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    Catching up with things d225

    So, as promised, after such a long break from not regularly posting here we go again, still in catch-up mode but here’s what happened in the week beginning 5th April, or round about then anyway!

    The Monday was a bank holiday and a day of doing entirely nothing after the crazy busy weekend of working Molly’s gig and then Shindig. I was crashing at my best mate James’s and kept continually laughing whenever I went to the bathroom to see a teddy bear with cleaning gloves on sat by the bath.  Its both funny and weird, it should stay.

    On the Tuesday I was back to stage one to continue development on the 3D flying system and this week was the beginnings of the custom console we need to build for this rig. Its one of those things that you can have all of the technology in the world, but when it boils down to what dimensions and spacing works for things its best to make it out of card board boxes with components stuck in them and get people to have a go. So here it is, 2 multi axis joysticks stuck into a box.

     Then the following week I got the metalwork back for the first pass and fitting, and generally making sure things were going to fit inside the designed space Most things fitted but some things still needed moving around, thus the scribbled sharpie notes on the metalwork. 

    Later in the week, Thursday I was down London at Fiftynine productions dong some preproduction on a gig called Digital Revolution, which opens at the barbican on the 3rd July. I managed to get up and go for a run early which was ace running by the canal, such a great location.

      It was a productive, challenging couple of days figuring out how to make things work, and discussion various technical elements.  I can say the guys have been very busy and I’m looking forward to this gig, there’s allot of top exciting digital artists presenting pieces. Whilst going for lunch on the Friday I was walking past a park and looked over at the swings and thought, why did they design that to look like a cartoon knob, so what else could I do but take a photo.

     Leaving 59 I popped my head in to the space where Richard and he chaps were filming some footage for Vivid Live which was on in Sidney Australia. 59 were doing the projected content on the opera house sails and from videos of the live event looked ace! Here a re some of the miniature Opera Houses they used to make some of the content, pretty neat! You can see a video of the event here: Vivid Live

     

    I left London on the Friday, travelled back north on the train to York, got my car from the car park where I left it when I travelled down on the Thursday then drove to Newcastle. The next day I was a Dance City again, twice in 2 weeks where I was last minute technical cover for the Hofesh Schecter dance company who were visiting. This was less Hofesh, but Hofesh dancers presenting their own work. This was the first gig on the road of the tour (after rehearsals) and, everything, I think went well, I didn’t understand some of the pieces but I guess that’s just interpretation?

    So that’s it, another week blogged, closer to almost being current, finally as the trend goes, A FACE!!!!!!!!!!!

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    Warning, Mammoth catchup post!! d243

    Once again its been a big gap between posts, too long, and I’m partially annoyed with myself for letting it slip but also the past month has been insanely busy. So the last time I posted we had just finished the install of Re-Rite Krug for the Philharmonia orchestra, which went well and  I’m pretty sure everyone was happy, I think the champagne helped with that too.

     Traveling north to Newcastle after Krug I had a few days with no work which well needed, I was a bit fucked after getting back from Russia and going straight into another job. Whilst in the northeast I went and visited the chaps at Nitelites just to catch up as I hadn’t seen anyone in months.  I was pretty amused to see a picture of Pimpy and Platty on the door to their office, very fitting.

    After catching up with a few people I was back down London for the getout of Re-rite was probably the shortest it has been installed in any one place. It was a good swift get out and a nice opportunity to see my friend the giant again ;).

    Straight after the Krug out I was back in the swing of it with stage one, doing some R&D and software on a bridle based flying system, which I’m currently still working on. When I first came back to the hangar after been in Russia I was surprised a the size of the truss which had been rigged up next to one of the aircraft hangars for our R&D. There been allot of progress in a very short space of time

    This was only a couple of week ago and an early visualization of the object moving in a software environment following the real bridle. It doesn’t look like much in the photo but was a nice little milestone getting the data back from the motion controllers and visualizing it so accurately.

    On the weekend I managed to visit my sister brother in-law and the Kids where I met them at Keilder reservoir for a day out. Mat had just had his sail boat painted and refurbished and he was going out on the water with my nephew. It was quite an eventful launch with Matt worried about getting the paint damages on the boat from it scuffing against the jetty and my sister nearly falling in the water after catching one of the ropes, luckily no one fell in and there was allot of laughing.

    The rest of us went for a walk through the forest to Leeplish, which was a good jaunt out, we were pretty hungry once we got there only to find the restaurant had stopped serving at 16:00 and it was now 16:10,  after a couple of buns from the shop it was another 5 mile walk back to where the cars were. It must have been pretty wet at Keilder over the past few months as there were loads of trees which had fallen over from what looks like their roots not being able to hold the land.

    After the weekend I was down Plymouth for the install of Re-rite but this time, in a tent in the town center. Usually this is installed in a site specific building and a tent threw up new challenges mainly with the street not being level

    When in Plymouth I managed to get out for a run, I’ve taken up running again after not doing any for the past few month’s whilst in Russia. Its been a slow start but nice to eventually try and get some level of fitness up. I’m aiming to do a 20k in august somewhere, just for fun, that’s my goal anyway. Whilst out running I ran past the ferry terminal and had forgotten that the last time I was here I was driving an unknown to me overweight Luton van for Seen & Heard back in 2006 or 2007.  I was driving from Newcastle to Barcelona getting the ferry from Plymouth to Bilbao and the first I knew was when one of the truck drivers I was chatting to looked at my ticket and noticed I was half a ton overweight! I was pretty pissed off at the company but was younger and greener to do anything, that feels like an eon ago now!

    After a couple of days of install I was back at Stage one to do some programming and testing for a couple of days. It was a fast couple of days but now we had the motion controller following a data stream from the currently 2D model. This seems straightforward but took quite a bit of tweaking and the cleverness of car to get the system running smoothly. By now we were inputting joystick commands into the visualizer which was then outputting wire lengths in real-time to position the object in a 2D XY plane. I also needed to read back the ACTUAL wire lengths and do the reverse calculation to work out the XY position from the wire lengths and the winch positions.  It was around now when I realised how much mathematics from college and school I had forgotten. S-O-H-C-A-H-T-O-A , its most definitely a case of use it or loose it!!

     

     

     

    After a great couple of days doing bridle stuff I was back down to Plymouth again after a phone call asking me to go back and help with the rest of the install. The schedule was, leave stage on at 17:00 drive to Plymouth, arrive just after 22:00, sleep, wake at 08.00 work all day,  go for a run, sleep, work Sunday till mid afternoon and drive back north ready for an early start on Monday back at the hangar, Crazy weekend!

     

    On the Monday I received a couple of phone calls, one was to do a projection design for a small section of a dance piece for a good friend on Saturday and the other was to provide a media server and my services for Shindig, a DJ dance event on the Sunday. Naturally I said yes to both.  The following evenings of that week were spent doing a combination of planning, chopping and animating content for Molly’s show on Saturday and forming a plan for shindig on Sunday to make sure things went as smoothly as possible from my end.

     

    The daytimes was spent in bridle world, working with Karl integrating my software with his software to make a more user friendly front end. It was one of those weeks where there was allot achieved but not allot to show for it.

    We did do some experiments making the 2D bridle follow a path which seemed to work quite well but is still quite a way of implementation as there is so many other basic elements to get rock solid first. This is an early path visualization also displaying the safe zone envelopes to avoid crashing into the winch towers and imminent catastrophe!

     

    After finishing at the hangar on Friday I was straight to Dance City to do some preproduction on Molly’s piece. It had been well over 6 moth since I had seen some people, it was great to catch up and as a team everything just fell into place and pretty much gelled together.We finished at a reasonable time on Friday and were back in at 09:30 on the Saturday, again it was a really good day, everyone was on it and after a several tech run-throughs and a rehearsal it was ShowTime.

    This is a preproduction mock up of one of the projection ideas which we used. Each rune symbol faded up on cue as the boxes were stacked, and hats off to the dancers for getting the stack order correct pretty much each run through!

    The piece was well received and straight afterwards I was headed down to the Newcastle quayside to do some setup and pre-programming for Shindig.

    I had my MA2 wing setup with Catalyst and a load of content; the only thing here was that I had never busked on the MA2, I had programmed cues and cultists for shows but this was a bit different. After a little head scratching and chatting with Andy (LD) and Neil (Dimmers) I had a bit of a plan. I stayed there till around 01:00 setting up color pallets, content pallets and basic FX pallets to mix the content with.  I left site happy and was back in at 09:00 on the Sunday back programming and doing some renders of geometric stuff to try and take advantage of the MiStrips. There was a combination of VJ’s from Novak and myself mixing content across the LED screen and the Barco Vidoe fixtures (MiStrip). Given more warning wit this gig I would have liked to have another switched input and run content direct from vvvv combined with catalyst, there was allot of potential here but time was so limited, still it looked the dogs bollocks in the end!!

    So , this all only takes us up to the  4th of April and were almost in to June, its just insane how fast the year if going already and how busy things are. Everyone I know seems to be busy with work in these strange incestuous live events / install /arts world we work in. That’s all im witing for now with a goal to catch up with the current time on tis blog within the week. More mini posts rather than the monster here. And without fail, heres a face, seen at my parents house when I went to visit a few weeks back, this was the metal hinge of the fridge door 🙂

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    d189 Finally a break, no work for a few days!

    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!!! 

     

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