Today is the end of about 7 months of utter madness, it started September last year doing some work for the Philharmonia early September. From there I worked programming video for Yeast Culture on a show called The Five, following on from that I was Acting video associate for 59Productions on the Spanish version of LosMiserable. Finally I was in Russia for a total of 4 and a half month’s. It’s been utter madness, stressful at times but also great fun with lots of new people.
I took my scooter out after my visa run in early January, which was superb for getting around sit, im not on faceboom bt someone posted this picture of me which I didn’t know about until Doug sent me it, pretty funny!
Since posting last there has been the rest of the winter Olympic ceremonies, which went well. Some days were painfully slow just being on stand by to fix things or solve problems where we drank quite allot of tea in container land (above).
Between the OCC (Olympic closing ceremony) and the POC (Paras Opening Ceremony) Gethyn and myself went to get out accreditation which was next to the currently being constructed GrandPrix pit lane for the F1 this year. We had a cheeky look around and were pretty sure its not going to be complete on time!
One day whilst working in the Batcave Mk III, (the Batcave Mk III was our little workshop area inside the stadium, and its called Mk III because we has to move 3 times) so, whilst working in the Batcave Nick came in to pick up some sweets he had been keeping in his bag only to fide a mouse had managed to crawl in his bag, eat most of his biscuits and half a Terrys chocolate orange. We found this quite funny but Nick wasn’t so impressed!
For the POC and the PCC we flew a boat, not a real boat but a huge 16ton replica of a Russian icebreaker. It was insane, 16tons flown from 18 carriages perfectly level through the stadium. Its difficult to get a scale of the thing through pictures but here’s a picture of Robin who was operating the automaton on the ship during the show.
And a panorama of the ship whilst it was stored in the hangar.
On quite a few mornings I would walk into work from our accommodation, which was right along by the black sea. The majority of the Olympic park area, and surrounding accommodation was a shithole, this was an exception and a nice walk when the sun was shining!
For the OCC and the remain ceremonies we had a lighting/video fixture called the LED forest built by Tate with the media playback from AI and flown on a combination of StageOne point hoists and Kinesys chain motors. For this I wrote a little piece of software, which took, the positional data from the Kinesys system and the stage one system, converted it into a 16bit artnet value. These was then sent to the AI guys controlling the video so they could have the real time positional data of the trusses flying the LED This would automatically adjust their 3D model accordingly and map the video correctly.
The remain ceremonies went well and without too may complications, I don’t think anything will match the madness of the Opening ceremony and the run up to it. I think we all learned a lot how to deal with the gremins that would arise and then fix them quickly.
After the PCC (paras closing ceremony) the final one, most of us were in the following day to start the get-out, allot of vodka was drank the night before so it was quite a slow, in fact very slow careful day. There was confetti everywhere and a team of people with leaf blowers to try and round it all up.
The boat was well on its way to being stripped down, I have to say it was such an incredible piece of set to stand next to, I’ve never seen a set piece so big and it almost filled an entire hangar!
Over the course of the job there were quite a few security staff who worked right through who even though we didn’t speak the same language we all had strange funny hand gesture conversations. This chap was always smiling and loved to ride around on my scooter, at the end of the gig I gave my scooter to him as trough a translator he wanted to take it back home to play on with his grandchildren, he was well happy!
This was the last day of my shift, the sun was shining and we got the go to finish an hour early. On that note we packed down super quick and raced for the 17:30 bus, only to find the busses only run every hour on that day. So we spent 30 minutes lying in the sun with Brian playing Ska from his Bose speaker,
The following day 24 hours later I was back in England after a flight from Sochi to Moscow then Moscow to Heathrow, it wasn’t such a long journey and not the pain in the ass I was expecting. Somehow I managed to avoid paying excess luggage, possibly the woman in Sochi just forgot. There was a minor worry that either my clothes or tool case wasn’t going to turn up in London but finally they did.
This was the first proper meal I had since getting back to the UK 8Oz rump steak, keeping up tradition, before I started eating I took a picture and emailed it to the guys I knew who were still left working in Sochi
The following day before heading off to my next job I managed to catch up with Mr Slaney and have breakfast at The Caravan Kings Cross, which is well recommended. I hven got Richard to carry mu bags, Marina, this picture is for you ;).
The following week after a brief stint in Canterbury wiring some things together in a truck I was working at the Truman brewery as part of the team installing Re-rite. This was amore corporate version of re-rite for the Champagne brand Krug. It was ace to be working with friend I hadn’t seen for ages and Nickin didn’t fail to entertain everyone all week, particularly when he tried to wear Bea’s jacket, which he did, just! Ha!
Krug, was a bit of a mad gig, things went in quickly, then somehow there was lots to do and no time, and then all of a sudden everything came together and looked ace on the opening night. This was a ticketed event; normally it’s free and a bit of a shame general members of the public wont see this install.
Finally………… WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!
