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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d146 Experimenting with volumetric video mapping

Posted on February 19, 2014 by andy

Heres a post which is less about day to day happenings but more about one of the many little ongoing research experiments I’m constantly tinkering with. Ive thought about this one for a while but haven’t yet tried to implement this until now!

After chatting with the Ai guys at work over the past few days about different content/ video mapping scenarios I’ve decided to try and patch sic a thing in vvvv specifically for playing content back on a “Volumetric type video display”. For a description on what the hell a volumetric display is, its basically a video display screen with depth or extra layers which the viewer can see. In most cases a video screen is a single skin surface from a TV screen, projector scene or a projection mapped building. A volumetric display can have depth as well as width and height, heres a brilliant example by AntiVJ.

Using everyones favourite node based programming software I positioned 4 quads in 3d space at varying depts in the z-plane show in the image above and below. This gave me my basic 3d scene and some reference markers for my camera to look at.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Using the same render information from the initial 3d scene I then too 4 views on the same scene, flat onto the relevant coloured quad. From there i then clipped the far and near plane in the Z-depth so that the view was only seeing a shallow depth of that particular plane. This proves the theory of this to be working but I run in to the issue of the model primitive I’ve been using in my scene is hollow, as are most models. Opening up the clipping planes gives a little pseudo thickness but I need to find a way giving the walls of the model a thickness, or the model it’s self some volume.

Do more research on:

  • Volumetric Models
  • Voxels
  • Shader/.fx to pseudo thicken model walls on the output.

vvvv project available here >  Volumetric Using:45beta 31.2 64bit

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d142 Post show and still in Russia

Posted on February 15, 2014 by andy

Its Saturday the 15th February 8 days after the Sochi winter olympics opening ceremony which I’ve been working on and were now working towards the closing ceremony. Its feels a bit strange environment as from what i understand there is a different production company in overseeing the closing but the original production team are staying here as consultants. I could be wrong but there are definitely more people onsite now with what currently feels like less to do overall, I’m sure that will change.  So we had a show, apart from the the ring which did not open that the sensationalist press seemed to focus on the show was FLAWLESS. Heres a picture below if some of the set pieces hung in the hangar before one of the rehearsals.

Given the time and conniptions out here we shouldn’t really have had as much as we did go right. It was only mid december when we had the storms that blew off the roof in the south hangar which also was unfinished in parts.

This intern allowed the rain to come in and rain down on the automation carriages used for physically animating the scenery and set pieces in the stadium. Allot of time was spent fixing equipment which to wet and during that time i don’t think anyone could have imagined we would have all that we did in the ceremony. Below is a shot of one of the tracks & carriages in a finished dry hangar!

Each carriage can traverse through the stadium along, up, over and down the curved roof of the stadium from one hangar to another and carries a 1000kg winch to lift and animate the scenic pieces.

Below is a hot of South Control where Cam, Davide, Rob and Gethyn have been programming from and then operated some of the show from. Its difficult to tell form the picture but they’re on a temporary platform suspended around 30m above the hangar floor.

Here is central control opted by  Dan, Neil, Doug and  Paul, although Paul has been kept very busy on night shift going between all 3 operating positions as and when needed! On a side note Neil, over the course of being in Sochi has adopted a stray, one of many which were onsite since we arrived and many have been culled whilst we’ve been here. Given the piss taking amongst the testosterone field environment here its actually quite a noble thing to do and you can read more of the story here: http://www.9news.com/news/world/377034/243/In-Sochi-stray-dog-captures-heart-of-Denver-man

And then here is south control with Robin, Bruce and Brendon, dwarfed by the huge islands, still now, in pictures, you cannot get a scale of things here, all of the scenery was, and still is massive!!

After my visa run to the UK mid January I decided to bring my scooter out to get around site, and I’m so glad I did, (a). It saves a load of time getting round site and (b). Its lots of fun. I think just about everyone has had a go on it even the quite a few local Russian security guards. I did on c a couple occasions get some parking warnings, the first was a ticket off Ben from PRG (which I failed to get a picture of, sorry Ben). And then the second was an incredibly well made wheel clamp, which i later found out was off Rory, once of our riggers, hats off it is a work of art!

Back to work here is a picture of “The Sun” just to try and attempt to show a scale of things, and then when it opens out (iris’s out?) it probably increases by about 1/3 in size.

And so to the rings, given the outstanding engineering, technology and general perseverance of everyone who made the opening ceremony work, runners, riggers, operators, electricians, lx, video, sound, everyone! . A show which shouldn’t have really happened given the circumstances the press focused on the one thing which didn’t go to plan showing a sad ignorance of everything which went into making everything else work. Heres a good quote from ceremony producer Konstantin Ernst was philosophical about the mishap.

“Among five rings, one of them didn’t open. And you know, Zen Buddhists have an idea: if you have an ideally polished ball, you have to leave a scratch, to get an idea of how ideally it was polished,”

Finally, for now, a face which has been right under my nose for weeks, the coffee maker outside the main control room, looks like a relative of Bender of Futurama.

Final Note:
Hats off to you Mr Bromagier, you made it work, AGAIN 😉 …….

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d127 Nyet T’Internet

Posted on February 3, 2014 by andy

I’ve been trying to post here for a while but the internet has been so rubbish since leaving the Raddisson its almost impossible to do anything web based, more on that later.  Its been over 2 weeks since my last update which feels like much longer considering the traveling and work done.  On the 10th of Janauary I left Sochi to return home to renew my passport and renew my visa, this was much easier than expected, Durham passport office were supper efficient  and hats off to them. It was nice to be home for a few days to visit family and catch up with friends.

Whilst in Sochi, this has been missed, food with flavor! Home cooked meal at my parents, thank you Mum for feeding me up whilst home.

It wasn’t long before I was on a train to London, flight to Moscow for a 2 hour stopover, a flight to Sochi and finally a drive to the hotel where I managed to get a few hours sleep before starting the nightshift again. There was a fire engine onsite which we had to look at twice,.

I’m back on day shift now, but had lots of fun with the guys on the nightshift. It was allot calmer on the nightshift, less people onsite and less automation pieces moving meaning we could do more. After the shift we would generally go for a beer or two before bed, this is one particularly sunny day, which we sat outside, sunshine, mid January in Russia!! 

The lifts are finally working in the stadium now but most of them still have their wooden protection on the inside,  at one point I looked up and saw this.

Just recently we’ve been moved from the Raddisson Blu, which was quite nice, to another hotel, the Omega on the other side of town which is not so nice. Smithy showed me his bathroom where the plug for the Hairdryer assembly fixed to the wall doesn’t actually reach the plug socket, there seems to be allot of oversights like that in Russia or maybe its just Sochi.

 

Over the past few weeks we’ve spent allot of time updating firmware at height on gantry’s and in cherry pickers updating firmware and doing general maintenance as the requirements of the show change, and we get presented with scenery which could have been built lighter to hang on the aerial flying system!

Finally, I saw a face when I was looking in my document wallet which really did make me laugh out loud. It  is one of the immigration forms I got when entering Russia, grrrrrrr.

 

 

 

 

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d110 Hello 2014!!

Posted on January 15, 2014 by andy

Its been longer than normal since posting only which can be attributed to the new year and time taken up with working, sleeping, and few beverages in between to break up the day. Just before new years allot of time was spent on the east winch farm (above) working on things replacing electronics which had been possibly damaged by the weather/damp. It was a long old week between xmas and new year and i think everyone was getting a bit cabin fever. I have no idea what Davide was saying to Smithy in the picture below but this pretty much sums up the working week.

On the nightshift we had new years eve off work so we took advantage of that and after waking up at 16:00 we had a few beers in the bar and then headed up to “The Grotty”, this is a small bar about 30mins walk from the hotel in a strange residential area. The Grotty isn’t actually called the grotty but was christened that by I think, Bully and Parky who were looking for a bar to drink in which wasn’t the expensive hotel bar. I think this was around May when some of the guys first came out they were walking around looking for a bar near the hotel and Parky noticed that there was some water and the faint smell of raw sewage running down a hill and there eloped like there were buildings further up. Based on the premise that where there is shit, there are people, and where there are people, there is a drinking hole, they marched up the hill to find what is now known as “The Grotty”

 

Here we had the Stage One New Years Eve bash, there was food and free beer which we all made the most of. Some of us, and when I say some of us I basically mean the nightshift, me included were pretty hanging from the little drink we had in the morning after finishing work. On this day Gethyn won the award for the worst hangover, and i think this picture, (a panorama made to go wrong) kinda sums up the headache.

After the Grotty, Smithy and Myself walked to Adler, to a nightclub called forward tower to celebrate the rest of the evening. On the way there we spoke to some locals who didn’t understand due and nor did we understand the but I think we wished each other happy new year. When we got to the club it was 1000r (£20) on the door to get in to a semi busy nightclub but we paid and went in anyway. We went to the bar and I ordered vodka and whilst we were there a short guy with an impressive jet back monobrow was trying to get us on the dance floor. Im not sure if we were getting propositioned or not as he was quite insistent for a while until the last time we shook our heads and he wandered off to a dark corner somewhere. The club was quite bizarre in the way there was lots of photocopied 5000r (£100) all over the dance floor with people dancing around kicking up the fake money. I think remember the 4th vodka*, and then absolutely nothing until waking up fully clothed onto of my hotel room bed, that was the end of new years eve.

What was nice was the if you have a birthday in the Raddisson you get a birthday cake left in your room with a nice hand written note from the hotel, nice gesture and we all enjoyed a slice at the bar after that nightshift.

I haven’t really posted many pictures of the stadium here basically because a. allot of them are the same a previous photos not much to look at. And b. the ones where there there is something interesting to look at i can’t really publish as ill break some sort of secrecy act and either get arrested or shot. What I can post is “Barry Safety” this is our H&S officer who looks after everyones safety on a night time, he’s not really called Barry but we call him that anyway. As for Tony Danger, well, theres nothing much to say.

In Russia christmas is celebrated on the 7th January, not the 25th December, i still don’t know the reason why but I’ll try and find out. This is what happens when we finish a nightshift, Stiggy decides we should wear xmas baubles and buys everyone Yagermeister, what a great laugh, two Xmas’s Bonus!!

One night in the canteen Kenji decided to show us a picture he had drawn that day, all he said was that it was a famous person and we had to guess who it was. After a couple of minutes looking and thinking I had figured it, and burst out laughing brilliant. Ill post who it is in my next post.

So that was the start of 2014, contrary to all the pictures and stories here there has been a considerable amount of work gone on and I really can’t believe where we are now after the set backs of the previous 2 month. Everyone has grafted their tits off and it looks like were heading towards a show now.

Heres a face to finish off, Smithy has to take credit for finding this one.

 

*in Russia a standard vodka seems to come as a triple in all the places we have been to.

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Xmas Week d95

Posted on December 31, 2013 by andy

Another fast blurry week consisting of work and play, Xmas day feels quite far away now but is well remembered. We had Xmas day off here and quite a few of us decided to go up the mountains and go snowboarding/skiing. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got there judging by the general incompleteness of the olympic building work in Sochi in general, but this place was actually ok.

We went up on Xmas eve and got up early to hire the kit and by 10:00am we were at the peak. I hadn’t been snowboarding for a few years and wasn’t really good back then, but in the spirit of things and peer pressure i ended up going from the top straight on a blue slope. After a few tumbles and getting up again things started coming together, it was a great day and good to see loads of people away from work.

The rest of the week we were back on nightshift generally spending our time commissioning automation equipment. This generally involves being cold, outside in the middle of the night as Ben demonstrates here below 🙂

In other news our catering has canted from our quirky little “Tin City” canteen to the general canteen for everyone. If the food was free I don’t think anyone would complain but the fact we pay 300r (£6.00) for some mediocre food and dire portions is a bit of a piss take.

I haven’t seen many faces this week but heres a heater face i saw in the control room at some point.

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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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