d88 The run up to Xmas

Posted on December 24, 2013 by andy

Still in Russia but now working the nightshift, it was bit of a pain to get my body clock around but not so bade once your in the swing of things. The plus side is that in the stadium on a night time there are generally less building work going which is good. On the downside because were down to a slightly smaller crew close to xmas, and the stadium is so massive, doing some things takes a lot longer.

Over the past couple of weeks there has been a bit of this (above), soldering replacement SMT chips onto circuit boards. And then quite allot of this (below), spending time in a Skyjack 35m off the ground updating software. This was the first time id been in a Skyjack, and after 2minutes instruction off our non english speaking Russian driver, he handed me the controls, which had instructions on in Chinese. It was pretty scary at first but after an hour you got used to it, proper good piece of access equipment!

Onsite there a re quite allot of stray dogs and surprisingly they are all really well natured, there is a female Alsatian cross which the crew have looked after since May when they first came here. Since then, a kennel has been built outside the ceremonies office which now house the 10 or so puppies she gave birth to.

After our 23:30 each night, Matt has been saving these for the puppies which is always an entertaining 10minutes when you see these little balls of fur running towards a 6feet Matt!

Another evening that week I went up on the “Black Steel” with Damo & Phill to investigate an electrical fault. Climbing the arches is pretty high when your at the 70m apex, but when your out on the beams over the filed of play its quite a different feeling. Its such a huge roof that when you look down onto stage things are so small.

Walking across stage I saw this written on a piece of wood, I think allot of people want to go home. Working here is tough, not because of the job but because of the endless politics it appears you have t go through to get anything done.

I don’t actually know the name of this guy but have seen him pretty much every night on nightshift driving round in his buggy looking after operations. Ofcourse to keep ourselves entertained, when you see someone with a load of “No Cameras” signs, what is the first thing you do :).

Thats all for now, apart from finessing with another face, well, a surprised parrot actually which i saw in the air vents of the minibus.

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d77 Friday the 13th

Posted on December 13, 2013 by andy

Its been a tough and sometimes frustrating couple of weeks since last posting, there is still allot of building work going on in the stadium which is hindering progress somewhat and the show is around 2 month away. Working in the stadium you kind of become familiar with some of the local workers and saying hello saying stuff and completely not understanding each other. One of the local beam climbers was saying “Firma Vasha many ne vozimut narabotu”  then he wrote it on the handrail. I took a picture and asked Micky, our Russian Ittalian rigger to translate. He said it means, your company will never take me or worlds to that effect, still don’t quite understand what my mate the beam climber was trying to say but we still say hello.

The temperature has started to drop and one time when I went in the office, Terry said she was having issues with her computer, could I come have a look. The cat from the cafe had made its nest on the warm keyboard, its quite a funny cheeky cat and wanders round the caffe most lunchtimes.

Rob and myself spent a duple of days addressing and commissioning some automation cabinets then once we had done there was another firmware upgrade so had to go and do it again, no doubt as things get requested theres still going to be more upgrades, still lot to do.

The sunsets are still amazing here over the sea, the colours are always a similar hue, i think a day or two after this is when we had “The Storm”

Im onto nightshifts now, and the second day in the dayshift and nightshift was cancelled due to adverse weather conditions. In this case adverse weather conditions meant winds  high strong gusty winds, heavy rain, thunder and lighting. I was in my room when i got the email saying it had been cancelled and i could actually feel the hotel shaking. Later i met some of the dayshift who had had gone into work before the the announcement saying the shift had been canceled. They had to sit in the canteen for 4 hours whilst the situation was assessed. In this time some roof panels had been blown off some of the buildings which was holding our automation equipment, and much of it got wet.

The following day, the dayshift began the carful drying of the electrics and electronics before tentatively switching on different elements. When we went in for the nightshift the temperature began to drop into the minus meaning some of the equipment which wasn’t fully dried began to form ice inside.

Its actually quite depressing, easily a 2 week set back, if not more, we’ve spent the past 3 days slowly powering stuff up and re testing when we should be programming a show. Hopefully we will have more access equipment tonight so we can get more done at height. It really does feel like 1 step forward and 10 steps back at the moment, even with the building work in the stadium, allot of the floor tiling has been finished on some of the concourses, then other local contractors come in and dump steel work stillages on the concourse smashing many many tiles. Along side the amount of times I’ve seen concrete poured then dug up again because of a forgotten pipe or something is just madness.

For a cheery end to this post, heres another face, whey!

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d60 Pulling cables

Posted on November 26, 2013 by andy

Im still in Sochi, going to be here until the 10th of January where I have to travel back to the UK to do 2 things, fist one is to renew my passport as there are no available pages for the second thing I need, which is a new Russian work visa, its a tight turn around but hopefully it will go without a hitch!

The Fisht stadium is such a huge place, and getting around takes quite a while, there are two main arches where allot of our kit and cable infrastructure is being hung from and this whole place is no more than 100m from the black sea. Look one way and its part buildings part stadium and look the other way and you see the beautiful vista of the sea, nice when the sun is shining.

All f last week was taken up with pulling up and threading cable trough the arches along the catalos to various which cabinets and safety circuit cabinets, pretty similar as the week but much heavier work, at the end of play today (Tuesday 26th Nov) most of it is in on the high catwalks but theres still allot to go in lower down. Jam and Chris had a bit of a competition reeling the excess cable we didn’t use back not he cable drum and had a good giggle at the same time.

I think it was wednesday last week we went to the supermarket to get some bits and bobs, you can see what most of the stuff is but don’t actually 100% know what your buying. I later discovered that what i thought was beef jerky was really fired fish, Bleugh. What was really ace was the size of the Vodka section, as to be expected when in Russia. Someone told me earlier this wee that when they went to see the medic about an incredibly sore throat they couldn’t get rid of that she told them to gargle with vodka at the end of each day then then swallow it! I was pretty happy when I saw this one, Si Bye had introduced me to green tea and Vodka during manchester festival couple of years ago and it was a revelation to see this on the shelves!

When it hasn’t rained for a couple of days it becomes pretty dusty in the venue with all the work going on. The downside is that it makes you cough, the plus side you see Crepuscular rays like this when the sun is in the right place

Sunday, on our day off, Nat, one of our riggers had organised a trip ingot he mountains to have a BBQ and drink some ChaCha, there was only a few of us went and when we got to the picnic site it wasn’t what I was expecting. Really beautiful place and it was good to be away from work and away from the hotel were living in. It was a well needed break and once to meet some new people, I possibly drank too much ChaCha.

Theres a bit of a theme developing with faces in places, after pointing out some to colleagues we’ve ball been spotting ore and more. The best one by far and the one that made us laugh the most was when Jam put his lunchbox on the table in the canteen and i spotted a happy little sandwich face.

These are just a few if the highlights of the past 10 days, theres been some really good days and some painfully slow days with various hold ups but everyone seems to be in good spirits. Theres still a long way to go for a show and hopefully the humour stays up as the days get longer.

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d51 First week in Russia

Posted on November 17, 2013 by andy

First week in Russian working in Sochi for Stage one preparing for the winter Olympics ceremonies. The stadium is a pretty amazing structure and when working in it you spend allot of time just getting from one point to another because it is so huge. Ild like to post a few pictures of the place but politically I’m unsure what I can or cannot post so ill put in a few of around the place instead.

First arriving here was a little crazy as when JT Gary and myself were been driven from the airport to the hotel at 04:00 in the morning, our driver stopd the car on this dark busy road and hopped out after he saw a body lying essentially in the middle of the highway. We all got out  and we had some high power torches to flash the oncoming traffic to stop them completely running over this guy.  A few other cars stopped and luckily this guy wasn’t dead but it looked like he had been knocked over and if our driver hand have spotted him he would most definitely been ran over by a truck within minutes. Eventually after 20 minutes an ambulance turned up and took the guy away, our driver took us to the hotel that was the end of that story.

My pass was meant to be ready on moray when i went in at 13:00 but was delayed for some reason. I pent the day trying to familiarise myself wight he place. Where were staying near the hotel theres not allot here at the moment apart from buildings and construction work!

Most of this week has been spent on the catwalks running in data infrastructure, updating firmware on the motion controllers and then playing the waiting game whilst we keep asking the local suppliers to turn on a section of power.

Its pretty hinge up there, its difficult to see from this picture put the red dot between the floor grate is the top of a guys helmet standing on the stage below us. Probably the highest I’ve worked before!

The sunsets are pretty cool here, this is the south end of the venue which overlooks the black sea. Ive been old the bright dot in the sky is venus, amazing colours here, possibly try and get a better picture some other evening.

This week has been quite a blur, I’m still adjusting to the place as it’s a bit of a mad place to work but more about that later on sometime

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Experiments with Geometry

Posted on November 12, 2013 by andy

In the downtime yesterday whilst waiting to get my pass to get onsite i decided to do some experiments with 3d geometry rendering out only in black and white. Its always difficult to get the ideas in your head down on paper or rendered as theres always the process of learning how to do such a thing. There are so may tools available and so many different ways of doing things that its never as straight froward as it first appears. Heres some digital doodles I came up with whilst spending time trying to figure things out.

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W6&7 d45 Friends, family work and play

Posted on November 10, 2013 by andy

The title perfectly describes the past 2 weeks perfectly. After finishing the big stint of work in Sept/Oct I thought I had a couple of weeks free to sort out general live but as soon as I said I wasn’t busy I was back at Stage One for a few days, setting up computers and helping here and there with the mammoth amount of work they have at the moment.

These are only some of the computers, which needed setting up configuring and checking before getting shipped to Russia in prep for the winter Olympics.

I’m due to be away till the end of the year now and this was my only real opportunity to actually sort my accounts, so I took all my paperwork with me and spent a not very exciting evening in the days in Wetherby (where I was living for few days) correlating and sorting all my paperwork into a sensible fashion. Buying a bottle of wine helped the process greatly.

When I was in the hangar it was nice to catch up with people and chat to Jam. It never fails to amuse me when Jam (Jamie) is working with his goggles on and turns around and looks at you.

When I was going through the cupboards I found one of the units we made for the Cirque show Zarkana. These were voltage regulators and DMX buffers for a couple of hundred meters of stage “step lighting”. They didn’t have a name at the time but after a night out having a few beers in Weatherby with Smithy, and it being the fashion season of Jeggings (January 2010 ish) and all the girls were wearing them they became known as the “Jegging Isolator” for no other reason than we found it entertaining. I’m not sure the Americans in Vegas understand the joke though.

Later in the week I was of down London again and because I had an early start I traveled down the day before and stopped at one of my friends houses I hadn’t seen in ages in St Albans. Steve had recently moved down south from Newcastle to work in London and live with his girlfriend. They cooked an amazing roast and it was really cool to catch up and see their new pad. They both have a good eye for pretty stuff and I especially liked the tiny carved animas on top of the hi-fi speakers.

The following day was a trip to the Truman brewery in Shoreditch for a site visit for one of next year’s installation’s of re-rite.  We will be doing the installation in a area known as the Loading bay, it was great to see the space and make a start on planning out how were going to fit everything in. I had a laptop with me to drop off at the 59Productions office. Richard offered to drop it off for me so in return I decorated the bag into a face.

I was back north that day for a couple of days and I decided to cook a Spanish tort. I had eaten allot of this when I was in Santander and was actually quite missing it. The whole thing was really easy and I was actually surprised how well it turned out. 12 eggs, 1 potato “Potato”, 2 cans of tuna I oil, some salad cream, pepper, salt, and olive oil.

Whilst I was up north in Newcastle I was staying at my good friend James’s house and it was great just to sit down with some wine eat tort and chat for the evening.

Fast forward to Thursday I was travelling back down south again to Canterbury to look at a truck, which the Philharmonia orchestra is looking to refurbish and turn it in to a travelling, interactive, music education platform. This is due to roll out next year and sit down in various places round the south west coast. It was a productive day with Hans going over technical things and figuring the way forward with this.

On the majority of the days I wasn’t working I was over at my parents as (a) I haven’t seen them for a while, and (b) by sister was over from Australia for a few weeks with the kids. It’s always mad seeing how much they’ve grown, as it’s been a year since I last saw everyone. Hopefully it wont be so long a gap between catching up with everyone again next time.

This picture has no relevance to anything apart from I like it, if I were being arty I would probably say the image has an intriguing composition to it and the industrial feel of the natural lighting creates appealing artifacts.

Yesterday, Saturday 9th November, I caught up with an old school friend Gleddy, real name Jonathan Gledhill who I hadn’t seen for a year and we just had a good old wander around Newcastle and having a good old natter. We wandered over to the Ouseburn where I forget how nice it is over that way with the pubs and river down there. On the way there was another bin face, this one almost looks like Jack Skellington.

That’s me done for now, currently sat in Heathrow for my flight to Istanbul and then Sochi!

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5.0 The end of a busy 2 month

Posted on October 29, 2013 by andy

What a silly busy two months it has been since the beginning of december and now its came to an end. Its been back to back a comibination of 2 different gigs, “The Five & The Phropercy of Prana” & “LosMiserable” with both gigs spread across London, Derry & Santandare. I think I’ve spent enough time on Ryan Air the past 4 weeks to last a year although I think I’m actually getting used to the checkin and boarding procedure, it really is just like catching a bus where you must forget to print out your “BusPass”

The last week on LosMis was spent tweaking the show and balancing levels and making stuff better. There was opportunities to get out and about with a couple of later starts and on some of those days the wind was blowing and there was some cool kite surfing going on, just a little jealous.

One day I had a wander round with Tom and Christian and there was this part of the coast where people would just run up to it and touch the wall and then run back. So on the final day before flying hat afternoon I decided to do the same by doing a run along the coast. Its been a month of more sitting around than any real exercise so this was a bit of a shock to the system!

The final week wouldn’t be complete without more HAM AND CHEESE!!! Aulthough twe discovered a “Thicker” ham and cheese sandwich “Lumo y queso bocadilo” the ham was too thick to be bacon and too thin to be gammon. The Mahou lager in the background was obligatory after a long day.

After flying back from Spain i landed in Stanstead and picked up mu little fiat 500 hire car and drove to Cambridge where one of my good friends Nickin was doing the visuals for Jamie Cullum. It was ace to catch up and see what he had been do’ing, I’m not a massive Cullum fan but the show was good and the visuals/live cameras, tricks and treats fitted in perfectly, good work Mr Nickin!

After the gig i drove into london where Mr Hillel kindly put me up for the height and the next day  was off to buy a new macbook as its time for my 18month upgrade. I got the 15inch 2.3Ghz i7 and i can happily say its F*ing fast in all respects, yesss! This definitely means faster rendering and being able to easily handle those huge Sketchup and Autocad files i get sent more and more!

That afternoon i drove to Harpenden to catch up with Amy and James, it was quit a civilised evening out which as quite sup prising as generally the past few times we’ve been out together its gotten quite fun messy! The following  day (Sunday) i drove north to newcastle to see friends and family aulthough not before spotting this Face in James and Amy’s flat!

I got into newcastle around 18:00 and saw my parents, bot sisters and all the nieces and nephews. Its quite amazing as this rarely happens and it was ace to see how much Jessica and Caitlin my Australian Niece’s had grown since the last time I’d seen them which was about a year ago.

That same evening i was of down to Doncaster to help my good friend James who was relighting the Ballet Lorent show Rapunzel. It was also a good opportunity to catch up with Graham and Simon who i hadn’t seen for quite a long time! It was quite a ling day and possibly could have gone a little quickener but we got everything in where it needed to be.

Right now I’m stopping at James’s house before I head down to Stage One tomorrow, James has just gotten some kittens, and I’m the only person in the house. They are the most curious kittens ever, I’m generally not a cat person but these little moggies are a well-fun distraction. They just sat here waiting me to open my laptop lid again, brilliant! 🙂

Its been a helluva few days of doing stuff and catching up with people and i don’t think its going to slow down anytime soon!

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WK 4.3 Relentless but rewarding with YeastCulture and BoyBlue

Posted on October 21, 2013 by andy

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

Posted on October 13, 2013 by andy

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)

Posted on October 7, 2013 by andy

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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