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of interest…….

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    Tired but happy

    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!

    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

    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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