Being a great ME requires equal parts technical know how, quality control and management.
The technical know how is required to turn a
light plot into something in three dimensional space. You should know the space as much as possible, what the
dimmer layout is (
dimmer per
circuit, hard patch,
etc) where cables are kept, what the color code for the
house is, how to get around, and that sort of thing. Depending on your situation your crew may have never set
foot in the
venue before or they may be the
house crew and are able to carry some of that weight themselves. Better safe than sorry. You should keep an eye out for
safety in how the lights are rigged and cabled. Just because the 20
channel gobo wash is only one
channel does not mean its a good idea to use one
dimmer for it. You will need to keep an eye on the big picture because sometimes electricians get tunnel
vision, they are working on a task and are not aware of the bigger picture. For example they might pull a
circuit for another
electric but jump across in the middle of the pipe, not a good idea ever in my
book but a horrible idea if there is a
drop between the two electrics. If your crew is inexperienced you will need to be able to provide them instruction for basic tasks. How to put an
iris in a
Source Four, how to
address scrollers, how to swap lamp caps. In short you need to no enough to lead a crew. Most of this stuff you can take care of before you get on site along with things like shop orders, buying expendables and that sort of administrative work.
Once on site your biggest concern should be running the crew. You should have made enough paper work and made it clean enough that you become more of a facilitator and less of a direct leader. This will allow you to keep an eye on all the irons in the fire. Try to avoid getting bogged down with one task, either delegate it to someone who can deal with it or move on. I have seen 4 guys stand around watch a ME struggle with a light with broken omega brackets. After a minute or two the crew could have been reassigned to cable the
truss, start hanging the next position or start to push empty boxes to storage.
On know when to pick your battles if it is 10 minutes to lunch dont
send a crew to the catwalks that take 5 minutes to get to. They could tidy up the
deck or something but its a waste of time to
send them to the
catwalk.
Know when it matters and when it can slide. If a light is hung with the wrong
lens that needs to be fixed but a light hung at 13' 3" instead of 13' 6" because of where the
lift line is not a deal
breaker.
In summery, know everything be everywhere and have all the answers.
