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of interest…….

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    WK 4.3 Relentless but rewarding with YeastCulture and BoyBlue

    Exactly as the title suggests its been a long but rewarding week in tech/rehersals for the show The Five and the prophecy of prana” with Boy Blue Entertainment and Yeast Culture.  We spent allot of time updating the catalyst programming, trying, changing, and re-editing and receiving more animations for the project, god knows how many hours were spent looking at the stage and computer monitors but I think all of our eyes are a little more square than the week before.

    Its quite funny looking back through my note pad trying to remember what the notes I made meant, and as the week progressed they all turned into a cryptic shorthand with scribbly writing and arrows

    I have to namecheck Richard Moores from the Barbican who’s valuable knowledge with Panasonic projectors helped us out of a confusing situation. We weren’t getting the projection raster width we were expecting with the throw distance we had and nothing made sense until Richard showed us another input setting which gave us the true 1920×1080 input & output, thanks again Rich!

    Above is one of the scenes from the show, its a great use of the gauzes and makes me smile every time, if you see the show you’ll know what I mean.  Im back in Spainnow and the show opens tomorrow (22nd Oct 2013)at the Barbican, it feels odd not being there for the opening after spen ding so long in tech and programming but the show is in in the capable hand s of Amber who will be lookign after video for the run.

    During the show there are different set elements which get projection mapped “pixel placement 😉 ” and to keep track of which blocks we were projecting media on we gave them all animal names. In total we have a, Cat, Dog, Swan, Frog, Bear, Baby Bear, p’pot, and diamond it always helps the stress during tough work weeks when you give inanimate object names. I think we’ve all got snappy at one point or another this week but its felt like a really good team, everyone seems to understand each other needs and has worked together well.

    I keep seeing more and more faces in places, I think the more you see then the more you see, heres a happy bin near the Barbican.

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    Jamón y queso

    I can easily say I’ve never ate so much ham, cheese and spanish tortilla as I have this week, we’ve been in the “Palacio de Festivales de Cantabria” in Santander tech’ing and rehearsing LosMis. Quite long hours, and in the breaks the staple diet from the cafes close by is generally ham and cheese!
    I think its been a god week, we got some time off on monday which was good to get some daylight and have a bit of a wander around Santander. Im pretty sure i walked East and was quite surprised to see a sea lion in a purpos built encloser not far from the theatre.

    Close by was also a couple of replicas of some boats, when i saw the one which looked like Noahs Ark i thought that must have been from the really early 1900’s built by some people who had been ship wrecked.

    Then I saw this plaque which gave information about them, I couldn’t believe it!

    That was the only time off this week and the following days were rather long 09.00 till 23.00 and I’m not actually shire what jobs i did on which days as they seem to have blened into a week long passage of time. We generally went out for a beer every other night and Jason had founf this pub which served a really good local IPA, Dougalls, probably pronounced Doogallez, in a spanish accent.

    As the week went on i got the multi-view working, thank god, and we slowly progressed through the show scene by scene, someties quickly sometimes pretty sloooowwlyy. This si the 5 projector show, 4 onstage and one out front, were comming in at really steep angles to project ontot he back wall because of the space restrictions, which means we need ed to move up from the 3 projectos on the back wall show to, 4 to cover the whole area with being so close. This makes the lineup pretty tricky and with tweaks being made each day to pull the 4 projected images into one. This has been the view for most of the week, with Tom (Programmer) and Simon (Associate LD) on LX in front of me to the left and Sergio to the right who will be operating the tour.

    This is a side on view of one of the onstage projectors with a blurry Sergio in the background. Hose who is looking after video is getting to grips with the lineup and he will be looking after this on the tour around Spain which i think is due to run for a year.

     

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    Week 2.3 (Monday 7th October)

    Its monday, I’m in spain on the second leg of LosMiserable where were setting up for the start of the spanish tour. Officially its a day off, unofficially its a day of catching up with normal stuff, like, getting laundry done, sending out invoices answering emails, and also I’m going to pop in to the theatre to try and sort out issues I’ve been having with the Multi-views we have on this job. The muti-views are a bit of a sore point, the rest of the system is set up and working as it should and these are the last hurdle. Ill probably look back in a month and say, “oh that wasn’t so bad’, but currently, the technology is being a pain in the ass and I wont be beaten.

    This is the multi-view window, it basically takes all the video signals we are outputting and displays them on one monitor, the issue is is that we are missing 2 windows (Backup 2.3 & 2.4). Its easy to point the finger and put the blame on the equipment when  you have an issue, If I had never had this issue i would have said these units were the best thing since sliced bread and to be fair they are quite good, once I eventually get these to pass the last 2 singals ill be much happier.

    This is my current room number, I’ve tried to get a picture of the room number of every hotel room if stayed in since i think 2010 and pretty much think I’ve managed to remember to take a picture of 99% of them. I first started doing it because i kept forgetting my room number, so if i took a picture i just had to look at the last room number on my phone and voila! Now its became a bit of a ritual.

    Rite, time to go to the Chemist (I feel I’m catching flue, typical day of thing), Laundry (Only have a few clean clothes left in my case), then pop in the theatre, (I’m going to limit my time to an hour).

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