I just participated in a rather insane program at MIT, called Splash. This is put on by the Educational Studies Program, which among other things reaches out to high-school students as a way to begin drawing them into the MIT community early in the game and let them get a taste of all the stuff that happens around MIT. The idea of Splash is a sort of immersion weekend, or a few sips from the firehose, or something like that -- the opportunity to pick from *hundreds* of little mini-classes on particular topics, and to learn something new over the course of the weekend. esp.mit.edu/esp_web/splash/ One section of this is Theatre Arts. The you-cant-be-serious idea for this year was to gather enough students and teachers and to write, cast, tech, produce, and perform a play, starting completely from zero. So the classes include acting, playwriting, sound and lighting and set design, propsmaking, etc. One or more of our esteemed TF colleagues who are heavily active in the MIT theatre scene reached out to me to cover lighting, and once again I dusted off that same still-very-beta TFU outline and tried to consider how I could compress all of that into a two-hour class. The answer was to split it into two classes, leaving the problem of compressing it all into four hours, but that still gave a little more breathing room. By now what I laughingly call a curriculum begins with the practical, dirty-hands "electrician workshop" to familiarize the student with the actual hardware of lighting -- to heft instruments and play with wrenches and see what the knobs do to the beam; then in the second half we pass swatchbooks around and think about color during the waving-of-arms art-fag rant. Sprinkled through this is a little nominal math concerning load balancing and beam width; nothing most high-school students couldn't handle. The trouble is, a course like that *has* to be much more interactive, and happen in a much more relaxed environment. One thing *I* took away from the day was that this course really needs a major redesign and better handouts. But it's what I had to go on. I stood up in front of twentyish kids and launched into it, a major achievement in itself given my usual aversion to public speaking, and was rewarded with almost zero response when it came time for someone, anyone, to please come up and try hanging just one light to get the feel for it. Amid a sea of either deer-in-the-headlights or marking-time-because- they-told-me-to-participate-in-this-weekend expressions, a couple of them finally, timidly, came forward and sort of performed the bare minimum necessary to get a fixture attached to a pipe and wired up to a dimmer output. In general the rather rushed feeling and the relative dead-ness of my audience helped to throw me off my already losing game, and the brighest point of pretty much both sessions was finally picking out the very few kids who *do* already have some theatre experience and are already well on the track toward doing a lot more of it. Perhaps bantering with them about some of their own experiences/comparisons was educational for the rest of the listeners, or maybe it was all meaningless buzzword bingo for them. Hard to tell, as they escaped after the two hours were up and pretty much left me alone to scramble around pushing things aside as I discovered quite unexpectedly that the room was going to be used for another completely unrelated class right after mine with no changeover time. Well, we had an entire tree, or in this case one of those flimsy aluminum Knight tripod stands, festooned with various crufty old instruments, smack in the middle of the room and a small rats-nest of cable running to it. Oh, and of course it didn't help that the small board I was given for this came with no wall-wart power supply, and the person sent to Rat Shack to get an equivalent didn't actually show up to deliver it to the room until quite near the end of the class. Meanwhile, in an astounding forehead-smacking moment I had finally realized that I could bring lights up off the two-Torchiere- dimmer assembly I had brought to show around anyway, so a large chunk that I had skipped and then jumped back to probably had much less impact as I sort of rushed through the rest of my material as time bore down on us. Anyway, I managed to get it pretty much cleared away and walk across campus to where they were handing out the bag lunches. To be fair, a couple of the kids were in both the electrician half and the design half and were clearly interested. These two or three were the ones that headed into the brainstorming and design sections later in the day with us, and then things began to actually happen. We spent a substantial part of the evening after dinner [also supplied by the program -- one perk was a lot of free food!] a bunch of us sat down to design around whatever the people writing the play had come up with to date -- at the beginning it was very sketchy but we were just covering general concepts anyway. A few hours later the script had shaped into at least a quivering blob of jello even if many things weren't concrete yet, and we could start pretty much storyboarding the whole thing and jotting down the tech nits for most of the scenes. About fourteen hours into my day, we had a pretty good idea of what would be required. I and the *one* student left standing by then in the lighting department [who hadn't decided to move over to sound or props at some point] began noodling up a basic design, but he didn't really have the broad view yet so much of it was driven by me. I had already realized that we were up against some serious gear limitations and working in a fairly hostile space -- Morss hall, the first floor of the Walker gymnasium building. I had already grabbed some of my own stuff to add to the inventory, such as a wad of 3-pin DMX cable that they suddenly realized they didn't have and an extra dimmer pack. So I basically finished the design that night after getting home and inserted tentative cue points into the still-early-beta script I had, figuring it would all come together the next day as actual work began on the production. The idea for Sunday was no more classes for the theatre-arts folks, but to plow what had been learned the previous day into putting the show together and making it work. Some of us arrived at ohfug-early that morning to start shuffling gear and figuring out things like power distribution. This is where the not-so-hidden hostility of that space began to really show itself. Basically, it took about three hours just to work out the logistics of getting items where they needed to be and what to eventually plug them into. We had a real power distro to tie into the camloks near the stage, but I noted several outlets up in the side balconies and went to try and find their circuits at some nearby breaker panels with the fox-n-hound. I could *not* figure out where they were coming from at all, and was stuck making some creative guesses about splitting loads. One reason for trying not to use the power distro was the fact that despite expectations of receiving real industrial-grade gear, the long Edison cables supplied with it were 16/3 orange Home Despot specials, completely inadequate for bringing a full 20A circuit 100 feet farther away. So for one side we hooked one circuit into the nearby outlets and ran one of my good extenders off into a lounge and found another outlet in there. On the other side I was forced to drop said orange hose over the balcony and use that, but fiddled the design around a little so the lights on that circuit received the most minimal and separated use. Anyway, my one aspiring Jedi showed up a little later and we began moving gear upstairs, through a reasonably convoluted route through various kitchen space and a typically crufty old MIT elevator. As the rest of the morning progressed things actually went fairly well, and this kid was really busting his guts on it. He put together the whole tree on one side by himself, with only a couple of instruments hung upside-down and a bit less slack in the tails than we would have wanted. I banged together the other tree while fielding various questions in the meantime, while wondering if the on-campus lighting group some of us know and love so well would actually come through with the remaining Edison/2PG adapters we were promised. About halfway through the building process I realized that the top pole of the Knight stand I was working on would have to be lifted for lights to clear the balcony rail, and managed to muscle what I had already up into the air enough and kept working. I then went over to the other side where there were substantially more lights on the bar, and three of us were able to stabilize the mess and lift it to sufficient height without backtracking any work. When I got back to my side, the bar was down where it had started, with the extension pole sticking high in the air above it -- the whole crosspiece collar had slid *down* its pole to come to rest [fortunately gently] on the lower part again. A few minutes of digging around the set shop downstairs turned up a hex-wrench set to tighten all the collars, and three of us muscled my tree back up in the air the same way. Once both of these things were fully hung they felt rickety as hell, and we didn't have any sandbags [or a good way to apply them to the tripod legs] or a way to safety it to the building. For the record, these things are basically speaker-sticks, and might be sort of okay for no more than four lights, and that's already pushing it without considering our *other* four that we actually top-hung on this garbage and tried very hard to not dent the crossbar with the C-clamp bolts. I will ignore all arguments like "oh, we do this all the time" and maintain that what we did was *not* really safe. Focusing would be a delicate exercise in not twisting the whole thing around. But focus we did, eventually, and the stage was beginning to actually look fairly good. A little headscratching over why the gobo-shot for the "Canadian woods" scene wasn't working made me realize that that must be the pack with the one bad dimmer that the guy who finally brought the rest of our adapters admitted to me about -- only *after* said dimmer pack was already installed, addressed, plugged up, and working, and buried under a mound of cable. This was after me pointing out to him how a duplex outlet on one of the other packs had been completely punched in and was floating somewhere below the surface of the case, presenting a clear electrical hazard but having nonetheless been given to us as working equipment. Thanks so much, guys. Fortunately the woods scene could be worked around with a quick plug swap during the show, so that went on the cue sheet. And we couldn't yet focus the four lights dedicated to the "rocket takeoff effect" until the rocket prop was built, brought in, and its location spiked. We were running out of time, and swung into "tech week" [i.e. the two hours or so before house-open] without them. We also made the unfortunate decision that there was not enough time to set up the four large flats that people had so carefully painted flat black that morning as a backdrop wall. That was only part of the rapid succession of compromises and lossage that plagued the final hours of that day. Now, the board we had was an Elation Stage Setter 8, aka American DJ's cheapo in-house brand mostly aimed at the small club market. And the dimmers were also little AMDJ 4-way packs, with a single Edison plug into each [as opposed to being able to take 2 circuits in] which, as I read the PDFs a couple of days before, made me realize that we definitely needed more capacity. This is why I threw in one of my own packs to use in one side of the house and basically doubled up the AMDJ packs on the other side by offsetting one by two channels. This would give me the effect of being able to "twofer" the two DMX channels of overlap and give six channels per side, without exceeding the 6-amp rated output capacity per outlet. This scheme was working fine and we had extended the 3-pin DMX line down to the floor and set up a little tech-table nest near where the director was sitting, and began building cues. The board is a basic 8-channel two-scene but can also run with one bank in "submaster mode" for the lower 8 channels or have all 16 sliders be their own channel with no subs, and there's a button to toggle through these various modes. Things were arranged so frequent recurring scenes would be on submasters and we'd flip the board to 16-channel mode and manually preset more complex things and use the output master to fade the result up and down. All this went okay as we went through dry tech, with my faithful student as board-op frantically taking notes on each cue and the stagehands working on their scene/prop changes at the same time. We got the whole framework laid in and the subs for the common stuff built, and were actually right on time to begin another run-through shortly before many of the other weekend's students and their parents would wander into the place to see what we'd spent two days working on. And somewhere in the middle of all this our rocket prop triumphantly emerged from the set shop in all its foam-core-board glory, and it was time to fix our effect to make it blast off. I left the student at the board and raced upstairs to one of the trees. About halfway through shuttering the second FX fixture down to the right place, both lights went out and I waited patiently for them to come back on for a bit before calling down that I really needed them back on to finish. After a pause and some consultation with the tech director who was down on the floor something was said about "board" and "working" and eventually it began to emerge that he *couldn't* bring those lights back up for some reason. All this involved a lot of shouting back and forth, because all the Rat Shack FRS radios had earlier and quite spontaneously developed an odd problem where if a headset was plugged in, they'd go into transmit and stay there. So we had for the time being given up on them. Gradually it became clear that the board, which had worked fine up until that moment, had just lost its little mind entirely. It wasn't even doing its little mimic LEDs in response to slider movements, after numerous attempts to swap modes, cycle power, mess with the built-in chases, etc. The only thing it seemed able to do successfully anymore was the "everything full on" button [which is very badly placed under the heel of the right hand, I'll add], which would not be particularly useful for a show. So basically our board had just totally died in the student's hands, right before house-open, and all our efforts to run around shortening the DMX loop and try different power points and whack it back into shape completely failed. There was no time to scare up a replacement from *anywhere* on campus, let alone get him used to a totally different console in zero time. I felt really bad for him, as we realized that he would never really get his chance to show off the fruits of the entire day's effort by running the show for all the parents and offspring now sitting around at the tables in the room and waiting patiently for the techs to stop running around like a freshly-exposed ant nest. A decision was made to simply bring the house lights back on and run the play regardless -- about the best we could do. There are also a couple of crufty old Altman spotlights at the back of the hall, which a couple of us jumped on to try and get a *little* extra light on the stage. Basically, Walker is the repository for all the cruddy followspots that have been rejected from various other venues around the campus. Halfway through the show these also gave out as the [one!] breaker feeding their outlets eventually became warm enough under the 2000 watt load and tripped, somewhere else deep in the bowels of the building and not locatable in the nearby panels I already knew about. I went back down to inform the TD that that option was no longer available to us either, and the best thing that the lighting department could possibly deliver would be judicious use of that "full-on" button on the smoking ruins of the light board to try making some approximation of our "rocket take-off" at the end anyway. At that point I was asked to not only go ahead with that, but for me to sneak up on stage and make the rocket actually *fly* during that minute-plus sound effect that originally was supposed to happen in blackout, giving the impression of "time passes and we're in this rocket, see." But now this was under mostly-full house light that we couldn't turn off again [without going back into the kitchen and rapidly throwing a whole mess of ill-labeled circuit breakers] so we had to do *something* to try and save the end of the show. My flight was apparently fairly amusing, as I hammed it up a slight bit with a couple of full flips and classic bad fifties-SF hanging-on-cables prop jitter, finally more or less judging the end of the sound clip in time to make it crash to earth [not the moon, as it turned out] nose-first and come to a quivering halt. I then just stayed put crouched behind it as the Canadian mountie rode up on his wheeled hobby-horse to survey the wreckage and the passengers wandering around wondering why the moon had so much snow and say "what's all this, eh?" I think these last-ditch bits to make the show go on despite the obvious tech problems, coupled with some real enthusiasm on the part of our student actors who tried *very* hard to get mostly off-book by the end of that day really carried it, because overall I think it was declared a success. Especially given the timeframe for the whole thing. But I will never, ever again think for one minute to consider American DJ / Elation equipment as reliable enough to base a show around. Forget it, full stop. Hopefully some of those who are trying to rely on this blight upon the industry will read and heed this lesson, but somehow I doubt it because it's generally not in their self-developed job description to care. Teardown went fairly quickly despite losing a certain amount of available hands to roving parents wanting their little darlings to please come home right now, but we managed to trundle it all back down to storage in the basement and sort it out as to ownership, even including swapping all the source-4 barrels back around to undo the preassembly I had done in the morning. Those of us left finishing this got done in enough time to still get over to Royal East for the tail of the celebratory dinner, which we, as the last people out of the venue after moving a bunch of heavy stuff around really needed by then. There was much speeching and back- patting and wolfing down of still mostly warm food. If the movers and shakers of Splash choose to put the script online somewhere, it might be worth a read. The actual dialog was written by one of the instructors who is also quite the playwright himself, but most of the storyline and twists came from our brainstorming sessions with the students and sufficient punchy, late-night development. And it certainly made a full day's production work for a bunch of us. _H*