It's all in and ready...mostly (sorry, no pix in this one)

It is hard to believe that I haven't written anything in three weeks.  WOW!  I feel like I have been really negligent in documenting what has been going on. But our usual process has gotten somewhat out of whack because we were able to get into the venue earlier than usual.

As of my last post, we had loaded most of the stuff in and all of the big stuff was installed.  In fact, on what would have originally been set load-in day, everything was already at the theater except for a 17' telephone pole that we brought with us that morning.

As I was deciding how to make one, I mentioned to Larry what I wanted. At his farm, he led me back behind his barn to an old mobile home and pointed by the front step.  Standing there was a power pole that used to serve the mobile home but had long been abandoned after a branch took down the line feeding it. At 8AM on load-in morning, I met him at his farm.  He pulled his backhoe next to it, wrapped a chain around the base of the pole and he yanked it out of the ground on the first pull.  The bottom 5 feet or so were filled with mud and termites, but I had my pole.  We threw it on his trailer, swung by the scenic shop to load up the cafe counter, desk for the sheriff and a bars for the jail and headed for St. Louis.

Getting the telephone pole into the building was a bit of a challenge, but it turned out to not be too terrible.  We stood it up in the fire escape, leaned it against the upper railing and then walked the base up the rest of the steps.  With a rope and ladder, it was standing in place in about 30 minutes and I was adding the cross arm and bracing.

We put the jail together and hung the two wall panels that "float" above the band.  While Patrick and I worked on other details, Kathleen and Melanie  got the bars and the scuffed up edges of the panels painted.  Patrick attached the barber pole and fished cables to the lighting channels for the practicals.  We finished with set load-in in about 4 hours!

The following week, Scott and cast were able to move into the theater and start rehearsing in the space, really adapting to the set early.

The next Thursday, I picked up lights and early Friday morning, Patrick and I began hang and focus.  Melanie came after work at about 4 and by 7, we had everything on the ceiling and mostly focused.  Saturday morning, Melanie and I went back and finished up set details and cleaned up the stage from our previous day.  By mid afternoon on Saturday, the lights were ready to go.

Last Wednesday evening, the theater was dark, so Melanie met me there around 7 and we spent a couple of hours going through the show and kind of getting the light plot "on its feet", so to say.  Sometimes, you just have to play with what you hung and build a few looks until you find things that work.  We recorded about 15 scene presets into the submasters on the board.  These represented base lighting for each of the locations in the show.

By doing these, we had a good pallet to use as we built all of the cues, since the way the show is written and staged, it is a series of interwoven vignettes and the action moves around the stage from one location to another to push the story along.

Last Friday morning, I got to the theater at 8:30 AM. Starting with the pre-show warmer, I went page by page through the script and wrote cues.  The sound folks came around 3PM, so I took a break for lunch and Melanie again arrived after work.  We ended up finishing with cues about 9PM.  12 hours seems like a long time, but compared to RENT's 22 hours, it was a piece of cake.

Probably the most interesting and challenging cues were the 3 collections that make up the gun fights.  My concept for the gun fights was to suspend a half dozen curtain strobes upstage, against the black curtains.  A curtain strobe is a small cylinder, maybe 2" in diameter and 4" long, hanging on a black cord.  They aren't super bright, but in a dark space, they provide blinding points in the audience's eyes.  Then I rented a monster DMX strobe: a Martin Atomic 3000.  Because it is DMX controlled, I can turn it on and off in cues.  This particular model has a fourth channel that controls effects.  In addition to rate, intensity and duration of flash, it has the ability to ramp up, ramp down, random flash, or do an effect that makes killer lighting.

The gun fights are a sequence of 10-15 cues that auto-follow, one after another.  Each auto-follow time is different; anywhere from 1/2 second to 2 seconds.  In the first cue, I start the curtain strobes and they stay on for the duration of the sequence.  Each flashes randomly so they are never all together, almost like muzzle flashes from 6 different guns upstage pointing at the audience.  Then in subsequent cues, I turn on and off the Atomic 3000 set to random bursts.  This gives the effect of someone with a machine gun pulling the trigger and releasing it in bursts.  The opening and closing gun bursts last about 10 seconds and the shootout in the middle of Act 2 lasts about 5 seconds.  Those three incidents account for more than 30 cues in the show.

The next effect that I discovered as I was programming is a little out of character for a New Line show.  I go back to the initial concept that this show's design pallet is all sepia tones.  This came from thinking of it as an old movie or old photographs.  As I wrote the cues for the various vignettes and ran back thru them,  the action seemed to cut instantaneously from location to location with no transition.  While we have been accustomed to this with modern TV and film editing, old movies used a lot of dissovles often through black to go from scene to scene.  This most likely came from early filmmaking's roots in old-fashioned live theater.  So, I inserted blackouts in between each cue where the action goes from one location to the next. Normally, blackouts are not part of a light plot that I would do at New Line, but this gave the show a more old movie feel. To keep it moving, I used auto-follows to go into the next cue. The result is a dissolve-thru-black, just like an old movie.

When we went through cue-to-cue on Saturday, we discovered that several of those auto-follows needed to be lengthened because the actors just needed a couple of seconds to get out of the way so that the next scene could start.  So I talked to Gabe and we decided that we would pull almost all of the auto-folllows out of the cues.  He just has to hit the GO button twice as often, but now he has control over it.

I never thought that I would use blackouts like that again in a modern show, but it really needs it to keep the audience from getting confused that the action has moved to another place and time.

All said and done, the show is a little over 200 light cues.  While not as many or as complicated as RENT was, it is still a sizeable number and probably one of the larger light plots that I have done.

Tonight is first full-tech run-thru and Gabe is at the helm.  I am anxious to see how it goes...
R

Loading in and wrapping up the set for Bonnie & Clyde

I haven't blogged in a while.  Some of it is because I have been busy on a number of fronts. Some of it is because there hasn't been to show.  Not that I haven't produced anything, but I have been making mostly little items and there weren't a lot of pictures to show.

In the shop, we fabbed a small table for the hideout, the bars for the jail cell, and the rolling piece that is the counter at the American Cafe on one side and the judge's bench on the other.

The past few days, however, a lot has changed!




Because the theater was empty since July, I was able to get started installing earlier than usual.

Last Friday, we took a trailer of parts to the theater.  Those parts included the car, a couple of sections of wood fence, and the components for the gas station.  The shop looked almost empty after those things were gone.  It hasn't been empty since right before I pulled in the Nissan truck to begin cutting it apart on April 1!

The gas station, while in the shop, didn't look like much.  It is a slightly bizarre geometry, as though I took the Barrow's original station and lopped off a corner of the canopy.  It wasn't until it went together on stage and we stepped back, that if made sense.




To get it into the theater, of course, I had to take it back apart because the freaking place has NO access for anything bigger than 3 feet wide!  That is probably the suckiest part of working on this stage...followed closely by hanging lights above the stadium seating without catwalks overhead. That's for a different discussion...

Sunday at noon, Melanie and I started by reassembling the upper portion of the station and adding the roof panels.  we then attached two legs and tilted it up. Leaning it against the wall, we could get the third leg under it and brace it into place.  I pulled the black masking legs into place and we teaked the location of the station so that it butted the maskings.  We then shot it to the floor and added braces to anchor it.  I will bring my box of black fabric and we will mask the rear two legs, so that it appears to float against black, consistent with the dreamy concept of the staging.


I placed the gas pump and a couple of old car wheels under the roof and it started to take shape as a gas station.  Finally I added an antique light fixture like used to don the old filling stations. Got it from my very good friend, eBay. The station gets a few more accents...the post that you see needs to be wrapped and painted out,  HB Barrow hand-lettered on the side, and a large Coca Cola sign on the roof.

The next thing that we tackled was the sheriff's office. I needed to base paint this section so that it could be finish painted when I bring Gary and Sharon to the theater on Thursday.  The paint had to be dry in time for Sunday evening's rehearsal, so we needed to get it done. We pulled out the brick walls that we had saved after RENT last spring.  We reassembled them far left, leaving just enough room behind them for cast to cross behind.  Since the band is going upstage, center of this wall, I needed to leave them as much room as possible. So, the masking legs on this side are actually flipped up and behind the walls.

It went together fairly easily. There was remarkably little damage after striking and storing it for 6 months. I brought the "front door" back that I had made for "Night of the Living Dead" a year ago and it becomes the sheriff's door.  Once the walls were up, we filled the Wagner paint sprayer with dark gray paint and 20 minutes later, Kathleen's wonderful graffiti from RENT was GONE!  :(

While we were spraying, we put a base coat on another brick panel that I salvaged from another show. It will get repainted into the sepia color scheme and repurposed into a representation of the front of the beauty shop.

The last thing that we needed to do was to get the car reassembled and in place.  Again, because this facility has no door wider than 3 feet nor taller than 7 feet, I had to make the car as small as possible. Resting on casters mounted to the back of the seat, it is 83 inches to the tip of the grill. So, the bumper had to be removed.  From the bottom of the legs to the top of the hood is 38 inches, so windshield and hood ornament had to come off as well to get it into the building.

With it still up on its back, we added skids to the underside of the legs to bring the height up 1 1/2". We mounted the two front wheels in the fenders, then tipped it over and slid it into place.  Then we reapplied the mirrors, windshield and bumper.

The last task for the day was to place the two sections of fence.

As simple as these seem to be, they are actually quite interesting.  One of the premises of the design is that the car faces the audience. We will be painting road on the floor that appears to run right into the center section of seats.  So, the fence sections splay as though they are running along the sides of the road. In addition, when I made them, I used "forced perspective" to make them appear to recede into the background.So, they are 48" tall nearer the audience and only 42" tall upstage.  All of this makes it look as though the road is running right into the audience.  The relationship of the road and fence to the gas station makes it look as though the road runs right long side of the station.

I will be adding a telephone pole upstage right of the right fence with "wires" stringing out toward the audience. This should finish the optical illusion and make the set feel very dynamic.

Lastly, I temporarily used an extension cord to test the  lights on the filling station.

Later this week, the painters will get in and paint the road on the floor and all of the brick work.  Next Saturday, we will hang the last two facade panels and erect the telephone pole and the set should be in good shape.  With a little luck, Sunday we begin lights!!!!

More after next weekend...R

Progress on more little things...

This past week, I have been spending more time focusing on small details for the set.

Last Thursday, I finished the gas pump for the Barrow Filling Station.  After the glue dried on the styrofoam, I smoothed off the edges and base coated it with the same deep red-brown that I used for the rims on the car.  In real life, the pump would have been bright red, but in keeping with my washed out and muted colors, this deep red-brown is much more sepia.  On Saturday,  Gary added rust and grime.  I topped it off with an original Texaco decal, a printed reproduction of the gage dial, and a plastic reproduction of the original glass globes that used to don the tops of gas pumps well into the 1950's.  The finishing touch was an original aluminum nozzle from an antique pump...an eBay find.






Then my attention turned to a prop that Scott specifically requested for the opening scene where Bonnie fantasizes about Clara Bow.  Scott requested a vintage Hollywood movie camera on a rolling tripod.  I certainly wasn't going to buy one, so to make it, I started by laying out the basic shape of the two reel canisters and the camera body on a piece of luan. I then built up the thickness of the body using 1x4s and a second piece of luan.  The reel canisters were layers of styrofoam glued up and formed into shape.  Meanwhile, Melanie fabricated the tripod. Finally the lenses and viewfinder were made of PVC plumbing fittings and pipe.  The whole camera and tripod painted in gray, with the legs of the tripod dry-brushed like wood.  Gary added a few silver accents to pop out key features.








Finally, to establish the bank facade,  Melanie and I developed an old-fashioned brass clock, like the kind that used to hang on the corner of banks as early as the turn of the century.  Using luan and 2x2s, we created two sides of what would normally be a four-sided clock cabinet.  We only need two sides facing the audience to show three-dimensionality.  After a base coat of gold paint, I created the clock faces and "stained glass" bank sign in Photoshop and printed them on the color printer.  With lights inside the cabinet, they will glow lightly and a little dusty looking, being paper and not painted glass.


This morning, Larry, Glenn Saltamachia and I picked up the panels that I made for the brownstone for Funny Girl at Stray Dog. We dropped at the theater, those panels along with the gas pump, movie camera and a vintage hair dryer that I picked up outside Hannibal on Sunday.

Gary, Sharon and I will repaint the panels along with the brick-work from RENT and repurpose them as pieces of building facades floating in our B&C dream locations.

I will wrap up the clock and whip together the bars for the jail cell and the fence for the car scenes. I am stalling on the gas station while the exact form mulls in my head.  By the weekend, I should be cranking on it.

Until next time...
R

Bonnie and Clyde set progresses...

After adding a little purchased bling, the car is mostly behind me now.

It has all of it's chrome and sparkle.  I think that I won't do anymore to it until I move it into the theater and reassemble it.  

I have to figure out a way to hold the hubcaps on after I mount the wheels on.  The hubcaps that I found are from a real 1934 Ford. The steel wheels are from a late-model trailer.  The two do not exactly fit together and snap in.  But, from off-stage, they should look cool.

For the jail, I will repurpose the brick walls from RENT with a new door and fresh "old" paint. Then add jail bars. The bank facade and another piece have been salvaged from another show that I recently did and will get reworked.  For the bank, I will add a lit bank clock.  For the other piece, a barber pole and perhaps a general store sign.  These will give me some of the character of the places that we are representing.  Fortunately, by repurposing previously built pieces, I can limit how much I have to build.

That leaves me with one fairly large component that needs to be made yet.  I need to tackle the Barrow Star Filling Station.  It was a Texaco franchise and a very typical, 1930's Route 66 type of structure; single room building with a tin-roof canopy and old-fashioned gas pump.  For my production of Grapes of Wrath in 2010, one of the cast members made an old pump but no one knows what happened to it. So, my next task was to set about building another.  

With some 12" sonotube concrete forms, it is a pretty easy task.  Tuesday evening, Melanie and I fit plywood discs into the ends of a 4' length of tube and a 16" length of tube.  A cap of 2" styrofoam on top and a 6" diameter disc of foam for the dial form the geometry of the pump.  I added a modified 2-liter soda bottle for the fuel filter and a piece of sump pump hose for the hose.  I will paint it on Thursday and then add the finishing touches.  On eBay, I found a plastic reproduction of the lit globe that used to go on top of the old pumps. I also found a self-adhesive decal for the front of the pump and an aluminum nozzle that is old enough that most people won't know the difference. 

The next part is to create the front "canopy" of the gas station.  I will spend a little time over the next day or two deciding what to build and designing the details.  Scott has already asked if we could  have the Coca Cola sign on the roof.  


I'll put together a design and then Melanie and I can tackle the gas station on Thursday and this weekend.
R

First piece done...mostly

We had quite a productive week in the scenic shop.  I decided to tackle Clyde's 1934 Ford as my first project for a couple of reasons.  First off, it is probably the most complicated piece of the set that I had to build, and second, I had the old truck from Grapes of Wrath to use as a base.  If I did the car first, then the old truck is out of my way for subsequent work.





Wednesday
My father and I built the original truck in 2010 in his garage in Beckemeyer, IL.  Since we, together, figured it out then, I thought that it might be nice to have him help me give it a significant facelift.  He got to the shop about 10AM.  We removed the old body and disassembled it into a couple of smaller pieces that would fit into the storage loft.  That way, if it ever needs to become a truck again (unlikely), the pieces are there to redo it.  The Ford Deluxe had a very narrow, sloping grille, so we started by making the grille and getting it fixed in place, between the fenders.  We then built back with luan and 2x2's to create the hood.  A sheet of chipboard formed the radiused top.

Next, we cut down the frame, making the car only 80 inches long.  That way it can stand on the back of the seat and fit through a standard door.  After re-attaching the rear legs and wheels, we constructed the seat and "doors".  Melanie got to the shop around 4 and she and I finished things up when dad headed home.

Thursday

Sharon was in the office Thursday, so after we got things caught up for U-Studios, she and I headed to the shop and painted.  First the grille and chrome accents.  Then the fenders got a warm, dark gray.  After an hour of drying time, we returned to the shop, blacked out any new wood underneath and then coated the body with a lighter, green-gray that is reminiscent of the gray that Ford used on their cars in the mid 1930's.

I reused the wheels and tires from the old Grapes truck as well.  They were trailer tires that had been scrapped by a local trailer and camper store.  I painted the metal rims a dark red and used white latex house trim paint to turn them into white-walls because every good gangster car from the 30's has white-walls.  These will bolt on to the end of the front axle after the car is in the theater and doesn't need to move around anymore.  Otherwise...too heavy.

The running greyhound hood ornament from an actual 1934 Ford came in the mail on Wednesday. So the last thing that I did was to mount it with some construction adhesive on to the radiator cap at the nose of the car... nice touch.







Saturday
I picked up a foam rubber mattress pad and grabbed an old roll of white vinyl material that has been in my basement since I reupholstered an old boat 10 years ago.

At the shop, I upholstered the "interior" of the car so that it looks like white leather.  Then focused my attention on adding mirrors and headlights.  Finally, I worked out the front bumper and the windshield and got those painted silver and installed.  The last thing on the to-do list for Saturday was to make a 1934 Texas license plate. Bonnie and Clyde were in Texas when they stole what was reported to be a brand new gray Ford Deluxe V8 because Clyde thought that it was the fastest car made at the time. It got them out of a lot of sticky situations, easily outrunning the police cars of the day. Ultimately, it would be the same car that they were ambushed in and shot to death.

There are still a few chrome pieces to to add when they get here: fog lights on the front, chrome hub caps, a self-adhesive FORD logo below the hood ornament, and a large, old-fashioned steering wheel.

I did take a little bit of artistic license with the car. First off, it is 2/3 scale...one full-size vehicle on stage this year is enough!  I stylized it a bit because Scott and I agreed that the whole show is a dream or a flash-back. So the front end slopes back a little more than a real 1934 Ford so that it looks faster and sleeker, because that was how Clyde saw it in his mind.  Finally, I made it a convertible.  The car that Clyde stole was a 4-door sedan.  But the roof on these was low and the windows narrow.  If I put a hard top on it, the audience would never see Bonnie and Clyde sitting in the car.

In the mean time, I am gearing up for the next pieces to build.  I have some old set pieces that I intend to repurpose.  I hope to move those to the theater later this week since it is empty for the month of August.  Anything that I can get out of the shop, just gives me more room.  I will just spread them out on the stage floor and paint them there before installing them.



Next to make on my agenda will be the gas station, complete with an old-time gas pump.  That should be a fun one.  Looking forward to it.  :)






Until next time, go see a show somewhere.  The artists appreciate it...
R

Time to start talking about the next season...

It is hard to believe that, for me, summer is over.  In just over a month, it will be time to load in the set and lights for Bonnie and Clyde.  I still haven't moved the Nissan truck on to its new home and already, the next show is looming.

I spent a good part of the summer researching for the next show, but not really designing.  Some things that I looked at were Bonnie and Clyde specific.  There were a couple of great documentaries.  But I also spent a lot of time trying to come up with what the towns looked like that they ravaged in Texas, Louisiana, Missouri and other states.



In 2010, I directed a production of Frank Galati's adaptation of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" for a local theater company and got myself neck-deep in the Depression-era dust bowl.  There is definitely an aesthetic to that period and place in American history that is distinctive.  A show about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow HAS to reflect that look.

Then, pouring through the script and discussions with Scott, I came to realize that this show is constructed in a very interesting way.  

First, the show really focuses on Clyde's obsession with the fame of Al Capone. And Bonnie is fixated on the glamorous movie star life of Clara Bow.  So, it seemed that it would be interesting for the show to look and feel like an old newsreel or series of black and white photos, yellowed with age.

The show opens with a barrage of machine gun fire and the lights come up on B & C dead in the seat of their stolen 1934 Ford Deluxe.  Then the show jumps back a few years and follows their fall into a life of crime. Scott mentioned that it is almost as though the show is their lives flashing before their eyes as they die.

Scott and I agreed that the whole show should almost have a dream-like feel to it.  Not a bunch of concrete locations, but just perceptions of places, distorted by memory and time.  More images of a place and time than real places and times.


Armed with this concept and a ton of imagery of the places and people of that time, I began designing the set.  I quickly settled on the idea that I would create a series of pieces that represented many different places.  Not whole sets, rooms, buildings, and such.  Just elements.  A part of a bank facade, a part of a 30's gas station, telephone poles, an old brick jail and of course, the 1934 Ford Deluxe V8.

The idea is that these elements float in space against black, composed in a manner that makes no sense to the conscious mind, but are more of just a composition, an image of the time.  For each scene, one element would be highlighted with light, leaving the rest as ghosts in the background.  This would allow me to leave almost everything on stage the whole time.  Then to establish the interiors for all of the places that the gang ends up throughout the story, we would just bring out two or three small pieces of furniture and set the scene way downstage in a pool of light, with the archetype hovering visually in the background.

In order to capture the flavor of the old photos and newsreels, I think that we will paint everything in sepia tones.  No colors, but all shades of brown, yellow, warm gray, and cream.  That should adequately give the impression of an old movie.


My first order of business will be the car.  There is a reason for this.  I still have the truck from The Grapes of Wrath sitting in the corner of the scenic shop, collecting dust.  It is a 2/3 scale, stylized and generic representation of a 1930's vehicle.  If I use it as the basis for the Ford, half of the work is done.  The Ford Deluxe had a bit of a distinctive grille and front bumper, so if I recreate those parts and reuse the frame, fenders, wheels and cab, all they will need is a paint job to match my sepia color scheme.  The car that Clyde stole was gray, so that can work.








I said that I wouldn't do another vehicle on stage, but...  this one will be much more stylized, not so realistic and certainly not a full car.  Plus, I have a good start on it.  If I do the car first, I can get the old truck out of my way and have more room.

As usual, I'll post pictures as things get finished...
R

Finishing touches

Last night, Gary, Kathleen, Patrick and I put the finishing touches on the set.  It is very strange to not be doing lights as well.  I feel like I'm not doing part of my job.  On the other hand, it is nice to have the stress off.

Monday evening, Melanie and I made the "tonneau" cover for the bed.  Originally, it was going to be a full platform that the cast could be up on, but after blocking the show, Scott decided to not have anyone actually up there.  Marcy and Ryan sit on the tailgate, but not in the middle of the bed. So, we used luan and a 2x2 frame and made a panel that just drops in and covers the bed. This is a good thing because the inside of the bed was is ROUGH shape.  When we bought the truck, it had a plastic bed liner, which I pulled out and threw away, because it was going to be in the way of the platform.  Too bad.  If that were still around, I would have put a coat of black paint on it to make it look new and left it in.

Last night, I rolled a coat of flat black on the bed cover and then painted the floor of the band platform so that it is ready for musicians to move in tonight.

I have been unhappy with the bed of the truck ever since we first assembled it in the shop. Notice in the pic on the left how the space between the cab and bed is wider at the top than the bottom? It always looked like it was sagging.  So, I cut a 2" shim and last night, Patrick jacked the bed up and put the shim in.  You can see in the pic on the right that it looks a LOT better now.

Gary added a little rust to the lamp posts and billboard frame and painted out the bases to look like beat up concrete.  He then attacked the floor with the texture roller and several colors of gray and cream to make it look like weathered asphalt.  Finishing touches included cracks, a pool of spilled oil and a tire mark.

Patrick and Kathleen hung flags on strings above the stage
and out into the first couple of rows of the audience.  It brings the top down just a little bit on the parking lot.  I think that with stage lights and the parking lot lights on, it will feel like a real car lot.

The last thing we did was to move in one of the typical tan steel desks that everyone used in the 70's-90's offices.




So, that finishes my work on "Hands on a Hardbody".  It is now up to the cast, band, Ken and Kerrie to bring it to life.

Can't wait to see it all come together.
R

Loading in the BEAST!

Well, no one said that it would be easy...  

We pre-loaded one trailer on Friday with all of the small truck parts, the platform legs, the parking lot lights and part of the bill board.  I quickly realized that this was a two-trailer job.  The bed and cab pieces were nearly a foot wider than Larry's trailer and longer than his trailer.  So, we rented a 6x12 U-haul trailer and towed it with Gary's RAV4.

Melanie, Larry, Gary, Brian Scheppler and Patrick showed up at the shop and we got the bed and cab on the U-haul trailer. Turns out that once we put the bed and cab pieces in the U-haul, it was "full" too.  Oh, we could have crammed a lot more in. For other shows we would have.  Pieces made of wood and painted with latex are easy to touch up if they rub together and scuff.  The finish on the truck is a different story. Even with the second trailer, we couldn't fit the wooden frame on the first load. :/



We pulled out of the shop at 10AM. When we got to the theater at 10:30, Todd, Ray, Marshall and Allison were waiting for us.  We quickly unloaded the two trailers and hauled the small stuff upstairs.  Then Larry too Brian, and Allison back to the shop to load up the frame and bring it in a second load.  What a pain in the ass...

Meanwhile, the rest of us stayed at the theater, drug out platforms and supplies and put the band platform together. Still waiting for the second trip to return, we wrestled the cab in the building, thru the halls, up the stairs, and into the theater.  It wasn't terrible.  So, after a rest, the gang decided to try and tackle the bed as well.  Got it to the bottom of the steps, tried to get it on the elevator and it was ONE freaking inch to big to fit! Son of a Bitch!  So, we waited for the rest of the muscle to return

On their return, the bed was brought up the steps and into the theater.  The wooden frame, on the other hand, it was decided to bring up the fire escape an thru the stage door.  That was quite the adventure.  I am still not convinced that it was easier than bringing it in the front door, thru the halls, up the stairs, and in. But, whatever... I just wanted it IN.

While they fought with the bed and frame, I quickly put the billboard framework together and Patrick and I got it hung so that it was out of the way for the truck parts in the middle of the stage.

With the billboard up and the truck parts on stage, Marshall, Todd and Ray bid us adieu.  Allison began to tackle getting the scrim on to the billboard frame while Brian, Patrick and I began putting the truck back together.

The wheels went on first.  Because we took the casters off, the wheels would touch the floor and I wanted to make sure that they were on before we began to really add the weight to the frame.  Next we set the cab in place, followed by the bed.  It seemed as though it would go right back together the same as it had come apart.  Yea, so much for that.


The doors were the next thing that had to be tackled and they have always given us problems.  When we put it together in the shop, it too us two evenings to get them on right.  Now, you have to understand that, in order to be able to get the cab thru a single 3' door, I had to sacrifice somewhere.  To keep the cab intact, it would have been the equivilent of a 4'x4'x6' cube...not going thru the door and heavy as hell to move.  So, we had cut it at the floor behind the seat and at the top of the firewall.  This meant that we no longer had the front door post with the factory-tapped screw positions defined.  So, we had to make that up out of wood.  Wood flexs, shifts, splits and generally is just not as reliable as steel. And that wood door post was supporting the weight of the door when it is open. But, I digress...

We finally figured out that we had set the cab 1/4" to the right off from where it needed to be, which thru the door posts out of square and the doors wouldn't close!  Frustration mounted and I got pretty testy.  I apologize to Melanie, Patrick, Brian and Allison for venting my frustration. I have FOUGHT with this damn thing for weeks and again it is giving me problems...

Once the doors were fixed, the rest of it went together pretty smoothly. The holes all aligned and it fit right back together.







While all of this cursing is going on, Melanie and Allison were having frustrations of their own.  Scrim is a bitch to work with if you are painting something on it that needs to be recognizable.  You see, it stretches...A LOT!  Compounding that, I bought loose cut bulk scrim from Rose brand. Two edges were factory and two edges were cut.  If you have ever had fabric cut, you know it is never perfectly square and even.  Then, of course we didn't paint the graphic on square with an edge.  The only thing that I knew was that the graphic had a horizontal edge that formed the field of blue on the bottom. That line had to be parallel to the bottom of the billboard frame. After two false starts, the ladies figured out a system, got the thing roughly tacked in place and then began the painstaking process of pulling and stapling on small area at a time so that the letters didn't deform, bow or run uphill or downhill.

We wrapped up all of that an sat down in the seats for a short admiration of our work at 6:15PM. It had been a long day. We turned off the lights, locked up and headed back to IL for a drink and BBQ on me!  Long-ass day!!!


Today, Melanie and I will go back in a few minutes, finish skirting the billboard, hang the other parking lot light and then thoroughly clean the truck.  It needs to look like a new truck and right now it is GRIMY!

More later... In the mean time, I'm off to LA for the week. I need to get away from this project. It has been a grueling 5 weeks of work and I need a break. The cast can get in there this week and put their hands on it and get used to their new space.
R

See you at the theater.