Sony
Active Member
So the year is over! Our season was long and stressful but also wonderful and filled with great shows! See this thread for pics!
Now that we have finished our first season in the new space I am at more liberty to divulge details that I wasn't able to before!
Unfortunately I do not have more pictures as I haven't had time to take any, we were going full bore throughout the entire year and therefore we didn't have much time. Somewhat expected when you have to cram 13 separate full length shows into one school year.
Stuff I've learned this year about the new spaces...
NEVER hire Signet to do ANYTHING, they were the ones who did our audio install here (install, not design)...they have screwed up more things than they have fixed. They were caught stealing from UMass Amherst and are now in litigation with the state and banned from submitting any more state bids, they are terrible.
However the people who did the acoustical/audio design are amazing, AcenTech has been nothing but the best. The system they installed sounds freakin crystal clear and holy crap does it have balls. 12,000 watts of speakers in the large theatre alone, all completely Renkus-Heinz with an M7CL-48 feeding it all. AcenTech's acoustical design is great as well, you barely need to mic anyone in the large space, and with a full orchestra the music is VERY loud. For our large musical this year it was too loud and we had to install curtains and soft goods in our pit in order to help reduce the orchestra volume. We didn't mic a single instrument in the 22 piece orchestra and you could hear every single instrument crystal clear. The people from AcenTech have also been wonderful! On multiple occasions the people from AcenTech have taken time out of their own busy schedules (without us even asking them to) to come and see our shows, including some of our rehearsals and give us suggestions on how we can make things sound even better!
ALPS has been wonderful as always! Their install has been virtually flawless and problem free other than two tiny issues which were resolved pretty much immediately. We have problems with one of the small Sensor+ 48 racks getting stuck in Straight 3-Phase mode for some reason instead of balanced. It required a software reset of that entire rack to fix. The other was a weird glitch with the ETC Paradigm system software where the Paradigm control system would crash after a period of 90 days or something like that and require a reset. This was fixed with the latest software upgrade. Paul has been awesome as well, he often comes in when he can just to upgrade all of our ETC software and firmware to the latest version for us.
We really tested our rigging system this year as well. For Curtains: The Musical, we hung a 1300lb fake brick wall off our number 19 lineset and it took it like a champ, no problem. I had 12 beefy lift lines on the thing to distribute the weight, it didn't move during the show, but it could have if we wished it to. For Sunday in the Park with George we had 6 Portals, 3 white and 3 painted which weighed around 200-500lbs each which flew in and out during the show. As well as two trees which also flew in and out with ease. SECOA installed a great system, it works great and the only thing I could wish for that we don't have is a walkable grid so I could hang chain motors and spot lines, or even a way to access our high steel without a boom lift, but alas you can't have everything.
Our equipment inventory is huge, with over 400+ Source 4's now in our inventory, we had no shortage of fixtures for any of our shows. We did however have to rent more dimmers for Curtains! as our 137 were not enough. We rented 2 supplemental 24 Packs to our extra 24 Pack that we already own, giving us 209 total dimmers. We easily ran socapex to our electrics, allowing us to place the needed dimmers exactly where we wanted them, something that would have been impossible in our old space. The 400 amp and 200 amp company switches both saw use this year during that show. Our electrical distribution is great, we have 800 amps in our dimmer room for all those dimmers, plus a separate 400 and 200 amp feed for our company switches. This gives us a total capacity of 1400 amps of 3 phase so 4200 total amps. (Over half a megawatt of capacity!) This is all fed by a 1600a Air Actuated Breaker and a 500kVA transformer that is dedicated to just our wing of the building.
The smaller theatre had a great run this year, we worked out all the problems we were having at the beginning of the year, and other than the lack of adequate dimmers (48 is NOT enough.) We hung curtains around the edge to provide sound dampening to kill off standing waves and we reconfigured the seating into an L Shape to give us more play space. Built some pretty awesome sets, my favorite being the one we built for Eurydice, some pics follow.
All in all it was a pretty awesome year, I couldn't ask for better students, they are amazing and I will deeply miss those who graduated this year.
Please feel free to ask questions! I will try to answer as best I can/if I can!
Now that we have finished our first season in the new space I am at more liberty to divulge details that I wasn't able to before!
Unfortunately I do not have more pictures as I haven't had time to take any, we were going full bore throughout the entire year and therefore we didn't have much time. Somewhat expected when you have to cram 13 separate full length shows into one school year.
Stuff I've learned this year about the new spaces...
NEVER hire Signet to do ANYTHING, they were the ones who did our audio install here (install, not design)...they have screwed up more things than they have fixed. They were caught stealing from UMass Amherst and are now in litigation with the state and banned from submitting any more state bids, they are terrible.
However the people who did the acoustical/audio design are amazing, AcenTech has been nothing but the best. The system they installed sounds freakin crystal clear and holy crap does it have balls. 12,000 watts of speakers in the large theatre alone, all completely Renkus-Heinz with an M7CL-48 feeding it all. AcenTech's acoustical design is great as well, you barely need to mic anyone in the large space, and with a full orchestra the music is VERY loud. For our large musical this year it was too loud and we had to install curtains and soft goods in our pit in order to help reduce the orchestra volume. We didn't mic a single instrument in the 22 piece orchestra and you could hear every single instrument crystal clear. The people from AcenTech have also been wonderful! On multiple occasions the people from AcenTech have taken time out of their own busy schedules (without us even asking them to) to come and see our shows, including some of our rehearsals and give us suggestions on how we can make things sound even better!
ALPS has been wonderful as always! Their install has been virtually flawless and problem free other than two tiny issues which were resolved pretty much immediately. We have problems with one of the small Sensor+ 48 racks getting stuck in Straight 3-Phase mode for some reason instead of balanced. It required a software reset of that entire rack to fix. The other was a weird glitch with the ETC Paradigm system software where the Paradigm control system would crash after a period of 90 days or something like that and require a reset. This was fixed with the latest software upgrade. Paul has been awesome as well, he often comes in when he can just to upgrade all of our ETC software and firmware to the latest version for us.
We really tested our rigging system this year as well. For Curtains: The Musical, we hung a 1300lb fake brick wall off our number 19 lineset and it took it like a champ, no problem. I had 12 beefy lift lines on the thing to distribute the weight, it didn't move during the show, but it could have if we wished it to. For Sunday in the Park with George we had 6 Portals, 3 white and 3 painted which weighed around 200-500lbs each which flew in and out during the show. As well as two trees which also flew in and out with ease. SECOA installed a great system, it works great and the only thing I could wish for that we don't have is a walkable grid so I could hang chain motors and spot lines, or even a way to access our high steel without a boom lift, but alas you can't have everything.
Our equipment inventory is huge, with over 400+ Source 4's now in our inventory, we had no shortage of fixtures for any of our shows. We did however have to rent more dimmers for Curtains! as our 137 were not enough. We rented 2 supplemental 24 Packs to our extra 24 Pack that we already own, giving us 209 total dimmers. We easily ran socapex to our electrics, allowing us to place the needed dimmers exactly where we wanted them, something that would have been impossible in our old space. The 400 amp and 200 amp company switches both saw use this year during that show. Our electrical distribution is great, we have 800 amps in our dimmer room for all those dimmers, plus a separate 400 and 200 amp feed for our company switches. This gives us a total capacity of 1400 amps of 3 phase so 4200 total amps. (Over half a megawatt of capacity!) This is all fed by a 1600a Air Actuated Breaker and a 500kVA transformer that is dedicated to just our wing of the building.
The smaller theatre had a great run this year, we worked out all the problems we were having at the beginning of the year, and other than the lack of adequate dimmers (48 is NOT enough.) We hung curtains around the edge to provide sound dampening to kill off standing waves and we reconfigured the seating into an L Shape to give us more play space. Built some pretty awesome sets, my favorite being the one we built for Eurydice, some pics follow.
All in all it was a pretty awesome year, I couldn't ask for better students, they are amazing and I will deeply miss those who graduated this year.
Please feel free to ask questions! I will try to answer as best I can/if I can!
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