Bluebeard in Dortmund

Posted on November 13, 2011 by andy

Once again it has been another incredibly busy hectic days since last posting my nonsense on here, so, from last monday…….

Another early start on monday travelling down to York for a couple of days work at SOCS, Jo bough a new which I borrowed, so now in the workshop we have Miami Vice,  Edel Vice, Fried Vice, and the new addition below. The comedy doesn’t get much better than this…….

Jo’s New workshop paraphernalia “Rachel Vice”

After 3 days at SOCS part working on a multitude of projects and having a bit of a challenge with some electronics (still in the pipeline) it was time for the last Bluebeard show of the year. Thursday was the day of travel, and after a busy morning sorting stuff and a quick 5k Row (21.50mins) at the gym, I picked up Steve from the Sage and headed over to the airport to catch out flight to Dusseldorf, the journey was pretty painless, we met the rest of the Bluebeard team at the airport and then had a 2’ish hour bus journey to Dortmund, finally after checking in we all met up and headed out for some food at  local food tavern bar kind of place. This was my first time in Germany (not just passing through) and liked the crispness of the air in November, it felt allot fresher than the UK. I cant remember the name of the place we ate at but it had the most bizarre decor, such as a freaky looking doll with a tiny “cock whistle” next to it right beside our table. This ment that the place was now placed much higher in our estimations!

What better decorations to have!

After some good food and a few drinkies we all headed back to the hotel ready to begin the setup for Bluebeard, we had an entire day to begin the setup, but the width of the stage was allot smaller and our projection angles were much more severe then before so there was allot of figuring out to be done. We got in the venue around 09.00 on the friday, checked out our positions angles and such and proceeded to get the kit in and ready. The venue was Dortmund Konzerthaus which is quite a pretty place with a VERY high tech box where we would spend most of our time!

This was our narrow stage with the acoustic reflectors in.

The local crew from the venue helped us get our heavy HD20 Barco projectors into the box as well as the multitude of cases containing video geekery! Because we had 4 projectors in such a small place the venue had installed extra air-conditioning which involved getting a crane to hoist an air con unit onto the roof of the venue to help dissipate the amount of heat the projectors generated. Outside on the roof of the tech box was actually quite nice during the day where we could pop out and get some fresh air on breaks!

Marina Laura & Nikin reliving titanic on the roof of the Konzerthaus

All of the working time on friday consisted of pre planning how to lineup the projectors and setting up the kit prior to the Deadline boys coming in and putting the set up, we knocked off around 16.00/17.00 to go back tot he hotel for an early night, Steve started work at 22.00 the same night and Nickin & myself started at 04.00 the following morning.  I decided to try and film all of the days proceedings on my iphone starting right at, 2 things came of this, either (a) we mess around allot and are continually taking the piss out of each other, or (b) i am very good at capturing the silliest moments on camera, probably a bit of both. If you know the password you can view “Bluebeard Cake & Potato” on Vimeo, or below.

Some Possibly needed explanations…….
Bluebeard > The Show
Cake > I like cake and have a funny accent
Potato > Nikin’s Heritage
Barco (Holmes) Ninja > No comment needed, fun fun funny!
Richard > Was just tired
Nick > Reached cabin fever for a moment
Marina > Thank you for putting up with us & carrying Richards bags

http://vimeo.com/32236577

The day went like most other Bluebeard days in the way that somehow time seemed to get sucked up very quickly doing many small important tasks to make up the bigger technical picture. This lineup was damn hard, we had 2 pairs of side by side HD20 projectors, pointing from a crazy steep angle at a set which the Deadline guys did a great job of squeezing onto the narrow stage. This day brought up new challenges which were expected but difficult to fully prepare until we were thee with all the kit trying to make a projected image fit the surfaces. There was more redrawing of masks this time after discovering that the severe beam angle produced more distortion when rotating our masks to track the video to the set. With more keystone tweaking more projection lineups tweaks , fine tuning the sail moves and video tracking the over the period of the day we we on time with the last Bluebeard show of the year. With a chance to get out of the venue we grabbed some food, prior to this the floor was moving when standing still due to lack of food and sleep depravation, we were back in the venue within the hour and ready for the final show of the year. Everything seemed to go without a hitch, Laura, once again did a stirling job of show calling and before we knew it we were at the end of the piece with lots of applause and standing ovations from the audience. Once the audience had left we began to strip down all the kit to pack away, Nickin found a present from David our LD which pretty much sums up all our level of humour, se photo below.

Davids end of tour present to Nickin

Post gig, post packing down, post walking back to the hotel, we had some drinks, and then we had some green tea vodka, and then we had some more drinks, some of us go louder as we drank more, one of us may have shouted “Scarf”, “SCArfff”, ‘SCARF!!!!!” repeatedly across the bar to some youngster waring a scarf at a volume level not appropriate for that time of night . It was a great end, with long days & fun times with fun people, I’m pretty sure thats only Nicks finger in the photo below.

Sunday, 13 November 2011 02:24 Dortmund, Germany
L2R: Nickin(Potato) , Nick (Bagal) , Myself (Cake) , Steve (BarcoNinja)

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WHEREDIDTHEWEEKENDGO?

Posted on November 8, 2011 by andy

Monday evening, Im back down York and the weekend seems a distance and partially somewhat blurry memory! Here are a few photos from Saturday through to today beginning back at Whitley bay with the guys from Novak!

Andrew Nixon guarding the truck  & Simon Williams waiting for the dark to arrive, click on the link to check out some of Simons top photos!

 I had to look twice whilst going back through my photos, this is projection on the Spanish City as it was turning to dusk, the like looks bizarre and the building almost looks like a cartoon, I like it! Also Adam & Elliot admiring Whitley bays relic!

Closer, it was great to see this happen gain this year and generated allot of interest

So,, after work on sat I met up with Mitch (left) & James (right) and we had a few drinks out in Newcastle, it had been a while!

And then we had a few more drinks and practiced our best turtle impressions. The rest of the evening was, well, hilarious and lots of fun, it had been a long time since I had been out out, and sunday morning was harder than usual!

POTATO! POTATO, look POTATO’s, Jams dinner today at work, put my pasta chicken to shame, but more importantly, POTATO!

Finally, Richard Slaney forwad me a shot taken by Andrew Corrigan who spent all day last Thursday at the RFH photographing the going on’s and people on Bluebeard and managed to catch me looking almost normal whist I was lining up the projection mixes (thus the binoculars 😉 ) cheers Andrew!

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Tired but happy

Posted on November 4, 2011 by andy

Its currently 22:22 Friday 4th November 2011 and the past few days have been uber hectic, busy, frustrating at times but on the while productive and fun. I traveled down to London last Wednesday for the London performance of Bluebeard at the Royal Festival hall. Steve and myself pre rigged some of the kit on the wednesday day and then the entire team was in from the early hours of Thursday morning. For some reason there seemed to be more to do on this gig, tweaking/fixing not helped by the fact that I was a little ill and made a few mistakes whilst updating the programming so had to do it twice!! Once again though as a team we all managed to turn out another great show which is satisfying. Nickins brother Andrew Corrigan was taking photos all day and had also set up a time-lapse camera which Nickin turned around and posted on Vimeo in super, quick, time, Good work Nickin, Take a look below.

24-hour Timelapse – Bluebeard’s Castle – 03/11/11

We also got a review in the evening standard which seems like a good one, although the thing is, in the grand scheme of things, reviews don’t really make much difference, people decide. I found the first reader comment quite amusing, James, from London, UK seems like a bit of an angry man, lets hope never to be stuck in a lift with that particular person.

So thats Wednesday & Thursday covered, not for getting that I manged to get home from York on tuesday nigh to squeeze in a quick 5k row at the gym and also go and see LaNuit at Dance city which turned out to be a fantastically and amazingly caught up with some friends, WIN!

Today I arrived home off the train around 11.00, got home, sorted some stuff out and then was back out again heading over to see the guys at Novak who I’m helping with a projection mapping project from last year which were doing again this weekend. To raise the profile of the area and to celebrate the centenary of spanish city Novak were commissioned to produce a projection mapping piece  and i was drafted in to help with the technical delivery aspects. As well as this, the guys have been working on some pretty special new 3D disco content and setups involving unity which I was impressed with and looking froward to their first gig using their own developed technology. Checkout Diversion, Novaks projection mapping piece, and if your in the area it runs on Sat-4th  and Sun-6th November 2011 at whitley bay spanish city 17.00 till 21.00.

DIVERSION @ SPANSH CITY, WHTLEY BAY

Now, I think I’m going to have to get some proper sleep, due to the lack of rest hard work and sleep depravation with the hectic schedule, I’ve felt the floor drop away from me on a couple of occasions. Defiantly 7 hours sleep ahead, its now 23:30, its taken far too long to write this, night.

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A good end to a long Monday!

Posted on November 1, 2011 by andy

Over the weekend I was working with Graeme Nixon (Techspec) who is currently technicaly managing Ballet Lorent’s current tour of LaNuit, it was a good weekend working with some fun and creative people. The show opens tomorrow 1st Nov 2011 at Dance City and continues a small tour around Scotland, its well worth a look out to go and see.

Today was an early start, up at 06.00, wash get dressed check my stuff and hop in the car and drive to york for a couple of days work, well, thats how I had planned it in my head. Just after Birtley on the A1 my trusty Honda Civic suddenly slowed down to 40mph without me taking my foot of the accelerator and wouldn’t let me go any faster, SHIT!! Then I noticed the engine light had came on, i had just passed the turnoff to escape the A1 so i pulled onto the hard shoulder to see if stopping and starting the car would do anything. Low and behold it did, well for a little while anyway. I had managed to get off the hard shoulder, drive for around 30 seconds before my car did the same again. It was in “limp mode”! I had to get off the A1 so I kept going at 40, sometimes getting to 45 on steeper bits and got onto the road to Durham, as soon as I could I pulled over, went onto Google maps and typed in mechanic bla bla bla and it came up with AFmotorservices. With the help of my satnav, and a rather slow trundle along all of the quietest roads I could find I made it to the garage, Adam (which i later found he was called) said he had time to look at it and plugged my car into the diagnostic gimbal which said i had a stuck ERG valve, which i now know is the return valve for exhaust gasses into the engine etc and is linked into the turbo. Anyway, he said replacing it would be expensive but he had time to look over it take it off and clean it out. I took him up on his offer and had a walk into Durham as it was going to take a couple of hours and there was bugger all I could currently do.

After a 30minute walk into Durham, had a coffee and done some work on my laptop, checked if there were any Iphone4s in stock anywhere, (there weren’t) I got a call off Adam who told me cleaning the part and all the gunk which was in it has fixed my sticky valve! I walked back to the Garage which was quicker than any frigging busses which proved hard to find in that direction. Adam talked me through what he had done, I gave hime some money and was finally heading south again!

I arrived at the workshop around 13.00 to a few sarcastic comments like “morning! oh no its afternoon, etc”, it wouldn’t be the same there without the dry humour! I got my shit together, checked out what had been happening over the weekend, James had been busy building up a few more IOM2 modules (I really haven’t made that up!), so I continued finishing the rest in anticipation that all of them are going to get used on this current project so best to build a good stock now. My other task running in paralel with this was to put together a prototype LED core which is to form the core light source of some of the scenic elements of a show about a big monkey. It wasn’t till late on friday when I got the full details and had a chat with Frieder Weiss who the sample is getting sent to. Now I’ve been aware of Frieder’s work for a while now so was really quite chuffed to have a chat with him,  check out his work, especially MortalEngine with the beautiful use of “the absence of light”! Bedises that i had to come up with a high brightness RGBW (Red Green Blue White) centralised light source to fit within these hanging scenic elements, including cooling and a way of mounting them so we had 360 spherical light. With pretty much no time, I got a brief parts list together, checked what we could use in the workshop and got them ordered for a monday delivery.

So now, its monday evening, and after amy hours in the workshop, butchering an RGB source and a W source (we couldn’t get any RGBW in-time). Mounting them with some rather good thermal adhesive, soldering onto LED stuck to heat-sink (which is hard) we have a prototype. Its not pretty, well its kind of industrial pretty, but it does the job perfectly. I came up with the idea of the central hub to be a Dodecahedron which the workshop produced really well in a minimal timeframe, which gives us 12 faces (2 strings of 6 LED) although we only have 1 string (half) mounted here you get the idea!

NUMBERS-MAX dimmer voltage-Current Draw, bla bla bla…….
RED – 16.8v 350ma (Add in 22ohm 5watt resistor)
GREEN – 24v 350ma
BLUE – 24v 350ma
WHITE – 24v 350ma

To be driven off a 24v LED PWM dimmer

Here are a couple of sneak peeks, I only have my Iphone for pictures so trying to get a shot in the dark with the led on was impossible! You can see where i had to butcher 2 types of LED star to make a frankenstein RGBW, MK2 will be much much neater using the CREE RGBW and hopefully a little more warning!

RGBW DEATHSTAR, its bloody bright!

All tailed back to a dinky 9pin D-sub

That was a satisfying productive day, Ill turn up tomorrow, no-one will know the hours and effort put in to make this happen in time, and the next challenge will begin, oh its a glamorous life ;-), time for Bed!

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Bluebeard at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

Posted on October 25, 2011 by andy

Ok, im going to keep words down to a minimum here, so just a quick update, we left Birminghm on out little bus to Heathrow, sat round in the airport for quite a while, flew to Lisbon and checked into our hotel ready for another 48 hours of Bluebeard madness at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian theatre Lisbon. Here i must say this building is fking amazing! I believe it was built around the 60’s and almost everything looks original, the decor the seats the James bond style underground car-park and tunnels and building plant rooms, if your in Lisbon, this place is a must visit.

Steve & Richard in the underground carpark.

 James Bond Dr No style plant-room, this is original!!

We have an entire days get in here which is a treat but is also useful as we have some crazy projection angles to deal with, were quite high up off the set and off centre also which throws up some masking issues. On-top of this we have a technical issue with the sails, an integral part of the set. We spend the rest of the day updating and reprogramming the rest of the show with only one sail which actually didn’t look out of place!


Nick Hilel, Steve Homles & Myself dealing with MonoSail!

Once again the setup time and rehearsals prior to the gig seemed to vanish into a frenzy of activity updates and lineup tweaks. After programming all day I can get quite grumpy and frustrated, probably due to forgetting to eat, drink enough water and generally the hard thinking for 6 hours straight its all worth while. The past 3 venues the content has evolved gradually, the programming and some of the timings have changed, to make things fit better after seeing the show in a few different scenarios now, I like this, generally I just like progress, progress in the right direction! Alongside the updating and evolving of the show, we had heat issues to deal with in Lisbon after sticking 4 high power projectors in a small room, the local guys came good with air conditioning

and the creative use of fans to help with the circulation, the picture is a bit shit but you get the idea!

4 x BARCO HD20’s, a little helping hand!

Once again the gig went well, and everyone seemed to enjoy it, I still have no idea how to judge opera audiences though! On the way home we spotted a traffic light which made us giggle. Im glad to see that childish humour carries through the world over!

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Bluebeard’s Castle in Birmingham

Posted on October 23, 2011 by andy

We arrived in Birmingham around 19.00 direct from the RFH after the mega long rehearsal day, the schedule was as follows, Steve & Richard go to the hall at midnight to begin setup, Nickin and Myself follow at 05.00 for video lineups & programming, Steve & Rich have a break and some sleep, we then do an afternoon rehearsal and then a show on the evening. Its a mental schedule and allot to squeeze into such a short space, with each venue throwing up a new challenge. This was the view from our projection/control booth for Birmingham, with massively different angles to rehearsal in the RFH, (we toured the toilet roll).

From arriving at the venue, the entire day seemed to vanish, doing lineups, redrawing masks, and going through programming the show, changing and updating footage. Interspaced with a full rehearsal, we continued through the day tweaking and programming and possibly got a little obsessive with matching the sail-moves timing with the video which was tacking the sail-moves. In the end it was time well spent, the masking and mapping was “bang tidy”, (inset a geeky high five here). With a short break for tea and doing final transfers to the backup machine we ran the world premier of Bluebeard’s Castle with Video, it was quite tense but Laura the show-caller is very clear which helped greatly. The show went down very well with i think, although I have very little experience with opera audiences and their reactions. Overall it was top performance and technically seamless :-), on top of all this, Steve had somehow managed, not to have a break and by the middle of the get out had worked for 24hours and was still managing to carry on. It was at this point that Nickin and myself decided it would be the right thing to do to wrap Steve up in PVC LX tape just to make him feel appreciated. This was definitely the most grown up thing to do and was perfect for that time of night!

Tres Fatigue (Trezfattygay)

Bluebeard Birmingham, TICK! Next stop Lisbon!

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Bluebeard’s Castle Begins

Posted on October 21, 2011 by andy

After getting back from Dubai I spent a couple of days at StageOne keeping on-top of drawings for HTTYD as well as managing and overseeing the start of the installation of around 500 Schnick Schnack panels in some scenic ground-row which is progressing nicely.

Now its the beginning of Bella Bartok’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Bluebeard’s Castle is a project I have been working on over the past few months with Nick Hilel (Yeast Culture) , Nick Corrigan (Nickin), Steve Holmes and Rite Digital allongside the Philharmonia Orchestra. To explain the opera better than I ever could, here is a brief excerpt from the Philharmonia’s website.

The extraordinary Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s only opera, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. Its world is sinister, dark and deeply disturbing. There are just two voices throughout, Duke Bluebeard and his new wife, Judith, and the entire one-act opera takes place in the hall of his castle. Judith opens the hall’s seven doors, one by one; each door reveals its own horror. In one, a torture chamber; in another, an armoury filled with bloody weapons; and in another, a garden where bloody stains the plants’ leaves. The final door opens and reveals Bluebeard’s three former wives, who step forward and receive Judith into their eternally imprisoned group. This is chilling, psychological drama, one of the great achievements of 20th century music.
SOURCE

Throughout the Opera we are projecting visuals on a stage set which surrounds the orchestra representing Bluebeards Castle consisting of 6 turrets which are our some of our projection surfaces. All of the content was all filmed and created for the piece and edited specifically in time and size so we can map perfectly to the projection surfaces in each venue. Projecting on the 6 surfaces is a challenge in itself , but to add to this there is also a centrepiece to the stage consisting of 3 sails suspended above the orchestra which move and rotate during the pice to represent the opening of each room throughout the story. This was the second challenge, figuring out how to project onto this matching and masking the complex shape whist it was moving.

IPhone photo during testing at the Royal Festival Hall

From our side, the run up to Bluebeard consisted of developing a system using Catalyst (Media server) which allowed us to mask to the shape and move the masks in realtime to match the projection on the sails as well as being flexible enough to tour multiple venues with different projection angles. Much testing tweaking and head scratching resulted in a rather tidy video playback setup, here are the details if you want to geek out!

BASIC PLAYBACK RIG
2 x MacPro 8 Core runing CatalystPM4 (1 Main & 1 Backup)
1 x KVM for backup switching
1 x BARCO Matrix Pro (DVI-I)
2 x Matrox Triple Head DVI
3 x 1080p Monitors (Output Preview 1, Output Preview 2, Catalyst Preview)
1 x TouchscreenPC running Chamsys MagicQ
1 x Chamsys PCwing
4 x BARCO HD20 projectors

The beginning of the ‘Tour’ (mini tour, very mini tour) started with a get in at the RFH after mid-day wednesday the 19th October, we had a small window to get the projectors in and playback setup before we were kicked out of the control booth for another gig happening in the space that evening. I had travelled down from from Newcastle and met Steve at the hall where we proceeded to get the kit into the booth, Richard Bleasedale was popping in as we had some issues with playback in Catalyst and h said he would try and figure out what the problem was, we managed to get the projectors in thanks to the local crew in the hall, and all the playback setup.

With 4 x 20k projectors in the booth it got rather warm! Richard arrived around 16.00 and and a look at the setup and programming, if you don’t use catalyst the following paragraph will probably boring and nonsensical, you have been warned! After looking at things and replicating the problem, (we had random video clips freezing onscreen but displaying that they were playing) Richard suggested a few things about changing the play-mode and being more defensive with the programming of the lighting desk. Low and behold his suggestions worked and I now understand the issue, thanks Richard, to anyone who is interested heres an explanation:

Random Video Clips not playing in catalyst

During some instances of programming we are pre-loading up to 16 video clips prior to fading up the intensity to display them on the screen. This process involves sending a packet of data (Artnet) from the lighting desk to Catalyst which changes multiple parameters such as the location of the video clip (File & Library) and the playback mode. For everything to behave as it ought to that packet of data needs to be read in to the system in the correct order and if any of those bytes of data are missed then the end result is not as expected. In this case Richard concluded that because we were updating so may things at once, coupled with using the Chamsys (were unsure how it packages and orders its data) that in some cases when we were triggering a cue, Catalayst was receiving the packet to locate the video and set the play-mode in a different order. This resulted in the correct in-frame of the clip being displayed but the play-mode not acting as should (possibly referencing the previous loaded clips parameters) because it had been triggered before the clip was loaded. This is how i understand it and after going trough the show and tidying up the programming we were in business! No freezing!!!

Back to Bluebeard…….
We left the venue at around 18.00 feeling happier with the progress grabbed some tea/dinner (Nice chinese restaurant down the street form the Old Vic) and headed back to the Travelodge. We were due back in the venue at 02.00 so after finishing off some work in the hotel I attempted to sleep for a few hours. The alarm went off at 01.30 and steve and myself headed over to the RFH for a setup rehearsal, when we got there the set guys from deadline had begun to put up the set under the guidance of Richard Slaney from RiteDigital, we proceeded to setup the rest of the system and got as-much lineup as we could whilst we waited for the rest of the set & sails to get put up. Nick & Nickin had joined us at around 03.00 and we continued on updating programming and tweaking things. In what felt like no time it was close to the first rehearsal, time seemed to have vanished but Nickin and myself with Steve operating Automation managed to get all of the masks drawn up and in the system. The rest of the day involved 2 rehersals, a quick lunch, many tweaks to programming & labelling up the system until 14.00 where we had to strip down the system and get our minibus to Birmingham for a repeat of what we had just done, although this time we would have our first audience.

Right to left: Steve, Richard, Nickin, Marina & Davids hand

These are the happy faces of people who have worked silly hours under pressure to get things right at the mercy and time constraints of an orchestra, mental or happy, you decide :-).

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Home for a few hours!

Posted on October 16, 2011 by andy

The past few days seem to have vanished into a flurry of activity since last posting which has generaly consisted of, hard graft and funny banter.

This is what happened in order starting from friday the day of Sandance beach party on the Palm in Dubai. For us, the technical team today was the least labour intensive day, all the rig was up, everything was plugged in we just had to be onsite as technical support for the gig and for a couple of follow-spot calls for Richard Ashcroft and Chicaine.


SAD (Lee) points at Shaun

In the industry Follow-spotting is generally seen a newbies job so when we got asked to do it from the PM (production manager) a silence descended between us as we looked at each other and probably spoke at the same time in our heads “Im not fucking doing that!” We decided to have a think and decide who would do it, tempted my the ‘after midday’ start for spot operating I agreed along with Shaun.
We got onsite around 15.00 catching a lift with Steve, checked the follow-spots, cans and basically hung around till Ascroft was on, Example & DJ Wire & Chicane where after that no more spots were needed. We got down to ground level and hung around following Chicane were David Moralis, Joris Voorn, Sasha in that order. I’ve checked out some of Voorn’s stuff since hearing him DJ planted some on my ipod :-), the Moralis & Sascha seem a bit dated now.

The next day (Saturday) was an 08.00 start followed by 10 hours of work, stripping down the rig sweating our tits off in the heat, we all must have drank over a litre of water per hour over the course of the day to keep hydrated which was just as well as we were all going out for some drinks later on. By 18.00 we had all managed to drop (derig) all lighting from the stage and site whilst the local crew stuck the last of the boxes on the truck. To everyones amusement, but not the driver. One of the locals had parked his van too close to the water and the tide had came in before he realised!

Much to our amusement, poor driver :-/

We eventually got back tot he hotel at about 18.30, with a quick shower shave, fresh clothes we went out for some food and beers with the rest of the Gearhouse crew. We met in a sports bar, had some food, had some beer, had some more beer, had some gin and tonic, had some more beer, then we left and went to a kind of nightclub place on the third floor of some hotel like building. Im not entirely sure where it was but we all ended up drinking these blue drinks, thats all i need to say, they were blue and contained allot of alcohol. Before we knew it we were back at the hotel ready to get picked up to got to the airport, we arrived at the airport, checked in, got on the plane and slept…………….

Dan & Sad

Shaun

Although some of us woke up to pay silly buggers……. Cheers Shaun.

Me and a Gerordie Chav 😉

I finally got home after picking my car up from Nitelites, helping Pimpy (Andy Magee) unload a truck, all in all a top week, lots of graft and lots of laughs. I have approximately 18hours at home before I head off again to Yorkshire for a couple of days!

 

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Sandance DUBAI!

Posted on October 13, 2011 by andy

Its hot, humid, dusty and this week im working on a beach in Dubai! Im lucky that working in the industry i do takes me to different places arround the world and this week just happens to be a the Atlantis Hotel Dubai prepearing for a beachparty called Sandance where around 10,000 peoople will be enjoying a party on the beach. One of my good friends Shaun Moore asked me to be part of his Geordie lighting team working for Gearhouse who are looking after the technical side of this gig.
Its currently the morning of day 4 and so far it has been a really busy/productive fun week. Its my first time out here and as with all new places, I wasnt 100% certain what to expect. We landed on Sunaday evening late and got picked up on Monday at 09.30 (local) and taken  to site by one of our new work colegues Andor. We met the rest of the team, Neil, Dave, Matt, Steve, Jules, Chandi allong with a load of local crew. The following 12 hours of work consisted of hanging and cabling many lighting fixtures, rigging truss, dringking LOADS of water in the baking heat and sweating most  of it back out again. The only thing whch slowed down the day was whist we were waiting for the tide to go out s the truck carrying out generators could drive around the stage (Stage right of the stage meets the shoreline when the tide is in) to put the generators in place. Whilst doing this the truck managed tog et stuck in the sand  with one side on the dry part of the beach and oneside almost in the water, you dont see that very often!


The truck with our generators on being towed out of the sand!

Luckily for everyone we had a Telehandler onsite to tow the truck so our lighting power could be delivered! The working day finished arround 22.30 and we were taken to a local bar for a few afterwork pints which was very much like the Cantina bar out of Starwars, this was great craic and a good end to a long day!

Tuesday we continued to place the rest of the lights getting all of the rig up and runing way ahead of schedule, it great when that happens! We finished arround 20.00 and Chandi offered to take us (Geordie techs) out and show us arround some of Dubai. After a grabing some quick food and having superfast shower we were onroute to “The Mall” to see the ?Burj Khalifa, the wolds tallest building standing at 828 meters. The tower is actually amazing and without actually seeing it, it is hard to describe the scale, so big I had to take a picture of it in 2 as as it was too big for the lens on my phone!

Burj Khalifa, taken on my Iphone

The tower is surrounded by a huge shoping complex, bars, places to eat, its all a little bit like Vegas in allot of ways. Walking tough the mall on the way back to the car I couldnt beleive it when i saw a Gold vending machine, where you could buy small gold bars, Krugerrands and other solid god items!!


Shaun & Sad (Lee) with the Gold vending machine!!!!!!!

The evening ended with a drink in a nightclub/bar called Bar Zar next to the Burj Al Arab hotel with some really cheesy club singers provinging the entertainment, even next to the worlds first 7-star hotel you get cheesy club singers, another fun end to a hard days graft.

Wednesday was a later start for myself and Shaun as we were working the later shift to finish running power & data arround site to the sitle lighting and focusing whilst is was dark. After bing onsite for a couple of hours it was arround 16.00, Matt, on of our production managers startd shouting for ous to get down of any structure, ground all of the hanging PA towers and strap things down as a sandstorm was comming! Looking over the bay the building s and cranes had dissapeard outof sight! we had a small time window but we managed to make everything safe and everyine managed to get down fromt the trusses in time. The picture below doesnt really do it justice but you should be able to see the hotel behind the stage.


Our own personal sandstorm, normally you can see the hotel behind the stage!

The dustcloud eventually passed and we continued to work through till the early hours, continuing with site lighitng to make the rest of the site look pretty for the gig.

 Jules, Andor, Sad(Lee) & Neil catching some ‘shade’

There has been allot of graft done in the past 3 days as well as allot of fun squeezed into a couple of hours of free time, its a good bunch here and we all seem to mange to continually take the piss out of each other for evereyones amusement.

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I think it has been a good week…….

Posted on October 7, 2011 by andy

I began writing this blog at what I had anticipated was going to be a very busy work period in my life, if you don’t know me then you probably don’t now what I do professionally for a living and without knowing what I do this wont make sense so now is apt to tell you a little about myself. First of all, as a pre-cursor, this is what this week has entailed.

Monday:
Drove to York to start a week of work at SOCS, arrived at the workshop and went over the custom LED strip which had been built for Cirque’s move to Madrid with Zarkana, in the evening went to the gym and rowed 10k in 44minutes.

Tuesday:
Worked with Karl going over the point hoist electrical drawings updating and modifying things.

Wednesday:
Drew up the panelwork for the track power & point switching cabinets for this current job we are working on, also updated the electronic interface board for each winch cabinet. In the evening went out for steak with everyone who is working together, English Canadian Australian & Chinese, its a good mix 🙂

Thursday:
Spent all day modifying drawings & updating drawing to the electrical drive cabinets, non stop working with the designer, electrical wiremen and other freelancers like myself to get things moving. Went to the gym at Weatherby leisure-centre, almost couldn’t get in because of the rude woman serving behind the counter didn’t believe we hand been before without been ‘official members’, eventually got in, rowed 10k in 44.44mins

Friday:
Collated the patch & schematic for an LED system comprising of around 600 Schnick Schnack B50 LED panels, spread over an arena size area, fully pixel-mapped and controlled by Artnet. Finished work, gave Joe a lift to York train station and drove northwards home.

Friday night:
Popped in Dance city to catch up with my friend James and others to socialise for a bit, now currently writing this!

So, as mentioned earlier, that maybe doesn’t make too much sense, so a little about me from almost the beginning.

IN THE BEGINNING
I was born on New Years Day 1980, Andrew Coates, Son of Jennifer & Alan Coates, younger brother to Dianne & Janice Coates. I grew up in a small village outside Newcastle called Burnopfield. I expect my childhood was very similar to many other counterparts around that time in that area. I played with friends, got into scrapes, messed around in the local woods and had a healthy fascination with trying to climb things such as fences and trees.
I guess school was also standard, there was a good mix of friends and  enemies, we got picked on by the older kids and thus passed this onto our younger counterparts when we eventually became the older kids, I guess thats some form of twisted karma?
Memorable events from ages 0 to 11 are…….

Sitting next to a garden gnome on the Isle of White whilst on holiday with my parents and getting my picture taken (That photo is still arround somewhere and I have no idea why I remember this)

Getting a very stern smacking and telling off from my Dad after climbing up onto the back of the sofa during December sometime and opening all of the windows on the advent calendar which had been placed “out of arms reach” to retrieve all the tiny plastic figurines hidden behind the doors.

Building tree-houses and dens in the local woods with friends and coming back to find that 2 weeks of hard work over the summer holidays had been trashed by someone. Undeterred we rebuilt a underground hide which blended into the pine needle covered forest floor which was almost impossible to find. The weekend later  we returned to find what looked like someone had stepped onto the roof of our den and fell in the big hole we had created leaving some shredded bits of denim jeans and a bit of blood, oops!

Kissing Anna Lucas in the corner at the bottom of the Yard whilst the rest of my class watched and possibly cheered. I remember it been allot of peer pressure to do something which at the time wasn’t very nice (due to age, not due to Anna, she was lovely, and a good friend who I have not seen since arround 1997! wow!).

Leaving Burnopfield Primary school age 10 to move onto the big scary place they called Tanfield comprehensive, where good live lessons were learned.

PAUSE: I dont want to make each blogpost too long so I think I’ll stop here for this one, I guess ive just set myself up to write a brief overview of ages 11 to 16 next!

Has this week been a good week? Yes i think it has!

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