Last week, I wrote about set load-in. With everything pre-built, two reasonably full days and we had a working set that the cast could rehearse on. Wednesday evening, with no rehearsal, I had a quiet theater to myself and I worked on details and base painted the floor. Friday, my architecture partner Gary Karasek, Patrick and I did artistic touches and painted the floor like hardwood.
While the set load-in was pretty smooth and easy, after base painting the floor on Wednesday and then wood graining the whole thing on Friday afternoon, we were hurting...that was nearly three hours on our hands and knees. A little taste of hell... ;)
Friday late afternoon, we picked up lights and began hang and focus. I decided to start in the hard places first...get that out of the way. The hardest lights to hang and focus are always the ones that you have to get above and around the set. Of course, the set doesn't HAVE to be there to hang and focus, but it sure helps to be able to point at the real thing instead of assuming that it will be where you expect it to be. The trade off is you are climbing an extension ladder 20 feet in the air and nearly straight up, hanging on with one hand, leaning over the set and adjusting a light with the other. And it is hot as "hell" at the ceiling of a theater with the lights on...
Some facilities have really nice accommodations for their lighting staff like catwalks that you can walk right out on to or at the very least built in ladders. Once you are up there, you may have to duck and crouch, but you have a flat surface to stand on.
Other facilities are a bit rougher...you have to hang each light from below on a ladder. That means at least one trip up and down the ladder for each instrument you hang. And if you have to stretch a cable because the receptacle is not within reach of the hang point, it can be many more trips.
For Night of the Living Dead, we used 48 instruments. It is a modest but reasonable light plot for a stage the size of ours. With all of the refocusing and adjusting, I am quite sure that we made well over 100 trips up and down the ladders Friday night and and Saturday. Now, we are REALLY starting to feel the "hell"... ;D
After everything was hung Saturday at about 7PM, we start going channel by channel, testing and discover that 8 of the 48 dimmers will not dim. They stay at full brilliance until they reach 5% and then drop out. We tried everything we could think of. Finally, after a 14 hour day on Friday and a 12 1/2 hour day on Saturday, we decided to clean up our mess and go. Scott recommended that I talk with Ken Zinkl to see if he had any ideas. But by the time I got home at 10:30PM (after a well-deserved beer and burger for Patrick, Melanie and myself) it was too late to call Saturday. A little bit of respite from the "hell"...
Sunday morning, I have a conversation with Ken and he doesn't like what he is hearing. Sounds like the electronic control board for the one dimmer pack has gone out. He suggested that I talk to our lighting rental company to see if they have something we can swap in. I finally return to the theater Sunday evening (I needed some downtime to rest my aching muscles) and get a hold of Mark Shilling at the rental company who really knows his shit about lighting equipment. He talked me through resetting the dimmer racks and behold...everything works! WOW! Stress relieved.
So I spent Sunday evening building some "looks" for the stage and just taking my light plot for a test drive to see what I could do with it. Overall, I am pretty pleased.
So, after two long weekends and a lot of sore muscles, a little stress and frustration, confusion and dismay, and ultimate success, I can say that "hell week(s)" are in full-swing for the scenic and tech staff.
God, I love doing this!!!! :)
R
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