The post title has no reference to this post what so ever, it was just the first thing which popped into my head, from the lyrics of this song Dr Alban, its been a week of ‘classic’ tunes whilst working in the hangar. Ive kind of started writing this post arse first, as normally I would go through my photos to see whats worth typing about and then start typing. This time I’ve just started typing subject randomly.
As always time absolutely flies by your busy and I’ve just realised it was almost 4 weeks ago when I decided i would go and see my mates band The Dust Town Dogs in Consett, I hadn’t seen anyone for I guess around 8 year ad it was a proper good catch up. Everyone was still as good craic as ever and i was well happy to see Peter Boyle who i bet i hadn’t seen since 2002!!!!
Peter used to be the recording engineer at Northern Recording, a community recording studio where I first got introduced to live events and mixing sound for bands. This all eventually led on to various related jobs and gigs crazy live event technical world I live and work in now.
This is my GrandMA Lighting desk setup, it hasn’t been out on hire or being used too much this year so I decided to get some nice photos together to either sell it or hire it out more. Mr Froment at DanceCity gave me a hand and let me use the theatre space to get some decent photos. I built this up a couple of years ago, fully designing everything myself, integrating a computer into he flight-case and the monitors attached to Ergotron articulating arms. Im pretty proud of it, and it does look the bees-knees!
That weekend my mate James introduced me to Hustlers Pool Hall, I’d never been before but it was right in the middle of newcastle near the Laing Art gallery. It was a great way to spend a couple hours, and drink a couple of beers! Its amazing the things you get shown in a city you thought you knew like the back of your hand!
That following working week Jamie and Myself went to a days PLC training in Cannock with a company called All Drive & Controls, it was a good introduction day. We covered the basics of input, output and touchscreen controls. The Unitronics PLC’s are incredibly powerful devices and it was good to see the kind of things that could be done with them from simple I/O to multiple stepper motor control!
At the end of that week i was heading down to London to do a weeks work at the Royal Court. Travelling down I knew that smithy was in london so when i arrived at KGS, I met him for a Black pudding Scotch Egg at StPancrass. I know that sounds like an euphemism but you can get some really good Scotch Eggs covered in black pudding rather than meat, I cant remember the name of the shop but if you go to the top end of StPancras, its directly opposite the Starbucks which is there. This is Smithy in his natural state.
The following day I was in the Royal Court, the last time I was there was over 2 years ago, June 2012 where was working on a show about global population & warming called 10 Billion. This time I was working on a show called 2071, another show about global warming and again directed by Katie Mitchell. This time we had a d3 media server to play with and I was working with Luke Halls who as designing the video. The whole process was incredibly compressed, we installed on the Friday, checked some video on the Saturday and then had only 2 days tech and rehearsal before doing our first preview on Wednesday. It was great to be at the court again and see old faces and some new, its always a great atmosphere in that building. Also it was great working with Luke, he had his work cut out getting everything animated with he time schedule and nothing really been set in stone script-wise till very near the end. I guess i am a little biased with workeignon the show but it does look really good, the monochrome projection combined with the brilliant shape of the set we were projection on worked incredibly well. Were off to install this in Hamburg in the middle of this month (December2014), if your around i recommend you go see it.
The following week I was back at the hangar in Tockwith where we were finishing off the tweaking and updating more requested software & hardware updates to the 3d camera flying system. Karl had made some incredible mods to the NextQ motion control system to make the bridle brilliantly smooth with loads of new features. I wrote the software for the 3d visual environment for control of the bridle, designed and built the 3d joystick console with could probably be described as a bolt on to the system enabling us to fly a gamble around on joysticks. The whole system is incredibly fast and responsive, the entire stage one team working on this have produced a brilliant piece of kit!
Its been a relatively short blog post, I reckon for the past 12 months I’ve been promising to post more often as many many things get missed when I try and compress a month onto one post. The only reason this post has gotten finished today is because last night I set my alarm for 05:30 instead of 06:30. It wast until I went down to breakfast at the tell when i realised i was an hour early, atleasr it s been productive!
Finally, a face, not just any face but a massive face featured in 2071!
