordingly.
I have heard of folks exporting the Lightwight data to an Excell file, then creating hang labels (as Steph described) printed on Avery labels that they then paste on a blank cash register roll, or some such, running down the raceway (if you have one) with the label pasted at the location of each unit. Pretty fool proof, but you need electrics with raceways.
So then the question for Stephanie. Do you have trouble peeling off the labels after the pipe is hung and cabled ?. I would wonder if that becomes an issue over time.
We didn't actually stick the labels to the pipe. You stick the label to the paper calculator tape, which despite the name is not actually tape, but a 150' roll of 2.25" wide paper. Then, when it's time to hang, you line up your CL and tape the ends of the paper strip to the pipe with gaff. Electricians hang the fixtures where indicated on the labels and when you're done you just rip the paper down. The only thing sticking to the pipe should be two little pieces of gaff.
So where is the label data generated?, LW?, and if so, how are you getting the data out of LW and into? to generate the labels. I'd love to try this method if it's straightforward enough.
I resemble that remark.
It's not MY problem, it's my electricians problem as he/she now has to re-hang !.
Well actually it's my problem as well, which is why I stopped using a cut up plot.
I once hung an entire show backwards...because the LD drew the plot with the US wall at the bottom of the sheet. Yes, tempers flared; objects were thrown in anger.
There may be an easier way with more recent versions, but I used to: Export from LW to a CSV file. Import that into MS Word, then use the label template wizard to create the yoke label. Print two: one for the yoke and one for the hang tape.
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Les
Well-Known Member
That's pretty funny, actually.
I've had some amazingly thoughtless electricians work for me over 30 years (myself included on occasion), so in most ways have figured out how they/we can screw up. But to this day, no matter how little or much, or appropriate the amount of information I put on a hang card, I can't get them to read. Especially when they've been working the gig for a few years and start to "assume".
As BTW, I've noticed that this has become yet another CB conversation amongst the regulars, with lighttechie5948 absent since the OP.
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Anybody care to share ?
iLightTheStage
Active Member
One improvement I've picked up: Instead of register tape, use caution tape (the side without writing) or 1" wide marking tape. Very cheap, and it takes some effort to "accidentally" rip it. And the labels stick to it very well.
For creating the tapes: always mark CenterLine, and which way is SL and SR. Your measurements should always be based off of centerline.
And people's methods also depend on the crew and the situation. Such as: it doesn't make sense to spend the time to make a 60' hang tape for a batten with 4 lights on it. This would probably be a situation where index cards with the info for those four lights are just taped where they go by someone who knows what a tape measure is.
I do mostly "one-offs", so we usually use colored index cards with printed labels, if it's more than "just look at the plot" difficult. Colors are different types of lights. Our placement is very rarely "crucial", so if we're off a foot or so, it doesn't really matter. And things change last minute, ALL the time, so it's easier that we just move a card to the new spot.
For creating the tapes: always mark CenterLine, and which way is SL and SR. Your measurements should always be based off of centerline.
And people's methods also depend on the crew and the situation. Such as: it doesn't make sense to spend the time to make a 60' hang tape for a batten with 4 lights on it. This would probably be a situation where index cards with the info for those four lights are just taped where they go by someone who knows what a tape measure is.
I do mostly "one-offs", so we usually use colored index cards with printed labels, if it's more than "just look at the plot" difficult. Colors are different types of lights. Our placement is very rarely "crucial", so if we're off a foot or so, it doesn't really matter. And things change last minute, ALL the time, so it's easier that we just move a card to the new spot.
While MS Word and Excel can and do work fine, if you can beg, borrow, or steal a copy of FileMaker Pro, I cannot stress enough how much better and easier it is for applications like this. I worked on a prep of a 500+ unit open-ended production this summer, and the PE asked me to come up with a way to generate labels for all the connectors, equipment, cables, scrollers, MLs, and everything else in the show. I didn't know FileMaker at all, but I spent a weekend playing around and building a file from scratch, and by the end of the weekend, I had a super functional and easy-to-use auto-label-generating file. And even at the crazy pace of a shop prep where things are always changing and needing new labels, I was able to easily keep up and generate new labels as needed. The attachments below are an example of one hanging position from that show, and these required less than a minute for me to generate - from exporting from Lightwright, automatically importing into FMP, and clicking the different buttons for each type of label, and they print nicely onto standard Avery sized labels.
I'd offer to share the file, but frankly, it's a very poorly written file, and it's set up pretty specifically to the way I use LW. For example, I make heavy use of Marks to define Moving Lights (M), Dimmers (L), NonDims (N), Scrollers (S), and a bunch more - so when I import into FileMaker, it just looks at the Mark column to figure out what units get what types of labels. I would like to spend some time making a more user-friendly version of this file at some time in the future, similar to Kai Harada's ShowTracker for audio equipment, but I haven't yet had the time to devote a significant amount of time to researching or writing such a file.
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