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of interest…….

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    New Year’s Eve in Allendale: the tar barrel parad

    Its March and I’m talking about new years eve, know, it sounds strange but  I promised I’d post about this after the event but never got round to it, or possibly just got lazy.

    So, roll back to the 31st December 2014 around about midday, i was working in the hangar at Stage One building and testing the LED rings for the Milan Expo job (yes its this job has been a long one).

    Paul who was working with us mentioned about this thing which happens at Allendale each new years eve. The local men of the village march trough the town with flaming barrels of tar on their head and throw it on a bonfire to mark midnight and the start of a new year. This was the basic description and neither of us knew what it was really about, so a quick Google search helped firm up the details.

    Heres a link with a better description : The Allendale Tar Barrel Festival 

    So, I finished work and drove back north towards ‘home’, called my mate James and suggested going to see this as something different to do on new years eve. We were both in agreement, and generally it seems like going out into town these days on NYE is pretty crap.

    From google searches we found out that nothing really starts to happen until about 23:30 when the march would start. We set of about 21:30 and were son on the a69 heading towards Allendale. we got there around 22:30 and struggled a little to find a place to park. Eventually right through the other side of town (which isn’t very big) we found a spot and parked up. It was a pretty cold and pretty windy evening, e did a quick lap of town to see where everything was, which basically meant finding the unlit bonfire in the middle of the town. with time to kill we had another little wander and then went into one of the only 2 pubs we could seem to find in town. The pub was RAMMED, lots of people in fancy dress and a good atmosphere. At around 23:10 we headed over to the bonfire which was still unlit and waited, eventually, just after half eleven the band started playing. It was quite an erie sound of the band and there was a strong smell of paraffin coming from where the music was, we couldn’t see anything at this point.

    Eventually the band came marching by followed by a load of people dressed in fancy dress with large flaming barrel pots balanced on their heads.

    The old rules say (so I’m told) that to be part of the parade yo have to be a gentleman who was born in the village, no non villagers are allowed to take part, i don’t know the exact rules but thats what seems to be the case.

    It was a really good atmosphere as the people were marching by, it was a really windy evening and embers from the fire on top of their carriers heads were going everywhere. You could feel the heat given off by these things so gone knows how it felt to be walking behind someone whilst carrying your own flaming pot!

    If i recall, all of the carriers were dressed in some form of fancy dress or a kind of ye’olde style outfit, from postman pat to spider man it was a brilliant insane sight to see.

    When the first carrier got to the uncut bonfire, he threw his pot straight down to the base and immediately the whole thing went up. The flames were huge and with the wind they were gusting arround. I think we were only about 8 to 10 meters away and you had to turn away when the wind blew the heat in our direction. Flames were flying allover and James had to put the old ladies hair out next to us which had caught fire from one of the many rogue embers.

    Not put of by the wind and the heat the carries continued to throw their tar pits on the fire until they were all done. It was brilliant, everyone was wishing each other happy new year and we were all shaking hands with the people around us.

    I know I keep saying this but it was such a good atmosphere, there was no healthy and safety like you would find on a commercial event which made the whole thing more special. Everyone was so close to the fire, behind a small temporary barrie fence of course,  but with a huge dose of common sense and I hope it stays this way.

    After telling a load of people about this the following day I’m pretty sure its on the cards again to go and see 2015 into 2016 with more friends.
    Lastly, heres a little fella i found in a flightless latch.

     

     

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    Assimilate ubiquitously

    Ubiquitous Assimilation — meaning to absorb everything everywhere all the time.

    This is a quote form a film I watched a few weeks back called Detachment, its really worth a watch and this phrase stuck with me. Theres a whole lot more to the quote but its better you watch the film rather than hear it from me!

    Its been a while since I’ve posted (again), were well into 2015, the last third of the first quarter to be more precise and I’ve been busy for pretty much every day of it. So where to start after a rather long blog hiatus?  To save the potential bore if going over the past few month and trying to catch up ill start from right now!

    Right now I’m in Milan in the final stages of quite a long project I’ve been doing for Stage One and were building the UK pavilion for the Milan Expo. The element i have been working on is the LED lighting in a structure called The Hive which is made up of an intricate system of aluminium rods and plate. This forms a 14m square cube with a spherical voice in the middle in which visitors can enter. Around this void is scattered one thousand individually controllable high power custom LED lights. These will resonate with colour which is derived from he audio stream of a real beehive back in the UK and with some processing and algorithms specified by Martin Bencsik, who has done in depth research on bee’s and their activity, we will convert this into a visual stream shown as colours in the Hive.

    For a better description in the form of a 3D render have look at the website of Wolfgang Butress, the architect who came up with the design for the Hive. In a nutshell heres a photo rundown and explanation of the progress.

    This is the supporting wooden and scaffold substructure which the hive is being built on, and as each layer is built and gets progressively higher it meets with the ring beam which is the grey ring poking up. The substructure is temporary, this will eventually be taken away and the whole hive will be supported on the ring beam.

    The earlier days onsite were very cold and very wet, this is us measuring out the wooden template position proper to the first parts being laid down. It really was pissing down hard with rain this evening.

    And here we have it, layer 1, made up of many water jet cut aluminium plate and hundreds of bolts and connecting nodes. Myself and Jon my colleague came out to fit the initial LED rings as the structure was built, but as there was no structure we all jumped in to help things progress.

    During the build of the first few layers the weather was rather cold, sometimes snowed and was always below zero. On many occasions if we had to loosen bolts to fit nodes, we first had to get a heat gun to melt the ice which had frozen in the bolt hole before we could get an allen key in. The ice was treacherous when walking around and over the aluminium and thankfully no one slipped as the edges of the aluminium are incredibly sharp.

    The first 5 layers of the hive are densely populated and the LED we were installing are inside this forrest of aluminium rods. This meant that once the next layer goes on access to test and potentially fix things is very difficult. The above picture shows Jon in at about ring truss 6, its probably impossible to get in any further until the lower floor is taken away.

    The first 5 LED rings were installed and left for 4 weeks as we went back to Yorkshire to manufacture address and these fur following 22 rings. This meant that these were left out to the elements and I was quite nervous on who the electronics would hold up in the damp and the cold. We made the units watertight at every opportunity and when we came to test them the only problems we had was a wrong DMX address on one of the pixels! Hooray!

    This is a panorama looking down from the top of the hive and the image is somewhat distorted by the panorama feature on the iPhone. I think this shows us up to layer 20 here. As each layer goes in we follow with the next LED ring, each of which has it’s own polar offset to match the lighting layout pattern as specced by the architects.

    This is Jon clipped onto the hive at layer 15, this is about 4 meters up from the temporary floor and I’m around 6 meters up. Sometimes when the element of the hive which we need to fit LED onto aren’t ready we will switch rolls and help with the assembly of the hive, its a varied job.

    Above is a screenshot of the LED control software, which is still been tweaked and worked on. Here we take in the live audio stream of the real beehive and analyse the spectrum. This is then used to create an image based on the various frequencies over time and then we pixel map this to the sphere. From there this is then converted to DMX via Art-net and output to the pixels spread over 8 universes. Im looking forward to getting this all up and running in the next few weeks.

    As I say the above is just a whisker of the work which has gone into this and is still ongoing, theres still allot to do, but there is a good team here and things are progressing.

    To finish off, heres a face I found in my potato a few weeks back!

     

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    Say Hallelujah!!!

    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!

     

     

     

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