Xmas Hols

"
Dance City Tech is now on winter holiday till the 4th of Jan 2011, we've had a pretty cool autumn season and are over due a break...

If your inquiry is urgent please call: 07980585577

Else please only expect sporadic replies till then.

Still, seasons greetings and best wishes for the New Year from James and 'Team'.

Look forward to speaking to you soon :)
"

QLab

Wow, wow, wow!
Today I had a school in for their xmas show... they brought in a load of video files... different types, aspects, sizes, various artifacts etc.
So we ran the matinee using; Quicktime, Windows Media Player and Real Player on their laptop. Which worked, but I was left guessing where the end of the playback was and trying to open the projector shutter just as the OSD was fading out. Ho humm, not stressful but really was a bodge.
I thought that there must be a better way... I've seen people using QLab and knew it did video.. just have never touched it myself. And here was an opportunity begging for the control it should give.

So I bought a one day license... booted up the software... fiddled with the video output settings, then my Mac, then re rendered some of the footage... and bingo a show!
Awesome, didn't even need their manual.
Highly recommended... and their support, well nearly instantaneous... although I had sent them a thank you email not a bug report! ;)
I'm going to be using this a lot now I suspect.
QLab: http://figure53.com/qlab/

Sorting a PA installation (again)

I still have a few legacy jobs that I just can't seem to shift. Here's one of them, although to be fair considering the time it's been in - it's not really so much trouble.
Alvino's Bar is probably my best installation. This would be due to the fact that I really didn't want to do it so stood my ground on budgets for equipment.
It's a zoned system.
Main PA is RCF Accoustica series... top notch,  powerful, passive boxes in a small tidy enclosure.
JBL contractor series in ceiling speakers, great dispersion and ease on installation.
Yamaha P series amps. Awesome value for money, attractive with some nice touches.
DBX brains: a Zonepro 640 and a Driverack PA.
It's the 640 that holds it all together. It adds remote control, all the delays, and auto leveling.

 The 640 that I installed is serial only for programming which is a bit of a faff these days. Plus the software is windows only... hence the bootcamp and prey the usb serial drivers work! Which they did very well.

1st Show Day Tomorrow...

Silk goes live tomorrow...

It's been a challenge working with the company... one that allows the director to be questioned... but that could just be me and the fact that I don't do a lot of theatre.

Still, lots of interesting things learned about the making process that will help with future work :)

I'm already looking forward to seeing what comes next!

Good day teching for Silk :)

Didn't get to drop the load though! Disappointed! :/

Confetti drop update :)

Whoop! It works... the LEDs have stopped blowing up, the additional diode has even (not surprisingly really) stopped all electrical noise from the system.

This ran over 20m mic xlr cables with no bother too... Now to load em up, make a mess... and hope they don't get cut! :/

Flhip Flhop

A top performance tonight by Rannel. Amazing timing and super jokes.. good crowd - other than a particularly outspoken kid :)
Once again it was brilliant to welcome a lovely company into the Lab, will look forward to the next time they come this way.

I did learn a little more about effective touring LX today too, which is always useful :)

3x Solenoids

Yesterday I was making up three 3 solenoid circuits to allow remote operation of some confetti drops.
The prototyping went well, except that I burned out the 12v indicator LEDs.

So it looks like I have to add a reverse bias diode across each coil to prevent the back EMF of the magnetic field collapsing from overloading the LEDs the wrong way.
Vid of the end result will follow soon! :)

She writes again...

More Mac repairs...
The G5 editing machine has been having trouble writing CD/DVDs that are readable in our show playback. (The show playback is a TASCAM CD01U and therefore quite picky!).
Today I replaced the original DVD writer with a new one... not a lot of choice on IDE writers it seems.

The new LG went in quite easily and preliminary test burns have gone well :)

Just another day at the Mill

So after a month or so of preparation Ockham's Razor finally arrive with their show the Mill. I was glad we had done the pre preparation work, everything went in quite nicely. This is what we ended up with... Quite unusual I think you'd agree! :)

We had a great time with the company, they were all very professional and lovely to work with, would have them back anytime.
Do check out their website I have linked, they've some interesting work and videos on there.

Sketchup again...

To save model boxing a show that is being created... I offered to build it in 3d in Sketchup. It's been a while since I've run the app, and also it's seemed a good project to use to start getting to know my new MacBook with!

I started with importing PDF plans of the ground floor layout. Then overlaying construction lines that I tidied up and then pulled up into 3d. Only done some of the stage and half the seating rake so far... check back soon for a more finished view of the Dance Lab at Dance City.

Just Jam 2010 International Battle (and sequences!)

This weekend just gone has been a busy one... following the New Art Club show we had two sold out houses for a Bboy theatre show and then a Bboy international battle.
All the performances involved busy turnarounds in to various configurations.

Most importantly we finally understood how to write chases on the Congo Jr. And this wasn't as painful as expected... and it helped us to make it look like we were doing much more work than we may have been! ;)
Give it a couple of days then search for "just jam 2010" on Youtube... there should be plenty of evidence!

Backstage :)

Tomorrow night we have the New Art Club in for a performance. They asked if we could reduce the stage size down to 6m... Obviously happy to help. So we've moved the upstage tabs to midstage.
Shame we only have the extra space for one night only as we have BBoying in for the two nights following...

Valley of the Dolls

We have Ballet Lorent in at the moment...
They have a few additional members of the cast in the form of a load of Dolls from Habitat. I've asked for fire ratings on them already... but now it's the day before the show I insisted...
Turns out they are pretty flammable... out comes the Flame Check :)
Here's them drying...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=537GGOjOFLQ

Generators and Stuff

This weekend I was working in Leicester Sq for a Cadburys promotion, Spots and Stripes game.

It was all a bit fraught... missing the last train and just managing to hire a car in time to get me there for a 4am call wasn't good! But this is what greeted me when I got there:

All in, a nice weekend till this:



This is a photo of an xray of the tip of my finger taken at St Thomas's after the jockey wheel of a trailer generator collapsed... Ouch! And thoroughly frustrating now :(

BBC Look North

Yesterday we had a surprise call from the BBC. They wanted to use one of our spaces to film a quick live article on some dance research.
We had a satellite van outside and a crew inside.
I was really pleased with how quickly the Lab accomodated this... and they left with a great impression of the space! :)

DC Atrium

The atrium at DC really does attract a lot of light at all times of the day. This I caught as I was locking up tonight.

Sometimes when the sun is just right we can get real light into the theatre. Usually when when we don't want it to I might add.

Points.

Finally.. and probably not before time, I spoke to the steelwork designer for Dance City. He is a dude caller Wille and works for Arup in Scotland.

I had a question over the suitability of the beams from which we suspend our motors from in the Dance Lab. And after one quick calculation he answered it with a "Yes, that's fine. You have a large safety factor in there. I'll email you the calc"

Awesome!!!

Lesson in this is: Stay away from architects, they are making it up. Speak to designers, they do the work!

And for those that are interested, here is the steelwork layout for the 3rd floor at DC:

Tallescope!

Will probably bite the bullet and move on to a mororised system of access soon. Writing a risk assesment whilst maintaining any sort of productivity with a Tallescope is proving difficult. Just wish I didn't have a sprung dance floor to put a machine on as it rather limits my choices! :(

Carbon Reduction Commitment

Today I got the draft of a CRC report from EDF energy, our electricity supplier...
All organizations have to assess themselves by sometime in Sept 2010 to see if they qualify for the full scheme and if so register with the environment agency. (This would involve buying carbon credits for the following year)
Luckily we don't, although I wasn't sure there for a while... full registration is required when you consume 6,000 Mwh. Now that's a lot of numbers in a row and it confused me.
It turns out we use about 261,926kwh of elec... double that for gas and we use, lets say: 600,000kwh of energy... 10% of the required amount.
As an additional note... I use a logging tool called Smeasure which compares energy usage to degree days (i.e. ambient temp'ish). This service puts us at above average in the efficiency of the use of our energy.

Good, good night...

Show day for the Dance City & Claire Dixon's "Urban Summer School" today.

Awesome!!! Love the kids shows. So much energy :)

Busked the lot with 3 effect chases and groups only on the Congo. Easy as :)  Goes to show that if you need to make it complicated then you could well be making it harder for yourself.

Oh yeah, and there was some Power Point stuff too... But that's now more or less second nature for this sort of gig now! ;)

It takes two... servers

Today.. whilst not feeling that productive, may actually have been a good day.

Got an engineer to replace the motherboard in our exchange server... it's now running on full memory.
Restarted the Databox gateway and re ran the services that facilitate the online ticketing system - this saves a few calls to the ticket office.
Met with a structural engineer to discuss loading capacities of our roof beams - got some great advice.
More or less collated everything we need to register for the Carbon Reduction Scheme (more admin load!)

Tomorrow I may do some techie stuff :)

All's quiet...

This isn't something that you see everyday at DC!

Whilst I was waiting for a meeting to finish... after having used the lift roof to access a fire alarm sounder... I though that I'd play with the setting on the BMS.

I reset a lot of the schedules and finally got it to a point where the boilers actually go into standby. Fingers x'ed they come back on when we need them!! ;)

Rigging Inspection Day :o/

As the title suggests. Today we had our annual rigging inspection. Always a slightly worrying time... not because you'll get caught doing something wrong, but because the cost of a service on a motor can be so high!
Anyway... everything passed and we gleaned some more tips on how to do things better from Darren at SLX. He even helped tidy a few things up for us :)
Here's to another incedent free 12 months! :)

‎"B" for blackout! A very useful key :)

Today I was forced to learn a little about PowerPoint. Thing is I don't have anything against this software... It does do what it says on the tin and on almost any powered system. But until today I'd never had to turn off a presentation without recourse to a switch or shutter...

"F1" to the rescue.. and surprisingly enough the key [B] will 'blackout' a presentation. I may be using this one quite often now! :)

Woo! A Good review.. in the Theatre Guide! :)

One of the most high pressure gigs we have had at DC in a while..
2x techs put in the whole show + additional hires from promoter.. 2days incs. in, show and out!
http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/secondsout-rev.htm
:)

Blimey... I'm behind on my posting!

Must do better...
See what I can catch up this week?
J

Glastonbury!

I'm at Glastonbury Festival at the moment. Been here since a week last Monday.
Quite tired of the gig already, and it's not event the weekend yet :(
Still very happy with the job... although it still strikes me as being a weird one when doing corporate at a festival such as this.

Underneath the Floorboards

Finally got to teching today on "Underneath the Floorboards". Set, lights and performers are superb (view from the Tallescope above). I'm sorry to be missing the rest of the project... Especially as it seems a bit damp out there and my next few weeks will be in a field at Glastonbury!

For more information about this show: Underneaththefloorboards

Tell them you know me if you speak to them! ;)

Taking it easy at work.

Today we've been getting in the set for Ballet Lorent's "Underneath the Floorboards", a show for young kids.

Here's Charlie on her lunch break :)

ALG at Public Announcement

This is a shot taken in rehearsals for Public Announcement last week.

It shows Anthony in front of the projection for his piece. We experimented with some wacky side lighting - super saturated colours.

Andy used VDMX on his Mac to get the origional video images to fill the cyc nicely.

Don't let Andy at me...

I think I'll try to fix this one myself...

With a bit of luck it could just be the mobo battery?

End of tech days.

This is the last moments of the last tech in the Dance Lab.

Now follows three days of shows of the students work.

This week is all about the degree shows...

And if I get time I'll post photos...
Don't hold your breath!?
;)

What else have I done this week?

Well this pile of "risen from the dead" PCs was a bit of a result...
The whole process was much speeded up by a disk clone utility that did the job nicely: HDClone3.8

Once the HDD was cloned all that remained was to hack the OEM windows key to the one on the box and rename it to a known one on the network... good as new... although largely untested in the wild as yet, but I remain hopeful! :)

Tidy set up..

Last bit of prep for the degree shows next week. Trying a new arangement of the kit and seeing if it makes a difference to do a complete soft patch for the shows.

We don't normally soft patch as we work with groups for the most part. I think this may be making us lazy so a neat channel layout may help me plot more interesting presets over the coming 26 pieces!!

Not quite what I expected?!

So I've been pestering the Degree lot for tech specs for all of their 26 pieces to be shown over 3 days...

Today I was given these:

Various sizes of paper, some actually readable... still only 12 of them :/

Oh well...

Getting there!

It's been a bit of a slog getting the Saros gig together because to save money we've been borrowing kit from here and there.

But today it really came together. Twirlies are here along with a band. Lights are in and PA from STUK Sound arrives tomorrow. 4 stacks of D&B - way too much, I'll not be turning it all the way up.

Had a result with video too. We couldn't get hold of enough coax cable so some of the long runs were done via ballens and CAT5. Worked a treat :) Just need to bodge a projector shutter for the one without a Walberg and that's all sorted.

Doesn't look like much

But it was a steady morning to get to this stage:

Before and After:

A couple of shots of the Fire Station - (Saros) before the production and the dancers arrive.
Some very nice people at BIC hired us a scrubber/drier, without which I'd never have got the place so clean!! :)

Before:-

After:-

Coming soon

Preparing for the new Cloud Commission art work to go on the walls of the Social Space at DC.

The last work was very popular and we are really pleased to have him back.

http://thecloudcommission.blogspot.com/

Not a workin' day! :)

So today we weren't working...

We were up in Northumberland climbing on gritstone.

My word it hurts your fingers a lot more than indoor bouldering!

:o/

3D so far...

Less than a week till we get on site for the Fire Station gig now...

This is the latest render of the 3D Sketchup model I'm using for laying it all out to scale.

The director keeps changing things about but with this app it's easy to keep it all up to date :)

Vinyls

Here we have a quick vinyl job that I did today.

Customers have been a little confused as to which studios are which.

So there are now big numbers on the doors too!

Just when I thought it was safe...

I found myself sat in the void above the ticket office with a multimeter, a screwdriver and a torch fixing the control for one of our smoke curtain's.

What started out as a simple battery swap ended up with a search to find an intermittant break in the continuity of the hold up signal for the curtain.

Not a job that could have been put off unfortunatly as the curtain that would normally only drop to protect the ticket office was releasing it's self of it's own accord cutting off Janine from our customers.

So that's where the water is coming from...

We keep getting a leak somewhere above the USR stage door. It's been a bit of a mystery till this week.

There was a major amout of water on the floor during a rain storm and I actually had enough time to investigate. Looking high and low and getting very confused.

Finally we opened a hatch into some ventalation ducting and this is what we found!
Mystery solved, just got to figure out what to do next...

Someone filled my dock up...

So we put the access tower in the accessible changing room!

Just fits!

:)

Say no more! :o/

http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/fire/pdf/150865.pdf

Odd thing to fix..

Today I was fixing a really heavy thing. This is the generator on the roof that is used as a back up supply for the smoke extract fans in an emergency.

On an earlier inspection the indicators showed that it had failed to start. The short term remidy was to install a new 017 battery. It was fun getting it up the ladder to the genset!!

10hrs...

Phew!
In 10 hrs today we did a rig/focus/plot and run for TVD and their Kick Off production, then an AGM for the Children's Foundation, followed by prepping for 3 contempoary classes. (Also including dropping the bairn off / collecting from school and loading set in to my van ready for a trip to Saddlers Wells.

To pre rig or not to pre rig...

Today I was asked for a pre rig on a show that's coming up. I haven't even been sent their plot yet!

The shame for them is that they are now at the end of a three night run of different shows in the venue. We'll do our best, but the time to have bought it up was at contract stage several months ago...

Well that was odd...

Today was pretty busy. Moving set, looking at fire risk assessment plans... and then a rock gig in an art gallery, the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle.!

All active or digital kit... which meant traveling light and home at a decent time.

The Lab

This is a view of the Lab having just been turned around from a daytime residency into night time classes. Easier than it looks :)

Nee Naww

Early'ish start today for a photo shoot for an upcoming site specific dance production. The gig is in an old fire station, so access into the site is great but it does offer a lot of challenges.

After that it was straight into meetings with Yorkshire Dance.  We were showing them how we do things at DC and then trying to learn from each other.

All part of the job... :o/

Oh the glamour of this job!!!

On my way back from a trip to Stage Elecs today, I get a call from Clare saying that there is water coming through the ceiling of the Playroom. So I rush back to see what I can do whilst we wait for the maintenance contractors to arrive.

I end up with my head in the access area of the cisterns in the ladies changing, looking at a hole in a cistern where the divert should be. Luckily when the engineer arrived he had spares. A trip to B&Q for a wet/dry vacuum and an annoyingly late night later, it's sorted.

300 plotting for Fathom at Saddlers Wells

Today Andy Coates was in pre-plotting a show for The Fathom Project that we are both working on at Saddlers Wells, as they have a Strand 530i there. I designed the original lighting for the shows at Dance City quite a while ago.

This 300 is the old DC house desk. It came with the original installation of the Dance Lab and really didn't last very long as a reliable desk. It received some tlc from service engineers but the "0" button remains a bit of an issue as spares are now unavailable for it!

Nevertheless it is still a handy piece of kit to have about for those techs that come in that just don't have the time to pick up the syntax of the Congo Jr.

Tonight I'm trying to put together a vid to the show on Saturday. Video isn't really my thing. I'm happy cutting up a single camera shoot down to something that is DVD ready... but this time I enlisted some help and shot with two cameras.

I wish I had more time to set them up properly... they aren't quite white balanced the same or even leveled the same. Ho hum!

I do a lot of the video stuff at home as there just aren't enough hours in the day at work. Here I use Sony Vegas and this is due to growing up with Soundforge I guess. Vegas certainly seems to be good value for money and fairly easy to get good results with.

Goodbye and hello :)

Today was the last day of Fiona Wright's residency at Dance City. Fiona gained a place in a pilot scheme we are running called Labspace. She had a good week in our Dance Lab working on video and material for her ongoing work. She's off to Berlin again now but we are looking forward to her coming back soon.

Then it was hello to my Venue Assistant, Clare, who's had a few days off. With her back, we managed to get a head start on tomorrow's performances by pre focusing and then more or less dressing one of the pieces that we'll be presenting. There is a great vibe around tomorrows event. Hopefully I'll be offering a bit of video of it soon after.

Gobo wash for Michaela and Rachel

Here are the lanterns that are making a gobo wash for Michaela and Rachael's piece to be performed this weekend. Selecon Acclaim zoom profiles are what they are. They are quite bright considering that their rating is 600W and generally a tidy fixture. Downside to them are that the yolks always need tightening up, they take an 'M' size gobo (this size isn't a popular one to tour it seems) and the lamp can be a bugger to get out in one piece.

We generally use gobos from Rosco and in particular you would find 77406 in our lanterns.