Its the start of another year and I find myself in Berlin again (currently 29th jan 2013) working on another Live camera theatre show. Previous to comming to berlin i spent a week in Ipswich working for the Philharmonia in preparation for a very install period of re-rite and Universe of sound in the spring! It was a busy few days testing, updating and preparing kit which can bee seen here, with Rich, Ash, Chris and myself very hard at work. Also whilst I remember check out the Philharmonia’s new app The Orchestra which is really quite good it is more expensive than your average app but you get allot for your money.
Five days later I was in Berlin to join the Jon, Megan, Jack and the rest of the team to start work on Katie Mitchell’s new show Yellow Wallpaper. Luckily I had a MA2 to play with and program video for the show on but first had to set up the system. This was the first time we had attempted to integrate LX and video onto the same console which had to be tested and proved. Generally in the past with Jons system we had taken the midi MSC output of the console and filtered out the shot number using MidiPipe and then displayed it using the system text function in Catalyst so that when stepping through Cues on the console the current camera shot number was displayed on all of the preview monitors for the actors and camera operators. In theory this should have been easy but because we had 2 consoles and multiple cue lists we couldn’t specify which cue-list would send the MSC so if video pressed GO and our cue-list was on executor 1.11 we would get a combination of the CUE number and the executor ID which was great but also if LX hit go we also got there executor ID and their CUE number which was also great. This was until, it was discovered that MidiPipe which we always use to filter down the MIDI would not read in the MSC output by the MA2. No matter what configuration we tried to output the MSC from the console midi pipe wouldn’t read this in and thus we could not filter the packet.
This was one of those horrible situations where there was no time or resources to test this previously and being unable to make this work onsite with the time constraints was frustrating! More frustrating was that because of this and the camera operators complete reliance of seeing the shot numbers, was that because we could guarantee it to work straight out of catalyst meant I was to ditch the MA and program Cue-lists direct on the Mac! Onwards and upwards, 3 weeks in I can say its not really too bad, just slow, and with the inability to quickly copy states makes some of the simpler tasks slower.
Its an interesting working environment, with allot of politics going on around the room which is definitely worth staying well out of and making the most of tea-breaks sponsored by our new friend Eddie sent to us by Karl 🙂
Last week a couple of friends were touring to Berlin with Enter Shikari, Ed and Steve. Ed who id seen for the second time in 2 years at ipswich the year before and Steve who I hadn’t seen for probably a year. Me and Megs went to the gig which was lots of fun and then partied Berlin style afterwards. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening although the following day was quite difficult. Only a few weeks, earlier Ed had proposed to his now fiancé onstage at the Roundhouse London, and I have to share the video below. Hats off to you Ed, bloody good work!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd4BlVxIuG4&feature=youtu.be
Last week we also went to a trip to Teufelsberg in the Grunewald area just outside of berlin to see if we could get into the old abandoned listening tower which I visited last year. I had heard that shortly after i had climbed through a hole in the fence last year to get inside the compound that they had repaired all of the holes and were charging people for tours. This is true, all of the holes are repaired and there are a couple of people at the entrance keeping an eye out. It kind of looses some of the appeal of sneaking in and exploring but with a popular visiting place it was bound to happen. During our time walking arround the perimeter fence we founs this tree which had grown through the chain link fence and knitted itself in, pretty amazing!
Today, 29th Jan, the snow is almost gone, its been a relatively warm couple of days and combined with the drizzly on and off rain/sleet theres barely any snow left on the paths. This is the complete opposite of sunday when most of the rivers were frozen and enough snow in Treptower park for us to make a Snowbot, he was named Herman, how original!
