Say Hallelujah!!!

Posted on December 2, 2014 by andy

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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Insert title here…….

Posted on October 23, 2014 by andy

Its Wednesday the 22nd October and time to update the blog about whats been happening over the past couple of weeks. My time has been quite nicely split across various projects, across various disciplines. So from where i last left off i was back to the hangar at stave one to continue development of a which speed winch 3d control system which StageOne are developing for a client. Karl and myself spent quite a which ironing out various little niggles which always arise when doing a new product. Ive been writing the 3d control software for the user 3d joystick flying and Karl has been doing some rather clever work in handling data transfer for a smooth flight.

On the weekend, I somehow, and I’m not yet sure how it happened as we are all never in the same place at the same time, but I managed to catch up with my good mates Mitch and BigChris. We went out on the motorbikes around northumberland and i was riding pillion on the back of Chris. I wasn’t expecting him to be accelerating as hard as he did and yes I did shout some profanities the first time he took off and I was confined i was coming off the back. It was a top time catching up!!

On the sunday i was to travel down to London to do some video programming and playback for a gig for YeastCulture. But before that i had to go through all of my stuff to make sure I had everything and at this point i decided to empty my rucksack as it was big and heavy and i really count remember everything i had in there, this is some of the contents, mainly less 2 laptops and 2 power supplies.

So, from top left to right reading like a book we have:

  1. 5 Point + H&V Laser, for projection lineups Link
  2. Passport, take it everywhere.
  3. Oyster card, priceless for London.
  4. Coloured pens, everyone likes pens!
  5. Super lightweight packable running jacket.
  6. Red backed Bicycle cards for doing sleight of hand
  7. Matrox Dual head2go, used for this Yeast culture gig.
  8. Leap Motion used for playing and developing softwares.
  9. Pencil case of random adapter cables.
  10. Wera portable screwdriver set, So useful. Link
  11. Korg Kaossilator II for making noises and general entertainmet. Link
  12. Webcam, for debugging & developing softwares.
  13. Gaming mouse, my RAT Link
  14. Some video signal adapters, HDMI/Minidisplayport.
  15. Leatherman Skelltool, Lightweight Multitool Link
  16. CUBE BOT Link
  17. USB Light (Around cube-bot)
  18. Bosch PLR50 Laser Measure Link
  19. LACIE Thndebot SSD external drive FAST!! Link
  20. Led Lenser Headtorch, dimmable & Focusable Link
  21. DVI Parrot used for spoofing EDID signals.
  22. 3D Mouse, i use this with 3d modelling software allot! Link
  23. Pitor, my little blue mascot from Poland when I briefly toured with Jonsi.
  24. BOSE Mini sound link portable speaker, I LOVE this Link
I eventually repacked my back with all the things I needed, and then packed my suitcase with clothes for the week and by sunday evening i was back down the big smoke again ready for an early start at Rich Mix in Shoreditich to begin rehearsals for the gig “Index of Metals” 

It was acne easy start tot he day and I met David and Ian from Sound intermedia who were looking after all the live mixing and audio playback, and also Simon who was following the score and cuing the piece. I was there in the roll of video & projection specialist to set up the system, program Qlab and make sure it all worked. We had been given triple screen content prior to the show split across 3 seperate video files so to make things more robust i spent a couple of days rendering out all the clips in to one long wide file which ensured sync across the screens. This was prep well worth doing, allows with rendering out an hours with of timecode which was used on occasions where the conductor needed to keep track where he was in relation tot he score and the time.

Two days later we were in the queen Elizabeth hall in the South Bank centre. It was a relatively easy morning setting up, apart from one broken VGA cable which took a while to find, and then a successful couple of rehearsals during the afternoon. After rehersalsand before the show I met up with with Nick from Yeast Culture and it was great to catch up over fish and chips! The show went very well and everyone was really happy, a success! It was a really good few days working with some really nice people!

The following day I was due to travel back north to the hangar at stage one to continue on LED development but received a call off roy asking if i could go and help Ben on a job in Battersea as Jam who was meant to be there and an ear infection and couldn’t make it. So the following day i was with Ben and the rest of the chaps from stage one installing automation for an event for Youtube.

Everything went in smoothly and ben had a nice view from front of house! The automation consisted of 3 revolves each of them with a double sided led screen on. In sequence and timed with video and performers the screens revolved for presenters and performers to come on and off the stage. Once everything was up and running it all looked really good. I must say that the production company Flourish Creative were incredibly nice people and looked after everyone really well. It was tiring out to be a brilliant week!

Early monday morning I was on a train up to Yorkshire and then headed to the hangar to catch up with work on the current large LED project.  This stage i was putting together the prototype power data distribution circuit boards, this time we had ordered to prototype PCB in red, mainly for my own amusement. After getting over a couple of silly errors it was all working swimmingly.  Heres a picture of one part of the workshop, I have to apologise for to Jamie as even though i start the day really tidy, by the ned of the day it works out like this. Sorry Jam!

Later on in the week we were on the disused airfield next to the hangar doing some real word testing on the 3d camera flying system which provided some good feedback. Thankfully for the 3 days it was up the weather was SUNNY!!! Since we have implanted quite a few improvements, and I’m looking forward tot he next test.

Here are some beautifully machined pieces of aluminium, containing lights, these elite things are really coming together. These will be used on a project going live next year.

I haven’t really seen may faces recently, this was the latest one, diddy robot head on a hydraulic valve on a scissor lift. Nuurrrrrggg!

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A Fast Month!

Posted on October 4, 2014 by andy

After I left of the last post where I had went for a run around Taunton we had one day left in Karls studio doing some LED development trying out some different optics. We discovered that if we introduced a smoke machine, and put an optic from an LED Lenser P7 over a 120 degree 4 color led you got quite a nice effect. Not the result we were looking for but pretty all the same.

The following Monday I was back in the hangar working on more led design as the brief had changed and the goalposts moved a little, which, to be honest, is for the better. This did mean back to the drawing board with the physical design and new challenges.
Boo, Jims dog was back in the hangar after a holiday and was looking healthier after his diet. This did mean that every time you were eating something or even just ventured into the kitchen you got this…..

After a quick turnaround design process and some lovely CNC machining of a combined heat sink and case we had a foundation for the printed circuit board, before sending off the PCB for manufacture I printed off the circuit to scale just to make sure it would fit.

On the weekend I was back in Newcastle, and even though the angel of the north has been there since 1998 I have never actually went and visited it. So on the Saturday morning after I had been for a I drive to the site of the angel. Apart from a few picnic tables and some playing fields and of course the sculpture there is not allot there. It is though when you get up close a very impressive structure and generally just a nice place to hang out of you just want to read a book have a picnic or just sit in the sun.

On Sunday I drove down to Birmingham to do a gig for the DRP group in the Hilton Metropole. It had been years since id been to this venue and when I got there nothing had changed. I didn’t know a whole lot about the gig before I got there apart from there were pair of Panasonic projectors, which needed blending into a single image. We started at 06.00 on the Monday rigging 6 projectors and all the relevant cabling. After some creative projector manipulation we had a basic projection blend setup by the evening. We were projection on to a set, which the content was mapped to, the tricky bit was that all we had was a single HD feed from power-point. Normally you would use some software to output 2 feeds with an overlap to do the blend. On this, from Brads suggestion we used the zoom and HV shift on the projectors themselves to select the part of the image we wanted and then did the blend on the projectors, it actually worked a treat.

I was looking after video playback on the conference, I haven’t worked a conference for probably 2 years and had forgotten how long some of the speeches can go on for. During this time there is nothing to do apart from wait for your next cue. Its at this point I started doodling, we were doing the conference for the SPAR brand, so I did a Spar doodle!

On the Wednesday morning I was driving back north to Stage one where work continued on the custom LED. I had built up some prototype units and was trying to get as much brightness out them as possible before they either overheated or drew more current than the circuit could handle.  They are now BRIGHT and so far, after 36hour full whack testing the firmware is bulletproof! More testing to follow!

I had to recycle some old broken electronics which I found in the workshop to make a power data breakout unit, its amazing what you can do with a Dremmel, some wires and a bit soldering to make life easy!

That’s a condensed month from my last blog post, its been a fast month too, in-fact its been a fast year! Here’s a face from the Days Inn Weatherby! I can’t believe I haven’t seen this before!

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Back to Work!

Posted on September 6, 2014 by andy

No sooner had I been back from Berlin (11th August) I was off away again to Spain for the install of Priscilla Queen of the desert in a theatre in Madrid. It was all VERY last minute, I hadn’t done the install for 2 years as my good frond Iain had been looking after it so we had literally one day for Iain to pass over all the info form the past 2 installs, lots on memory keys but also sobs very important notes in notepads!

I don’t actually live anywhere at the moment as I spend most of the time, not quite on the road but in various locations around the UK/Europe so when I’m in Newcastle which I call my base, my best mate James has a spare room for me and i generally buy the beer which works out well. Whilst packing for Madrid, one of James’s cats, Rosie decided to make a nest in my case and took quite a bit of persuading to get out!

I Landed in Madrid and finally got to the theatre midday on the 13th August and it was nice to see familiar friends whom many I hadn’t seen since Sochi. Most of us had installed this before which was useful because its a bit of a task with so many bits to put together mechanical and electrical.

Gethyn, Davide, Ian, Simon, Smithy

For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about there when I say Priscilla here is a basic explanation. Priscilla Queen of the desert the musical is made on the film of the same name about 3 drag queens who drive across Australia to Ayres Rock. Priscilla is the name of the bus they drive around in and for the stage show the bus is an incredibly complex piece of stage equipment. The bus can be remotely driven around the stage in any direction because of the 4 wheels can pivot independently an be turned in any 360 degree direction. Ontop of that the bus has 3 lifts inside which raise performers onto he roof and the entrée side of the bus opens like a massive garage door. Thats the mechanical part and now for the electrical! The bus is clad in 40,000 LED’s which can display low resolution video on all sides along with may theatrical lighting fixtures hidden inside the bus to light the performers when the garage door is open. This was a picture I sent to Iain with his nickname Waldo t let him know how we were getting on.

The bus is getting pretty old now and electronic spares are hard to come by as most of the components are custom produced, thus manufacturing more is quite expensive and people don’t want to spend the money for an overhaul. So because of this I had a box of electronics which i didn’t know what was working and what wasn’t. Luckily there was only one LED driver card which got damaged in transit so i managed to  put together a new unit from working bits on several different non working bits!

The bus has done well considering the age of here and that she has done close to 2000 shows  between London, Brazil, Sweden and now Spain. I think the next time it moves to a new place the people with the money are going to have to reach into their pockets for a major electronics and cosmetic overhaul. This was her on day 4 when we had almost everything together and it was just tweaking and tidying after that.

A day after i got back to the UK I went and helped out Nitelites with some content mapping for Shindig in Hoults yard. Because they were orienting the screens at 45degrees the pixel processor doesn’t allow for this adjustment, so using Mad Mapper and syphon so the VJ could still use his preferred software Resolume i set up the system so the content fitted the screens correctly.

The following week I was back at the hangar at Stage One and that friday one of my good mates Si Bye was leaving the sweat house for good, this meant one thing, leaving drinks. There wasn’t just a few drinks there were many which almost broke me. This is Simon Me and Bully in the Boot and Shoe at a civilised part of the evening!

Visiting My parents house the following weekend I was sorting through some stuff which had been at the back of a cupboard and I was quite surprised to find this poster. This was part of a series of gigs that my mate Andy Magee and myself put on in 2002, we did all the promotion and also provided the sound equipment, we were essentially making work for ourselves. It was  great fun and i can’t believe its over 12 years ago now!!

Currently, August 2014 I’m working on a project for Stage one where we are designing a high power RGBW led pixel to be installed in an architectural structure. Im not sure how much I can say about it apart from that were looking to produce about 3000 high power pixels which will run very low resolution video across,  this was a printout of the PCB design to make sure the components would fit. Once we had the layout correct the designer changed his mind about some visual elements which meant we had to redesign the PCB, turns out that after much head scratching of how we were going to do it, it should be better wight he new layout.

This week just gone i was down London working on a gig called The Dinnerparty Revisited with Ash Green. I didn’t know much about it until getting down on the sunday evening when Ash talked me through it.Its the brainchild of  Katherine Araniello who is a disabled performance artist. The gig was split across 2 venues each containging 6 tv screens which played back characters at a dinner party prerecorded with Katherine acting in them. When Katherine went over a sensor in her wheelchair at the south bank centre the associated TV at the Purcell rooms, south bank centre and at arts Admin would play the video. Both venues had actresses playing Katherins butler and her personal assistant, and because theres only one Katherin, we had a inflatable effigy with a live feed of Katherines face from the Purcell rooms projected onto it. There was also a live feed of both venues sent to each other and vision mixed onto a big screen upstage. The show was bonkers and as part of the show the actors drank Prosecco as part of the show and gave it out to the audience. In the venue where I was looking after the tech we had Laura and Katie who were superb, incredibly funny and kept the audience when sometimes it was quite difficult to understand because of the inherent delay of video feeds between he venues. It was a crazy bizarre show but everyone seemed happy when they left, i think the champagne helped too 🙂

Whilst in london I was  staying in a flat in Balfron tower, one of the last bits of undeveloped Poplar. Most of the tenants have been moved out the grade 2 listed building in preparation for it to be developed into expensive flats but currently there is a guardian scene where people can live quite cheaply although they may have to move out within a week or a month’s notice. Theres no real guarantee that you will have somewhere to live for anymore than a week/month thus the low rent. We were the because our producer Andrew Mitchelson has something to do wight he tenanting and we had an amazing view from the 24th floor, top digs!

On the wednesday I was off straight to Taunton to Karls workshop where we were assembling and testing the first prototype of LED i mentioned earlier. Whilst there i want for a run around Cotford StLuke’s where I was staying, it was quite nice to be in the country direct from busy busy london! I wasn’t sure what do do when crossing the railway line as the sign said don’t, so i did!

Last of all, a face to finish, this was in the flat at Balfron tower, an old TV ariel socket making a pretty good skeleton face! Booooom!!!

 

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Guten Tag!

Posted on August 6, 2014 by andy

It’s the 5th august and I’m still in Berlin, this awesome city, the past 4 weeks have flown over so fast and I’m happy to have met so many awesome people from around the world on my language course. We were all studying at the Goethe institute for 4 weeks and what a fun time was had. Based on some of the things we did heres some recommendations on what to to in Berlin.

Hello!

Visit the Grunewald forest – Drachenberg – Teufelsberg
This is a large forest area just outside of Berlin, and really easy to get to on the train. If you take the S7 train to Wannsee you need to get off at Grunewald and from there you have several options. First it’s a really nice area just to have a walk around during the day, there are lots of tracks and if you cache Google maps on your phone you wont get lost.

About a 30minute walk from Grunewald there is Drachenberg, a huge plateau area where people go to walk and gives brilliant 360 degree views across Berlin. 

Finally there is Teufelsberg, I visited this abandoned cold war listening station in 2012 when you were able to find a hole in the fence and investigate but not the place is sewn up and people offer commercial guided tours. My housemate Ben went on the guided tour recently and he said it was interesting.
http://berliner-teufelsberg.com/web/ 

Treptower park & Soviet Memorial
Treptower park is generally just a nice area but make a trip to the Soviet memorial which is quite impressive, one of a few memorials to Russia in Berlin. Further into, east there is an abandoned fairground which I am yet to visit, there used to be places where you could jump over the fence and have a look in but it think that its all secure now and you have to pay someone cash to get in. I may have a look this week

Hire a boat
Go to this address which will take you to a petrol station
Aral Tankstelle Yvonne Hoffmann
Vor dem Schlesischen Tor 2
10997 BerlinGermany
By the side of the fuel station there is a path where you can go down to and there are some bars and food places, when you get to the end there is an area which you have to pay to get in, tell the person on the door that you want to hire a boat and they will tell you to walk right trough to the end, go through another door and follow the path until you come to a small jetty where you should hopefully find a nice gentleman willing to here you a manual or electric boat for a very reasonable price for an hour.

Go to Badeschiff
This is a great area and has an out door pool which floats on the spree and many deck chairs to pass the day lying in the sun. There’s many food places and bars around this area, If you want a deckchair get there early as it becomes quite busy after 12:00/13:00, good way to spend the day.
Badeschiff 

Hang out in Warschauerstraße
This is a pretty mad area, there’s always something happening day and night, places to eat during the day or go rock climbing then platy of clubs on an evening to visit. During the day there is Emma Pea, a fantastic little vegetarian restaurant based in a tiny disused rail station building. Even if you’re not a vegetarian the food is ace and the people are nice!
As it gets later, Bar zum schmutzigen Hobby (My dirty hobby) just around the corner is a fun place. Completely camp and from what I’ve been told owned by a famous drag queen. Its completely silly, non pretentions. Then when it gets later around 02:00 its generally a good time to go to suicide circus, this si a great club with and indoor and outdoor area, sometimes the music isn’t for everyone so check the website to see who is DJ’ing.

Avoid Checkpoint Charlie
I’ve never been but everyone I’ve spoke to who has was disappointed, to quote people ive spoke to “it’s a replica of an old building in the street akin to a shed”

Check out wansee beach
Around 30 minutes outside berlin easily accessible by the s-bahn, take the S7 to Nikolassee and then from there is a bus, which will take you the 500m to the beach entrance. I think we paid €3.50 entrance and when we got through the gates I wasn’t expecting an actual beach. It was a great way to spend the day and my first time swimming in a lake.
http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/strandbad-wannsee

Play beach volleyball
Beach volleyball is big in Berlin and never realized how much until Yaman organized us to play Beach volleyball one day at the courts in Mitte. I was pretty atrocious and my serves didn’t make it very the net very often but it was great fun and many thanks to Yaman for the coaching ?
http://www.beachberlin.de/beachmitte.html

Do a loop on the circle line
This is a great way to get a very basic bearing of Berlin and to see how the place changes as you travel a complete loop around Berlin from east to west. Catch either the S41 or S42 one goes clockwise and the other goes, well you can work it out. It takes around 50minutes but means if there is something you see which finds interesting you can take a note and go visit it later.
http://www.fahrinfo-berlin.de/Fahrinfo/bin/

Visit Tempelhoff airfield, have a picnic play Frisbee or just relax.
Tempelhof, Berlins old airport is now an amazing open space right n the middle of the city, perfect for running walking cycling or just hanging out. Theres is enough space to have 100’s of people there and still have loads of space. A few of us went there for a picknic one day and it was a perfect way just to eat drink play Frisbee and chill out.
http://www.tempelhoferfreiheit.de

Have a walk down Richardstraße
Doro, our language teacher recommended this when I asked here for places to visit, which weren’t touristy. Based in Neukölln this is what I can only really describe as an incredibly picturesque English village in the middle of Berlin with some little houses and picket fences
Richardstraße

Alternative ZOO
In Volkspark Hasenheide on the Hasenheid road side. There is a petting zoo with camels donkeys and cow. Its such a funnly little “zoo” abd worth popping by if your in the park. Its quite strange to see a highland cow in the middle of Berlin
http://www.visitberlin.de/en/spot/playground-in-the-volkspark-hasenheide 

Visit the old Olympic stadium
This is another short journey outside of berlin, maybe 20 minted on the U2 to the station Olympia Stadion. Its a good way to spend an afternoon seeing all the old architecture.

This is non no way what you should do if you visit Berlin, but a few ideas. Theres so much to see around the city that a few days could be easily taken up just walking round looking at stuff, (if thats your thing). If your going to go out clubbing go out at 02:00 in the morning, and try and avoid the tourist traps.

That is all for now but not without a face….

MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

 

 

 

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A Kind of holiday d273

Posted on July 23, 2014 by andy

Whenever I do a new blog post I have a kind of process where first of all I go to my own blog to see what the last thing I posted was. Then I realize that its been almost a month since I last updated, tut tut. No matter how much I promise myself that I’ll try and diligently do one post a week it always ends up being once every, 2, 3 or even 4 weeks! So, just before writing this I checked my blog and the last thing was about the Site visit to Berlin. One month later and I’m back in Berlin on a kind of holiday which has comprised of a small amount of work at the beginning, then straight into a 4 week intensive German language course at the Goethe institute which I am now in the middle of week 3, so let me consult my photo library and we’ll backtrack to where I left off!

Lets start by travelling from Stage One down to London to start a 3 week job for 59productions, Davide, a colleague and a good friend was driving down south so he offered to give me a lift, luckily we managed to squeeze all of our bags and tool cases into his AudiTT, thankfully there was only two of us so we managed to make it fit!

We made it down to London in pretty good time, and Davide dropped me off in kings cross and didn’t even try to shag me once, thanks Davide, I owe you a packet of Strawberry bon bon’s.

The following day i was at the Helicar & Lewis studio to do some preproduction on a project they had been commissioned to to for Adidas. Thats what the Site visit to Berlin was about in my previous post.  Im gonna digress here as theres no real other ay of telling thins, so, I digress…….

Late may i decided i needed a holiday, I’d  been working my ass of since September 2013 and even I hd noticed that i was more grumpy than usual. So, knowing that i love the city of berlin I decided to have a holiday there,and also at the same time deciding that it would be a good oppertunity to have a holiday and attempt to learn German/Deutsch. So in this order, i booked a 4 week intensive german language course at the Goethe institute and then i Booked my Flight out and then after much searching managed to find a room to rent  via the sister of a friend. THEN! Yes, capital THEN, in the middle of this process i got a call from Helicar & Lewis asking if i was available for a job in Berlin, it was one of those brilliant times where everything was aligned and just worked!

So tracking back i was in thh HCaL studio building a structure i had specced for their projection mapping installation. more of that later.

The amin reason iw as don london was to work for 59Productions on the install of Digital Revolution which is currently (23July2014) running at the Barbican, London. It was a hectic project, not what I was expecting in terms of workload. Initially things were behind schedule with external contractors, which had a knock on effect. At the start it seemed like there was never going to be enough time to get everything done but withe the genuinely good all round team “Shit got done!”.
It was pretty neat to see Tim Webber (Mr VFX) watching his own work (Gravity)  presented by 59 in an immersive video-wall structure.  The only down side was that after the install testing we all heard the grunts and panting of Sandra Bullock far to may times!

Closer to the completion of the install, classic devices like the Gameboy and the Nintendo Game&Watch were on display. Obviously who couldn’t resist having a go and getting sucked back into the early 90’s games. I think Lysander is playing Tetris and Sam is playing Donkeykong!

After 3 weeks Digital Revolution was ready, there was an opening party where we all drank free alcohol. It was quite surreal seeing visual artists whom I’ve followed their work for a long time at the press party. It always feels strange knowing someones work but not the person, and it was good to see that there was nobody at the party who came across”A bit of a cunt” as you generally find at these kind of gatherings.

Moving forward to the 4th July i find myself in Berlin with HcaL installing the Adidas Flux display which was running as part of Berlin fashion week. It was great to be working with Joel Pete, and the team on this as technically it was a pretty major achievement regardless of how easy it looks to the viewer. This was some serious projection mapping onto a surface and a shoe from 2 projection sources .

Work never really seems to stop and theres always overlapping projects which is good as its good to be kept busy and  on your toes this was my desk one late thursday? maybe night.

Back at the Adidas project Jonas was busy making dome projection mapping magic happen, with some custom open frameworks software along with other developers Joel & Patricio. The install seemed to be well received from what I’ve seen but currently seems to have very little internet presence to the common surfer, hopefully this will change as the internet does its aggregation thing.

The past couple of weeks has been a pretty good time to be in Berlin, I  never watch football but couldn’t help but watch the last 2 games with my classmates. On the final Berlin went mad, there were people cheering int he streets, cars beeping their horns an there was s superb vibe.

Something i didn’t realise was that beach volleyball was popular in Berlin, one of my classmates Yamman is pretty a good volleyball player so he organised a trip to one of the local volleyball places, which now we’ve al been to at least twice. Great way to spend the evening.

I have no idea what this is but i pass it most evenings walking from the train station back to the flat and it makes me smile.

On Saturday we had a pick nick in the forrest, 30 min outside of Berlin at the Grunwald  forrest. It was a good get together but non of us were expiating so may mosquito bytes. Raquel on of the girls also studying at the Goethe counted 75 mosquito bytes the following day. ouch.

Before coming out to Berlin i was stopping at my mate Nicks flat in london. I came home once and noticed this, i didn’t stop laughing for about 10 minutes!

 

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Getting Around d243

Posted on June 23, 2014 by andy

Busy busy busy, always busy. Heres another attempt to keep this blog current and up to date. Where I left off I was at Stage one working on the 3D camera bridle system, which is working well, Karl has made some very clever smoothing algorithms so you can drive the bridle around on a joystick, record your movements and then play it back smoothed out, i am well impressed each time we test it.
So, it was a thursday eve, and I was traveling down to Milton Keynes to do some media server programming for a a company called LED flex, who were intern installing an LED sculpture in the lobby of a new building for Catapult Transport Systems. Over 2 days I programmed up a media server to play back programmed states which ran colour chases and rolling hues  along the 20feet led strip. It was still a building site whilst i was there so i never actually saw it finished but it did look quite neat even amongst the carnage of building stuff. I left them which a Touch OSC app which allowed them to chose one of 15 different animations/states and the ability to do manual colour sweeps from an iPad. I hadn’t used TouchOSC for quite a while and had forgotten how quick and easy it is to setup program and use, perfect for this.

From milton keynes i traveled south and stopped in StAlbans for a couple of nights to visit friends in and around london. It was a great weekend catching up with people and being based in StAlbans it was dead easy to commute on the train, the last thing i wanted to do was take the hire car i had in to the centre of London!

On the Monday (Bank Holiday) I travelled north again and went to see my parents, they had been on holiday to Benidorm and i hadn’t seen them for a few weeks before that, it was nice to see them and I think the holiday done then good as they were really chipper! Whilst i was there a book i had ordered had arrived Vast click on the link for a fill decryption but i can only describe it as interesting peculiar and nice to look at.

 

After a top weekend i was back at the hangar in weather by, more bridle stuff, i had been designing the playback/control console as well and was nearing the final production build. Heres an image of the almost complete (graphics missing) console next to an earlier agricultural prototype. We had the console chassis 3D printed on one of the new printers at the hangar, version 1 was a bit flimsy but second time round with some mods, adding spines and doing a thicker print it was really quite neat. This is just my opinion but 3D printing still has a long way to go, prints still need finishing as even on a fine thread the finish is still rough. Its still a great technology and I’m excited to see how it will progress.

Whilst at the hangar i decided to take apart my GrandMA2 wing just to see what was inside. Its an incredibly neat construction, 2 4layer PCB’s holding cherryBlack key switches for the buttons. Also each key is individually dimmable via serial with a Texas Instrument LED driver IC. Theres allot of thought and design has gone into it and i was really quite impressed!

That weekend i was back in newcastle and had forgotten i had agreed to do a couple of days etching at Dance City for my mate James. It was for a Spanish company called Alacaldanza doing a kids show and actually it was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of days, proper nice company.

I also got the chance to properly package my projectors into their custom cases. I bought a pair of Optoma EH501 at the end of may then got round to getting some custom cut foam in Peli cases for them. Not only is it protective but it looks pretty cool as-well  olive green was definitely the right colour.  

In July I’m off to Berlin for a holiday but I’m also doing a German language course which should be fn but I also imagine quite intense. Five hours a day each week day, then the evenings and weekends relax or go out to a club. Coincidentally*  a few days after booking my berlin trip I got a phone call to do a little job out in Berlin which fits in nicely. I can’t really say much about it at the moment but it tie mean that we had to go out there for a day to meet the clients and do a little site recce.  After leaving the airport and gong on the S-Bahn, we  finally got on the U-Banh at Boddinstrase and i remember last time i used this stop it was winter and about -14 Degress C, this time was much warmer!

Heres a face I saw in the toilets at the airport, i wasn’t sure about getting my phoe out in the toilets to take a picture but then i thought, aaahh, fuck it…

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Catching up with things d225

Posted on May 29, 2014 by andy

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

Posted on May 27, 2014 by andy

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!

Posted on April 3, 2014 by andy

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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