Small images link to larger ones, as one would expect.
As in previous years [see '08 and '09], build proceeded pretty much as usual. No crank-ups and long spans of truss this time; just upright 16-ft sticks on big square bases. |
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We used an *assload* of sandbags. I don't think we'd ever ordered 50 before, and we wound up adding to that later for something like 68 of them. They pretty much all got used -- Arisia owns a lot more drape bases now, we needed a few for the truss bases [but not all that many cuz those 4x4 monsters are *fknheavy*] and the small-tent boom bases and lots of screen legs in the ballroom and throughout the rest of the hotel. I really really hope we got 'em all back to ALPS, as I think we may have had an inexact packing count and I wasn't about to dump all 1300+ pounds of them back onto the floor. Unfortunately they really are the right thing for the purpose, but even at our somewhat discounted rate they ain't super-cheap. One really important improvement came in how the Arisia cyc "truss" is deployed. This time we lashed down the horizontal piece into the little right-angle hooks that hold it to the uprights, so it couldn't drift up and out of said hooks [or rather, the poles couldn't escape downward]. A perennial problem had always been lost upright-to-truss connections from inconsistent pole-raising speed; this time everyone was forced to stay together and the entire thing went up in ONE smooth shot. Five pieces of tie-line, and a whole world of solved problem. In fact we raised so enthusiastically we overshot past the "max height" lines and a couple of the top sections came out of the lower ones; that was fairly easy to correct and after everyone set to the max-height lines the thing was just about *perfect* with only very minor post-fiddling needed.
We've discovered that wetting down the cyc a bit helps it "hang out" and become much smoother after being wadded up in a storage bin for months. |
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After the cyc was hung, a thorough water-spray job then reduced the wrinkles quite a bit. The late-in-the-rental-game addition of Carl's Colorblaze LED fixtures completed the rig; this time we actually cheated the whole stage out from the wall another six inches and dropped the 'Blazes right *behind* the stage which worked fine to front-light the cyc because their throw is so narrow. And no risk of someone kicking them off the back lip.
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This was finally the year to try the "wiggle-lights as spots" hack, which I've had designed up for about three years but never really got a chance to play with. Yes, there were NO spot ops for Masq except for the awards part at the end, and Joel simply stood up from his SM seat on the one spot scaff we bothered to construct and spot-opped to grab 'em out of the audience. Spots for the entrants were all handled by the two wiggle-lights in the house instead, controlled semi-manually off my Hog PC. It worked quite well, especially when I managed to not lose attention to where a performer was heading [!], but I sort of cheated: I kept the spot circles fairly huge so the pinpoint accuracy wasn't really needed. Sometimes I irised them out even *bigger* and basically held them still, for example on Hani's "Marvin" entry on stilts where his head would have been out of the circle anyway. The spots-hack runs over a preset matrix of 15 positions on stage -- 5 x 3, all captured one at a time [by focusing tightly about chest-high on my 6' ladder placed carefully over each point] and stored in the Hog position table. The five cuelists that do the work then reference those positions. Motion cues [using about 2s with a "damped" path profile to simulate a heavy object swinging] are written into the five lists that spread across the 5 x 3 matrix -- each one with three steps: downstage, midstage, and upstage. In other words the more times a cuelist is triggered, the farther upstage the lights are "pushed" -- it's fairly intuitive once one gets used to which cuelist to kick, and if someone's moving back and forth across midstage it's a fairly easy matter of "go go" on 3, "go go" on 4, "go go" on 2, etc since they tend to stay mostly midstage anyway, and in practice they do. Set-in-blacks are easy to handle by mousing down a separate brightness control and then moving to the center-center position in dark, manually fading up on cue. At that point I know *exactly* where the spots are pointed and there's no wild-swinging oops on pickup, either. Doing the spot hack isn't just about mirror motion, and the many people who immediately come up with "joystick?" to suggest an alternate control syntax need to be aware of a few additional pieces. Having both lights move smoothly toward predefined known aim points actually keeps things much more coordinated and accurate. But along with motion, there are also iris size adjustments that happen along with -- when a light is shooting farther across stage, it gets irised down just a bit to keep the spot size the same, and larger when closer. Thus there are three iris-size presets that also need to be defined at setup/calibration time. And the two upstage right/left positions invoke an automatic fade to black as someone exits, whereas the other cuelists trigger an appropriate fade *up* to begin. So that's a lot to coordinate at once, and trying to do that manually by arbitrary mirror movement, even with multi-axis joysticks, would really suck. Because of the throw angles, the control syntax of how the board works, and the fact that I'm running off a *laptop keyboard*, there is basically no arbitrary X/Y capability that would get this right. The Hog stuff is a commercial product, which is already pushing obsolescence, and besides its own internal concept of single-parameter control wheels has no provision for input and x/y/z conversion math from devices like joysticks or tablets. Those who suggest sitting down to write something to accept such input and squirt out all the right DMX over USB are welcome to try, but should have a goodly number of unallocated coder-hours available and likely the ability to reverse-engineer all the undocumented protocol sent to the Hog widget along with. Under Windoze. In other words, ain't happenin' any time soon, and you can stop bugging me about that now thankyouverymuch.
Thursday evening's crew dinner was a big pizza feed; some of us kept working
through most of that time and grabbed what we needed on the fly just before
it was all gone. No time to stand around telling war stories; we still
had plenty of work to do.
I never got any pictures of the small-tent build, but one of its simple trees can sort of be seen in the long shot here. It all ran on one of my LD360 packs, with enough separate wall-outlet circuits found in that room to feed its two inputs to pretty much full capacity. |
...Time passes here... and the rest of a mostly problem-free build got
completed before the first official con events started happening on Friday.
Review text, on blending a large video screen into the main-tent drape: The IMAG-as-part-of-drapeline was awesome. The thing that made it really work was the availability of a very tall projector-mounting place in the box-corner, mostly helped by the huge trunks from ALPS stacked up, to get the entire beam over anyone's head passing through backstage. We should try to do that more often but the problem may be finding sufficient RP height and throw. The asymmetric lighting plot screwed this just a little; the screen would possibly have worked better with lighting if it had been at house right instead, but that would have cheated away some of video's workspace. On the other hand, it would have been farther out of lighting throws and the video folks could simply look up at it to see what they were sending. One problem I sort of fixed was that the side-stage lights at SL were basically throwing diagonally across and *onto* the front of the screen at stage right; I wound up hanging a piece of drape straight forward off the line at SR and behind the truss upright, which covered just enough of that within appropriate shutter-cuts to keep the screen dark. A quick morning hack, but it worked. I'm feeling like I should update that funny little room .GIF to show the screen rig... It's irrelevant for next year, but an equivalent is well worth thinking about for the Westin.... and safety, although we didn't catch *all* the places in advance where the Hyatt house staff had simply lost a bunch of the leg pins on their stage risers and had half-assedly replaced them with random untethered bolts, and we later had to fix a couple of saggy places. The stage pieces got lashed together "internally" this time, i.e. load straps were run around some of the *inner* corner legs and tightened up. This works fine, as the intent is to firmly join all the floating corners together, and uses a lot less strapping length. So those huge 3-inch or whatever yellow things from BSFS or whoever aren't necessarily needed for making a stage safe, where the shorter ones we already used in the truck can suffice. |
The major Saturday event was of course the masquerade, an all-day commitment
from the "costume-friendly tech" presentation in the morning all the way
through rehearsals and run. I got to noodle aesthetics and work with a most
excellent board-op who was willing to swap in at the last minute and took
to composing looks on a relatively unfamiliar console like a fish to water.
Almost every entry was done as a cue-block, which actually yields many
different looks and really shows off the versatility of a lighting rig as
opposed to cranking all the entries through with just warm-fred, cool-fred,
yawn. And this all included using color-changers at the sides which needed
to be pre-cued in black, giving slightly more complexity to each cue block.
My job was to add appropriately to this, with the caveat that doing ground-up wiggle-light programming takes a long time so in general I'd try a few things from a long-standing repertoire of preset looks and see if the entrants liked any of it and just capture the basics into a cuelist, take some fast notes and build its run framework for real later. This time, backdrop hacks were secondary to running the spot-matrix as that was the only means of additional front color-emphasis we had in the design. We got a little behind schedule as usually happens during any of these days but made up time at the end, and finished with plenty of time to eat dinner and re-fiddle things once the actual entrant run-order sheets arrived. |
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Basically, the wiggles were providing front color-punchup as they're a short-arc source with a high color temp and have some interesting spectral output via some of the more "pastel" dichroics on the color wheels. That somewhat harsher quality of light combined with the fact that they're essentially point sources at that distance is what adds the sparkle and rounds things out away from the rather drab [and frankly a bit greenish here, not sure why] 3200K from the wash lights. Danielle and I wound up cueing two boards at once and using the combination from wash and wiggles quite a bit, with deeper hues from the Colormerge units at side-stage filling in the modeling, and were pretty happy with the results. The other important thing that followspots add, be they human or machine operated, is that element of motion -- the circle doesn't necessarily *have* to be sized exactly to the talent, it just has to give the sense of moving dynamic and emphasis as the entry runs. And this method did, in spades. One minor issue came from trying to do too many things on the Hog at once, when entrants also wanted some cute background stuff. The spots-hack runs manually and trying to do the final move/fade on them PLUS fading the cyc effects at the same time produced some klunky-looking lags on exit. But I've since thought of a simple way to link those cuelists together, so if we do this again that shouldn't be a problem. With the two house wiggles doing spots, the only lights left available for FX were the two down at the stage corners without a whole lot of throw, so I couldn't paint the entire cyc with texture as we've done for other cons [well, without losing the spots capability too]. Offsetting them and using the three-way prism yielded an okay spread, though, so we went with about five or six instances of adding cyc-play stuff. Including the *nine-cue* Frodo entry -- yup, one of them did the whole trilogy in 60 seconds all the way out to Grey Havens, and it ran perfectly [including a nifty volcano fire effect] and left us all sweating bullets but ecstatic. Anyway, with these relatively minor caveats I hereby declare the wiggle-spots thing a success and it can only get better next time. The upstage entry platform seemed much more sensible than previous years' mid-to-down route, and actually seemed to lend more backstage room for performers. Then again, the box-pile's footprint was a bit less this time possibly due to the types of cases we had, and/or a bit of tetrising that I and others did.
The Masquerade segued into the usual fairly major lighting changeover for the
club-dance, which has become pretty routine for our crew by now. I went back
to the old method of chaining both DMX lines together into one, saving the
cost of a Fleenor splitter, and the combined path length wasn't much more
than either of the split paths anyway.
I didn't get any dance pictures, but some other people may have. See the LJ community for some pointers to other peoples' photo sets and even a few videos of various events. I didn't get any Masquerade pictures either, but other attendees probably did and if all else fails, there's always the "official" stuff from Sandy Middlebrooks albeit mostly overexposed and with that same awful turd-brown backdrop. I wonder if he'll ever realize how badly that thing just *eats* fleshtones? Here's the flat list of 582 images, wrested from that script-driven nightmare of a website as usual. Totals about 67 Mb; have fun. They're more watermarked-up than in prior years. Once things were off and running, or rather dancing, I trotted out another little project I'd brought along just for fun -- something I hadn't even thought about much for *years*. Review text: The dance was ... well, the dance, as usual. I brought the "flamers" back in -- sometimes they're just the right kind of cheeze for certain things, and in this case they made admirable truss-warmers for the house trees. The dance cueing ran on autopilot for much of the evening, because for a while [when not upstairs enjoying some libations] I was busy with a different little project. I had decided to dig out, where "exhume" is the proper synonym, some of my old laser gear from Back In The Day. After fooling around with it in the living room at home and being astounded that the argon still fires and the old oscillator-box not only still works but the sixty or so little trimpots inside are still *in tune* and not dirtied up, it seemed only right to bring it to Arisia. I put the laser and scan head up on the scaff out of harm's way, placing it far enough back that the beam going too low would get blocked by the platform edge, ran out some sections of airwall as a quick-n-dirty screen, and set the box out on the table for *other* people to come up and play with. And they did -- there was usually someone there wiggling the sticks most of the time. The rest of the stuff ran pretty much as it has lo these past N years; I channeled up the cyc units to split them into narrower stripes to play back and forth behind Zed on the stage and the bits of inter-cuelist housekeeping I've done over the past couple of years has definitely helped alleviate some odd states the Hog would sometimes get into. |
The dance went until ridiculously late [or is it early] as usual. Once
I finally got up and got enough coffee back into me I went and helped
cover the Sunday events -- much less complex, which let me actually
hang out and relax and actually watch some of it.
Review text: In contrast to last year when I was almost asleep by 3am, Zed kept the floor busy pretty much right up to 6AM when the hotel started coming in to do airwall turn. We had to sort of shut down in a hurry and drag the sound table back across the airwall line, and I resisted the temptation to try and refocus the trees at that point. Mike R. and co. graciously picked up that task the next morning before I finally rolled my sorry butt out of bed. That and a little bit of wiggle-FX carried Sunday's events just fine, including a quick cyc repatch to create the now-traditional red-to-blue cyc gradient for the radio play. |
Skinny White Chick concert ... |
... where it suddenly struck me that my cyc-light channeling experiment yielding R, G, B was appropriate for this as a static backdrop, since that gives ... *white*, right? |
I wasn't sure what to do for the "Malice in Wonderland" period dance, but one of its organizers suggested a Cheshire cat theme. Well, I tried. |
After this our crew was pretty much done, and could go party. The remaining
events were pretty much self-supporting as the folks who ran them have their
own tech staff. And we had all the next day to strike.
Review text: Having the tech party on Sunday worked really well for me, as it allowed spending more time on the dance on Saturday and then hanging out with folks in a mostly non-working context late Sunday night. The Teseracte people took over the ballroom for the overnight, and their lighting guy *really* loves playing with the LED cyc for moments in the movies. Oh, and of course Teseracte [e.g. more traditionally-skilled operators] is another reason for having at least one regular followspot. At that point the wiggles were powered off and the laptop was safely up in the room. Teardown was *fast*. Kudos to whoever attacked removing all the pipe and drape as the first thing -- that opened things up the right way. When I ran a bunch of stuff under the stage I tried to pull it through *between* the first two rows of platforms, so that for teardown all we had to do was remove the load-straps and pull open a gap with the downstage sections to reveal most of the cable runs all ready to lift and coil right out. In general, thinking about wire paths and ease of wrangling later in a weekend is probably good to do. I observed that the big "easel" pieces of paper used to indicate where to stack differently-owned gear worked well, and that with those visible on the piles it is *not* necessary to burn miles of tape marking out stupid boxes on the ballroom carpet. That didn't prevent someone from trying, wasting some quantity of white gaff to do so. |
It started to snow that night -- after all, what's an Arisia without any snow? This made loadout and gear-return a little more interesting. |
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I met the ALPS truck Tuesday morning, and managed to get them in so that their driver could drop the lift-gate right through the big back door onto the ballroom floor near where I'd staged the stuff. A small brute-squad formed to help push stuff onto the liftgate, but after the two huge trunks went on the *truck* started drifting away from the building on its own. Eep! It stopped after a couple of feet, but the driver had me sit in the cab and hold down the brake, as apparently the transmission in this truck has no parking-lock and the e-brake was proving totally inadequate. After a while all the thumping and rocking I could feel from up front stopped, as they finished loading. My next task was to haul Bromberg's gear up to his house way up in boonies NH. It was snowing again; I was glad to have loaded the previous night [and parked my car in front of the ballroom doors, with permission, to try and prevent all the random electricians and plumbers from parking their vans there in the morning]. The Prius in full freight-mode swallowed the long pipes easily, and I got all his stuff and a few items of my own in and sent the rest of my crates with the Arisia truck. Bromberg's town apparently waits until the snow stops before plowing, making the last few miles rather interesting as it was an inch or so of a miserable slush/sand mix and easily the bumpiest part of the ride up, including ascending to about 800 ft ASL near the end. The car struggled up all this fine and I made it to his house, but was finally defeated by Mike's driveway.
I got up it to about THERE and no farther, as the old packed-down slick stuff under the freshly fallen snow created an almost frictionless layer. |
Even trying to go up backwards with more weight on the drive wheels didn't do it. The problem was that it was fresh snow basically on top of ice, or very hard-pack underneath left by his plow guy, and all right around 32 deg F at the time. [Mike frequently has the same problem with his own Prius in the winter too...] When I finally got out of the car to walk up I promptly went on my ass -- the car was getting better traction than I was. I alerted Mike that I was there and grabbed a shovel to clear a couple of strips down the steep part, and then got the car out of the way so Mike could gingerly back his 4x4 down toward the end of the driveway [and slid fairly uncontrollably the last 10 feet or so himself] and we crossloaded the gear into that. He then managed to crawl that back up the hill in 4-low to the garage where we put things away. So, overall a good con with a few more learning experiences even after doing it several times in this venue. Next year, new place, and we hope to do some of that info-gathering walkthrough soon.