Day 17

I realized I haven't shown you the theatre from this angle. Boring, I know. I'm in at 5pm for tech rehearsal, so i'll try and make up for it!)

Today we kicked butt! We had a worklist ready for us when we walked in, which included a bunch of the roof/catwalk tasks that i've been wanting to finish. We finally relocated the wireless intercom antenna (moving it closer to the audience, so we have better reception in the house during technical rehearsals) and tweaked one of our trap cameras from yesterday. We also moved the B-lift camera farther upstage (closer to the back deck), although i'm not sure why; I guess they just wanted a different angle. Allan worked on the CellCom antenna while I worked on the B-lift camera, and we got both done well before rehearsal began on-stage.

As I was coming down from the catwalks, I got a copy of the rehearsal report for "Madame Butterfly", the show currently rehearsing on-stage and the show that i'm in charge of for this season. There was an A/V request for two torm monitors, one on each side of the stage (I'll try and get a photo soon to visually explain these). As I mentioned before, there are video monitors around the perimeter of the proscenium arch all facing towards the stage. They show a video feed of the conductor, so the performers on-stage can stay on tempo and receive their music cues. When a performer is facing off-stage, they obviously cannot see these monitors or the conductor, so they need a video monitor in their line of sight. We have some small flat-screen monitors that are great for this, so we hung them just inside the first lane/torm.

Unfortunately, these TVs have received a good amount of abuse over the years, and their video input connections are broken. There are some custom-made jacks on them also, but since they're not labeled (surprise!) we couldn't get them to work either. So, instead of giving the rehearsal what it requested, i'm sitting in the control room fighting with a monitor to show a simple image. Through a roundabout set of adapters, we eventually got video on the stage left side. However, I couldn't get video on the right side. I triple-checked my connections, and I knew there was a conductor feed on the stage right side because the rover was getting video, and the rover was plugged into the video amplifier (also called a distribution amplifier, or DA).

Wrong.

What I learned way too late in the morning is that the DA was NOT getting a conductor feed. Why? Well, a week ago we learned that the conductor DA on the stage right side needs to be receiving an amplified signal itself (because it's so far away from the control room). Instead of hard-wiring the stage right conductor DA into the back of a DA in the control room, it got plugged into an unlabeled jack on the patch bay, THEN wired into a DA in the control room. When I went to patch something else the day before and needed a patch cable (because we were out), I assumed since the jack it was plugged into wasn't labeled, then it was left over from last season.

It's funny, I get called anal-retentive because I obsessively label things, but here I am, wasting time fixing broken shit because it ISN'T LABELED, instead of doing actual work.

I fix the DA issue, get signal stage right to the flat-screen, and all is well. I head back to the control room and chill out for a few minutes, cooling off after getting really frustrated with the whole situation. Oh, and the rover that was getting signal? someone had put a "T" splitter on the camera feed going back to the control room, so the feed was feeding the rover as it was heading back to the control room. Unfortunately, "T" splitters are the devil, if the rover gets unplugged, you now have an open, unshielded connection that can disrupt the camera feed, which will throw off every other monitor receiving that feed. Bad news.

I had to get out of the theatre, so I took a field trip to the Box Office by the main entrance. I needed to return some batteries for our assisted listening headsets, and the Box Office is the group who distributes the headsets to the hard-of-hearing at the start of the performance. We tested their batteries to make sure they still held a charge, and returned them. I also got to chat with the ladies in the box office, and strike up some new friendships that may come in handy later in the season.

I also ventured over to the Gift Shop, some place I haven't been since I got here. They have a pretty neat selection of trinkets and knick knacks, as well as shirts and posters. All pretty expensive, but we get some discounts throughout the season.

I took lunch during the end of the morning rehearsal, and came back just as rehearsal was finishing up. This was a chance for us to get back into the catwalks and hang some sound effects speakers. just underneath the catwalk position. It's a really creative position, because it's just offstage of the stage itself, and can throw pretty decently into the house. What's tricky is that it clips into a small loop barely sticking out of the catwalk. You need one person to hold the speaker on their shoulder, while another puts a shackle through the hanging point. Tricky enough to do, but even harder when the wind decides to blow 30mph and push you around.

We got both speakers hung, their cables ran, and the amplifier patched, and I was ready to push some test sound through them when rehearsal was called back. Damn. So close.



Next, we took the shelf I built yesterday for the stage management desk, and mounted it on top. You may remember this photo which shows just the TV. Usually, there are a bunch of 9" monitors stacked on the upper right portion for trap cameras, but they're not in easy view. Karl asked me to design and build a shelf to hold three monitors underneath, and then the big TV on top. That was yesterday's project, and here's the final result (upper left).

We finished up the day on the mezzanine level, re-wiring some video and audio monitors used for latecomers. The audio and video runs were very convoluted, so we decided to rip them out and start over.

I'm in at 5pm tomorrow night for tech rehearsal, and I hope to get some great photos to make up for the stuff i've been putting up recently.

Cheers!
-Matt