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of interest…….

  • From Tokyo to Seoul (and a bit of War)

    I Cant deny that I’m a lucky chap to see so many different parts of the world through work. and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to go to Tokyo. Its not all play, although I generally don’t write too much about the work aspect I was over in Tokyo working for 59Productions to make sure all the video kit was prepped for the Japanese rehearsals of Les Miserable. It was 4 days in a studio space, prepping kit, making it work/ communicate with each other and conveying to the Japanese company providing the hardware, what we required. The day I flew to Seoul, i had the morning available to look around Tokyo.

    Deciding i was going to do much walking i walked to Roppongi hills and had a wander around to find a huge spider sculpture which was pretty neat. Upon my translator Shoko’s recommendation i decided to walk into town to the Electrical appliance district as that where all the gadgets were! It was a bit of a grey day and slightly raining, which brought out the brollies in force, i think i was the only person walking round without a brolly, for some reason I thought it was going to be completely dry! I was wrong!

    I eventually got to the area and went into Bic Camera which is a MASSIVE electronics/gadgets etc store in which I lost a couple of hours looking at stuff.  There wasn’t anything there you couldn’t get off the internet but it was pretty overwhelming to have all of this technology under one roof! I made it back to the hotel, got a lift to the airport and by 21:00 that evening I was at my hotel in Seoul.

    This job is another move of the Korean version of Les Miserable on which I’m working with Simon Wait installing the automation for the show and also overseeing the projection. Its day 3 and we’ve got allot fo the bulk of things in.  Yesterday we got all the floor laid and there was allot of time spent on the floor running in belts and plugging up motors. Its noisy, long days, some standing around waiting then a flurry of work bit its a good bunch here so were all merrily getting on with things.

    Lying down on the job

    So now, according to the news North korea is at war with South Korea. It still seems pretty chilled out here in Seoul and non of the locals seem very bothered. Seems like another empty threat from the fresh faced Kim Jong Un but no-one really knows. Its good that everyone is just getting on as normal, why let a little war threat get in the way of things!

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    Cherry Blossom Tokyo

    Today I’m in Tokyo, well Ive been here for just over 24 hours now and its pretty exciting to be in such an iconic city. When I arrived midday yesterday I got out the car to see the most amazing site of the Cherry-blossom trees in bloom around the place i was staying, in-fact I was after told this happens every year for only about 2 weeks and they’re in bloom everywhere! Its an amazing site and I’ve been so lucky to see it!
    Getting here was a bit of a mission with 3 flights to catch and connections with no room for error. 06.00 leave the house and get to Newcastle airport, fly to Heathrow land at 11:00 and next flight to Seoul at 12:00. When i landed in Seoul, about 12 hours later I had to arrange to get my bags transferred from the BA flight onto the Korean air flight, which took a lot longer than expected. Eventually I made it to the gate with 5mins to spare, first world problems indeed…….

    The reason I’m out here is to Prep the video kit for the Japanese version of the stage show Les Miserable. The Kit is being provided locally but needs to be prepared and all the Catalyst commands set correctly to talk to the corresponding equipment. I thought this was straight forward but now I can understand why Fiftynine-Productions sent me out. The Japanese Magnux, who are providing the kit and support for the tour have done a great job getting all the kit together and was plugged up perfectly when I arrived today but i guess a few things were lost in translation Jon’s (Who I’m prepping the kit for) specifications. There were a few racking issues and miss-understandings of things which in hindsight seem obvious now but at the end of today were in a good place ready to crack on with geeky stuff like setting up the ethernet commbs between Catalyst the Kramer switcher and Avitec Multiview. Its been a hard but fun day, and also what is prety cool is that were rehersing at Toho studios the place where Godzilla was made! Ace!!

    I forgot to buy milk this morning when i went to the shop to buy some bits and pieces for my stay. I was telling this to my translator Shoko who has been an absolute godsend today and she was saying that non of the milk in Japan seems to be labelled in english so english speaking visitors can never tell what kind they’re buying. So, for the first time in my life I was given help to buy milk, there were so may variaties, and in the end i went for semi-skimmed, (i think)!

    24 hours in and I really like Tokyo, everyone is so polite, theres allot of work to be done in my two remaining days here but but it should be fun with the bunch of people I’m with!
    Aw, group hug, ha!

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  • A Brief Visit to the Laing Gallery Newcastle

    Seeing that I’ve been home in newcastle for a short amount of time i took the opportunity to catch up with Steve Legget who works in the Laing art gallery Newcastle. Steve’s a good old friend and writes allot of electronic music which is well worth a listen to if you like cleverly sampled ambient tunes. Upon meeting steve he took me straight to one of the galleries upstairs and showed me this!

    Going though the door initially i couldn’t tell what it was but it looked very smart, upon closer inspection i realised that each of the black things in the muddle of the white squares were clock mechanisms. And looking even closer i saw that some of them had the second had on them and were ticking merrily away with a tinly piece of pencil lead hanging off the end of the second hand whoch drew beautiful spiragraph’esque organic pattens with the ticking motion.

    Each pencil pendant was a little different to the other and the slight undulations in the floor showed up through the pencil. Steve was telling me that each week the artist comes in and adds another row of hanging pencil leds onto the clocks so each row ends up being one week younger than the previous which shows up through the definition of the drawn circles. Its such a brilliant and beautifully simple idea its well worth a visit if your in the area. The piece is called Timecasting Nick Kennedy, a more detailed writeup can be found here LoraCollinsArt

     

     

     

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