Arisia
is always an entertaining mix of busting my ass and aesthetic play.
Theatre and production tech and its supporting infrastructure, when done
right, is itself a form of performance -- a symphony of motion, timing,
art, and science all executed within a universe of gratuitously heavy and
hazardous objects governed by disproportionately delicate control. From the
logistics that gets the gear where it needs to be to the designs driving how
it is all put together and operated, the end result boils down to how it
*looks* and *sounds* to the viewer when all of that underlying complexity
is abstracted away. Helping construct all those layers upon which the
audience experience rests makes it fun on a multitude of levels.
This year's theme was "weird science", and be it fiction or fact, I think the combination of being a new hotel and experimenting with some hitherto mostly-unknown lighting gear fit that concept pretty well. [As usual, each small picture links to a larger one.] |
Then we all meandered over to the hotel. Its docks are completely under
cover -- nice to have in inclement weather. Vehicles were still tracking
in a lot of wet, salty ook but fortunately that was mostly confined to the
driveway.
I pulled in along with our truck and unloaded a relative minimum of my
personal gear, and then went to bury the car for the weekend in one of
the local surface lots.
Where the Cambridge Hyatt had given Arisia a very favorable rate on weekend parking in their own deck, the Westin refused to consider anything of the kind and self-park would be a minimum of $28 a day or something. Unfortunately the nearby commercial lots aren't that much better, and now completely dehumanized as the only payment option is a credit card with a good mag-stripe on the back. No more real live people in the booths. And they wonder why South Boston isn't blossoming as they thought it would as an attractive event nexus, even with the airplane-hangar-like BCEC right in its midst. |
The design documents and many other supporting files for this event can be found here, which will help explain some of the specifics mentioned throughout this. As our first go at adapting to this new space, I thought it all worked out rather well with very few compromises needing to be made on the fly. This is one very clear benefit of having a commonly-agreed-upon *room design* laid out well in advance and then everyone building from that instead of trying to jam six different ideas together at the last minute under time pressure. Go, us! |
To get the maximum height, I wanted most of the lights top-hung, especially
for a roughly identical load-balancing scheme when one side of the room
would be on triangle-truss and one side on box. Why? Because
ALPS
doesn't have quite enough square 12" forks for the L-16
crank lifts, which seems odd but I accomodated the limitation by accepting
the tri-truss where I could. Clearly, thought several of our crew, the
easiest way to do this hang was to monkey along on top of the truss rather
than wrestle with a long reach top-hang from a short ladder.
Here, however, we seemed to be contemplating the problem of passing wire over that huge piece of doorframe architecture. It's over 16 feet high, but is clearly the right way to get cabling past the traffic point without running on the floor. The modified layout and additional length has been documented in the post-con diagram making it easier to plan for this hop in the future. To connectorize that piece of run, it turns out a 50-foot cable will hang a couple of feet from the floor at both ends and conveniently connectorize the segment. In the case of the lighting stuff, the ends could just drop right onto the truss. |
Since ladders for this would be dicey and cumbersome, the obvious solution was to assemble and use the scaffold work platforms which would later double as focus tools and finally followspot towers. |
We were reaching the point where lights would be ready to test, so it was
time to haul out the board and get the rest of the dimmer pack plugged up.
The Colorblazes, seen here in the background, would also have to be laid
out along the cyc now that it was in place and dedicated power run for them.
Each 72-incher draws 420 watts at full white, so two circuits for the bunch
of them. The DMX run would then complete through the cyc units and then
over to the last stage boom.
The Smartfade represented a bit of an experiment in terms of control for the events we were about to do. But at this point we only needed to test rig functionality; I set it up on the stage so a single person could check channels just by looking around. | |
This year had the interesting wrinkle that it mattered which way the 'Blazes were laid down, because we were subsplitting each unit into two parts so that each one took six DMX addresses. But the "low end" of a Colorblaze is fixed, so to have a nice 1:1 channel slider correspondence to which stripe of color comes up on the cyc, the unit has to be oriented correctly. I think it's toward the power connector, but don't quite remember. There are also little numbers on the LED modules inside. Having them oriented all the same way also gives a little better beam uniformity when the units are physically aligned the same, making focus a little more straightforward. This came up last year as well, but I didn't really note it in that writeup as we either got lucky on endian-ness or just quietly fixed it. Anyway, note for next time -- determine the physical low end, and orient that toward stage right. |
... stop playing with the Colorblazes long enough to have a quick tech meeting. |
The venue actually does have pull-down hard-points in the ceiling, from which
trusses could be flown on motors. So why the wheezy ol' crank-ups? Because
to fly anything in this space requires that PSAV, the in-house production
staff, get involved and that means spending about five times the money to
get the show together as well as having to coordinate with their riggers to
change anything. As in many venues around Boston, they have a stranglehold
on the function space and many aspects of its usage. The only way we had to
circumvent that was to bring everything from the floor with our own gear.
I'm sure the PSAV guys appreciated the long weekend off, and we found their
closets full of stored truss and motors anyway and dreamed about what we
might have had. Fortunately, the L-16s at their maximum height actually fit
the space rather well, gave an acceptable angle onto stage, and didn't look
like the toy toothpicks I thought they might in this big room.
19-degree instruments at this distance were a full stage shot, which was okay since I wasn't counting on any area isolation other than what maybe separate channels in the sidelight could do. Only a little bit of shuttering in the 19s boxed up the front washes quite nicely, not losing a lot of light, and I took *out* the 114 frost I'd originally specified because it was *way* too fuzzy at that distance. A little bit of barrel-out defocus was all that was needed to smooth things out. |
Even the plain ol' construction scaffold from
Lynn Ladder
doesn't get too ugly in a room this big. So all the stuff at house left
here fit in pretty nicely and still left quite a bit of seating room, which
was the whole idea.
Close examination of the scaff on this side reveals a very ghetto lashup to accomodate what became the lighting-control booth. Two stacked tables, and a third thrown in across a cable trunk [where it wouldn't sit flat] for the chairs. It all barely fit in between the X-braces but was actually fairly secure. Why wasn't this just on a mid-level set of work platforms? Because some collective of myself and the Arisia finance department screwed up and failed to actually make sure to order them, and I didn't catch that fact when the delivery came off the truck. So neither scaff could have a mid-level. But we made do, including building a little temporary throne for the masq show-caller on the other side. |
And what of that lone 6x22 cannon sticking out of the scaff, reachable from
the desk? That was for a very special little hack, following the year's
informal secondary theme of ... wait for it ... ponies.
ZOMFG PONIES!!@!#!
I managed to
cut an appropriate gobo
and get it loaded into there without destroying it, and this was put to
astoundingly successful use at the beginning of the Masquerade. Acting
on Joel's brilliant inspiration, Sound played the well-known
THX "deep note" trailer,
and as the chord resolved itself I faded a big pink pony up on the cyc. House
management had seated the conchair *right* up front and center, and from all
reports she was completely doubled over laughing hysterically. And that
after already being completely awash in ponies of all different forms from
many other people. Later the masquerade MC calmly held up a My Little Pony
figure and mentioned this theme, and I brought up the gobo again and made
it gallop around a little by wiggling the back of the leko. More
merriment ensued.
The 6x22, roughly equivalent to a 10-degree, has a multiplying factor of about 0.18. So from around 100 feet back, that's still a pretty big pony. But the gobo looked flawless, possibly because of an unavoidable very slight blurring from the light even at best focus. [Which, in this case, was beyond where the barrel screw would allow it to travel so for best equine-crispy-critterness it had to hang halfway out the end with nothing but friction retaining it.] And it fit on the cyc, which at this juncture was kind of important. I didn't even have a formal dimmer output run back there for it -- I drove the Leko with this little redneck two-channel, uh, test "board" [literally, mounted on wood] made from a couple of old dorm-burner dimmers with the linearizer hack added. |
While I took almost no pictures of the actual events, here's one example of how well my intentionally "sidelight-heavy" rig worked -- playing with some looks as Faebotica set up on stage. I could have any color on the talent from either side, and the cyc looking *completely* different as the sidelight didn't touch it. Add a minimum of face light, barely visible on the backdrop but enough to round out figures, and I thought it was a nice stage picture. A very careful look here reveals where the main warm/cool washes cross through the drape gap and intersect, and to either side the rounder output of the additional "shadow-killers" from fresnels on the side pipes. There was an almost non-noticeable color shift between main and "killer" only on the warm side, but with everything else up there was no way it would start being an issue. And no shadows of the *side trees* themselves showed up on the cyc via the main wash, which mildly bit me last year -- this time we pulled 'em far enough back to really work well and integrate with the rest of the rig's intentions. Straddling the drapeline has many merits. | |
Another reason I didn't get many event shots was that there was a video
camera and often its operator right between me and center stage when I was
sitting in the lighting booth. And speaking peripherally of video, I had
to balance sidelit subtlety versus completely washing out the cyc with
front-light for the sake of the cameras, and there was a bit of the usual
bickering about human vs. camera perception levels. Okay, so I got it a
little wrong a few times but was quick to cheat the "fred" up a little
brighter when the request rolled in. Maybe when prosumer video gear
finally gives a fully manual iris at an affordable price point, this
issue will settle down for us. C'mon, guys, this is Art!
The backdrop texture, of course, was from glass lenticular gobos in the Martin 918s. These took a decidedly secondary role this year, as the whole club-dance event was in an entirely different space on the other end of the hotel and other than me renting him some infrastructure basics, was handled soup-to-nuts by DJPet and his vanload of *very* fun toys. My only mild shadow problem came from the throw of the wiggle-lights which couldn't be shuttered to avoid hitting the side trees in a "cyc spread" position anyway. But for random textural add-ons, who cares. |
Faebotica played a nice little rehearsal to about ten of their closest
friends, the PMRP radio-play ran, and then it was time for
Teseracte
to take over and do their thing. They owned the room after midnight
for *all three* main nights of the convention, which was one reason for
having the ability to simplify lighting-control as much as needed.
Their lighting guy likes having a few useful basics under his fingers,
so he got his very own scene-memory page in the Smartfade which I added
a few things to as he asked for them.
Teseracte's performers double as crew as needed, so sometimes they just have to climb scaffold in dress heels. I wish I'd gotten a better shot of this, as it was all rather funny. |
The room plan worked out fairly well in general. The IMAG looked great and
nothing got in its way including my lights or any people backstage, and as
far as I know nobody even stumbled into any of the projector tripods. Our
dead-case pile at backstage right could have been made a little neater, as
it spilled a little far into real estate that the large groups of performers
needed, but it wasn't a total mess and we could still find things. We wound
up cable-ramping the house back left door anyway instead of flying everything
on the truss, as sound didn't have quite enough snake to make the hop. The
room's 100+ feet long but a lot more cable gets eaten when you start going
around the periphery in addition! And after I tucked a couple of
permanently-on safety lights under the rear risers, the fact that we
had a big gap next to the entry/exit path was much less of a hazard.
For the record, out of 40 sandbags ordered, we had about 8 remaining in the trunk once everything was up. 40 is probably about the right number to have on hand. One thing we need to think about better in the future is that if we have ASL interpreters, we plan where they're going to stand way before we did in this instance. That light got focused with the house open before the Masquerade, and that's just lame. If an MC podium can be planned on a room plot, so can an ASL signer, its lighting throw lines, and the block of hearing-impaired seating. The hotel staff was really excellent to us. The electrician couldn't find his 50-foot camlok feeders and came back with a batch of 100-footers and a gush of apologies, and y'know, they conducted electricity just fine so we were all good. That, by the way, is unusual -- the hotel can supply feeders to a client's dimmer pack or PDU as part of the electrical package they sell. The housemen bent over backwards to get us what we wanted and ask for direction on where to put things to not be in our way, and didn't blink when we went hunting for more tables in the catering storage room ourselves. They were really careful with the airwall when moving it, and knew where to stack chairs to not be in our way at all. Everyone I ran into in the back hallways, security office, docks, up and down the staff elevators and across the main lobby -- all very cordial, "good morning, how are you", really giving the feeling that our staff and their staff were all working together as a team, and *nobody* in those sectors gave me any crap about being barefoot or even looked down funny. [While it's been claimed to me that someone went to bat for that particular latter cause at the administrative level as part of informing the hotel about how Arisia works, I don't buy that as the sole reason that none of the hotel staff cared about it. Such things rarely reach down to the level of the staff we were commonly dealing with anyway, and furthermore I was around over the summer for some of the early walkthroughs and it wasn't any sort of issue then either. They just appear to have the wisdom to not care about it or want to groundlessly impinge on any guest's comfort.] |
I did manage to escape the Grand complex every so often and run around a
little. Speaking of the dance tent, here it is with its seven acres of
dancefloor. I only got one shot of its early build but we already see a
couple of issues. The stands need to be much farther out, as it's generally
a bad idea to cantilever long sticks of truss. [That got fixed before hang
happened.] What I didn't catch here was also the fact that the truss was
bolted up wrong, not continuing the brace pattern through two joints.
That's a little more minor but not the safest thing if it was going
to be under full load. Which it wasn't.
Jim sent in his own report on the dance space later, which I've turned into something of an equipment link-fest and reposted. Hopefully other people got pictures of the dance-tent when it was up and running. It would probably be difficult, as Jim's stuff tends to keep up a pretty fast pace when it's running and as he points out, low-light-capable video would probably work better. |
I didn't see a whole lot of the con from staying relatively busy downstairs, but did get up to the staff den and some other spaces once in a while. From the upper floors I could look out toward the Laz parking facility and spot the fact that my car was still where I'd left it. |
In contrast to many other regional cons, we had quite a number of events
here besides just the Masquerade. I got to do some nice aesthetics with
the belly dancers, and a bunch of cues banged in by total guesswork for the
Our Hideous Future musical folks seemed to keep them reasonably happy. By
the end of the weekend the board had crazy bunches of memory stored,
occasionally spooled off to the SD card [visible as a vertical red line to
the right of the knob in the big pic, which I surmise is ALPS paint on the
card's back edge as they intend it to just be left in there]. The board
labeling is a bit contrast-enhanced here for actual readability. The
"baseline" subs used to construct everything else were on the yellow tape,
and my intent was that per-show subsets and derivatives would be copied
into memories on different pages and labeled on changeable white tape
lower down. That's pretty much how it happened. We didn't come close
to running short.
[Yes, we peeled all that gubbish off before packing up the board...] | |
As mentioned, getting this board instead of some of our more traditional
consoles was a bit of an experiment. It's got all the usual basics, but
some minor UI issues that I worried would make things a little more difficult
here and there. Before the con I sent out some preliminary thoughts on
board organization, and with the show [or our many shows] now done I've
added a followup. Executive summary: it worked. The whole thing can be
read here,
likely of any interest only to lighting-control geeks and/or those who
have run their own shows on these and want to see just how full of crap
I am. Those interested in exploring this more can also find all the
documentation and offline emulators at
ETC's website
[turn on cookies and user-agent headers or they won't talk to you].
Just for completeness I've also saved our final
SHOW03.ASC file
for perusal as well, showing how memories and cues and patch get saved.
Memories are called "group", and note that they go up to 576 in the case
of this board -- 48 subs * 12 pages worth. After that, about three-quarters
through the file, comes the patch. The funny business starting around DMX
49 and up in the patch is a hack to collect all the common cyc-unit colors
together into their own channel blocks, e.g. "all reds", "all greens", etc.
Everything else is simply 1:1.
There's one particular nasty UI trap involving memory page 1; that's described in smartfade.txt too and is good to remember for future show planning. The tape over the "G" SeaChanger sliders was to keep the "super green" wheel out of the picture for those used to mixing simple CMY, as it really doesn't add [or, ahem, subtract] that much in a beneficial way to any color selections unless you're striving for a really pure green. Which we rarely seem to. But that's what it's for if you need it. |
Repeat after me: "Hobbit is *not* going to TD. Hobbit is *not* going to
TD." ...
While I would really love us to be a really crack crew with perfect workflow, solid communication, and gracefully-executed high clue all round, this is volunteer labor and it's just not possible to be selective. Some of the folks who show up *are* really good, and that's how stuff gets built quickly and right. But in every group there are invariably a few slackers and drones, sour notes that consistently ruin the symphony of technical production for the rest of us. Perhaps, after I don't know how many years now, it's time to face this problem and solve it. The fact that I'd even bring any of this up in the middle of a rundown on an otherwise fun weekend should speak volumes about why I could never be an effective TD, but if the deeper particulars of this are interesting in the slightest they are held in a separate rant which is likely to come off a little harsh. You're warned. |
SmartFade user manual -- for software version 3, which we were using
midpix11.txt --
direct, unencumbered links to Sandy Middlebrooks' perennially mediocre
shots from the Masquerade greenroom
[Apparently, no shots of the actual show this year]
The Post-Meridian Radio Players, presenters of the "Dr. Who Starship of Madness" show
Arisia Livejournal community, where there are likely to be several other sets of pictures posted
Arisia Facebook group wall, where even more picture sets will likely show up. Should be mostly visible to non-farcebook users, a refreshingly rare configuration