Ron,
Guess you have seen this
http://www.wendallharrington.com/gallery/theatre/
It must have looked incredible!
i bow down very deeply to you sir!
Thanks Pete! I hadn't seen your link actually but there were a great many visual moments in Tommy and I got to see them live a goodly number of times. Most of my dealings, once in the theatres, were with technical
production manager Gene O'Donovan and Gene's mate was Lynda Batwin of Batwin and Robin who were the king-pins supplying and supervising all of the projected imagery. When the bomber was projected, its two revolving
props were real, flown in, pieces and, from memory, the blades were about 12' in diameter, designed to look spectacular while rotating fairly slowly in front of the projected imagery while moving as little air as possible due to very tight fly-space clearances.
I'm most definitely no one to be bowed down to, just a guy who was fortunate to be in the right places at the right times. I'm Ron to everyone and definitely NEVER Sir. Again, ask me anything about the electrical and automation aspects of either the
German or British productions. I've only peripheral knowledge of the scenic projection and I MOST DEFINITELY had nothing to do with creating any of the slides themselves. For the era, having 54 projectors configured as 18 stacks of 3 rear projecting onto one large RP
screen as anything from 1 large, to 18 small, images was pretty impressive and, when dissolving through slides at its maximum rate, practically capable of motion. From memory, I believe the Frankfurt production was accomplished with RP lenses that were standard products but I believe the producers had Zeiss create 54 custom short
throw lenses with
keystone correction to work within the even tighter
throw distances of the London production in your Shaftesbury. I met a lot of really skilled British
stage hands doing "Tommy". One thing I still remember that surprised me when we got to England: In North America we're used to having 3
phase stage dimmer racks housing dimmers of all three phases within a single rack. I was totally surprised to find the Shaftesbury's dimmers were segregated by
phase with one rack /
phase powering all
FOH circuits, another supplying all
stage floor
level circuits and the last rack supplying all flown circuits with the goal being to minimize the possibilities of
phase to
phase shocks. When we showed up wanting dimmers of all three phases in each of our six, automated, floor tracks the British
production electrician was taken totally aback. He also wasn't familiar with the concept of using dual redundant
incandescent dummy loads on dimmers driving
transformer coupled loads and / neon. Basically London was an excellent experience after dealing with TUV for Frankfurt.
Sorry! I blather too much. Ask me anything about any of the electrical and automation aspects of either production. Our automation software was controlling 24 axis of accurately position-able AC servo drives along with the two rotating propellers and the
house curtain drive.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard.
