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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One Week

Posted on October 5, 2013 by andy

Saturday the 5tth October and I’m back Santander to do the second leg of Los Miserable the 2013 Spanish tour of the show. Its been a mad week, generally its always a mad week which pretty goes for all of 2013 so far and I don’t expect to change anytime soon. I haven’t posted a blog since June, allot has happened between then and now, and I may touch on that someday but for now lets get back to this week.

Last Friday I had a flight to catch to London I had been working in Santander for the week doing the initial video of Los Miserable, it was a tough long days, quite allot of fault finding, but by then end of the week the setup was in a good state for me to leave it for the week, I was slightly worried that there wasn’t going to be enough time but somehow along with some ‘unforeseen complications’ it all came together in the end.

I arrived in London, Friday evening, eventually found the apartment I was staying in for the night and had arranged to meet Joe and his wife for some CHEESE AND WINE. It was a great catch-up, lots of geeky talk and discussing what project wed been working on, strangely we had been working on allot of the same thing from different angles and didn’t realise.  The cheese and wine just wasn’t enough so we ended up going to the new Five Guys burger joint in town. I was a bit dubious abut cuing for a burger and almost got the grump on but it was actually worth the wait. Good food, and craic to end the night.

Saturday morning I managed to drag myself out for a run, it had been exactly a month since the last time I had been for a run, far too long, it was good but also felt like I hadn’t been for a run for quite a while. I met Megs for breakfast and a coffee we both chatted about stuff choked and said goodbye
An hour or two later I was at Gatwick meeting everyone from the Team on Boy Blue entertainments new show “The Five & The Prophecy of Prana”. Ive been programming for  Yeast Culture who are responsible for video and set design of this pretty fun show. It was a relentless week, early starts, late finishes, lots of hours spent programming internally in catalyst and staring at screens but it’s a good team, and I think we all managed to play out part and keep moral up throughout.

These are one of the set elements from TheFive which were projection onto, I’m going to wait until the press is over before posting any proper pictures un here but I can safely say the show is great fun, there are some incredible dances, not only dancing but martial arts too.

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And then it was July!!!

Posted on July 24, 2013 by andy

I seem to be getting quite consistent at leaving big gaps between blog updates so I’ve gave myself a 40minute sot this morning to get a short update done. I use the term update in the most cage terminology as LOADS has happened sing the mast update, I’m going to aim to do more frequent updates in smaller bite size chunks!

So, I wasn’t going to post this bit for a while, but after some thought here it is. During the last couple of days of the UOS Birmingham fit up I got hit by a car and this is what was left of my suitcase.

It was quite a surreal thing which happened I remember quite a bit but not the whole thing. I was crossing a traffic light crossing and a guy ran a red light, the police said that after watching the footage i hit the bonnet, then the windscreen, went up in the air, and then rolled off onto the road after coming down again. I do remember standing up, putting my hands on my head and shouting “fuck” quite frequently. The people around ushered me to the side of the road where there was a bench, made me sit down, called an ambulance, a motorcycle paramedic stopped, the driver of the car came over and then an ambulance turned up. The whole thing was just surreal, I called Steve and Rich who were in the building just up from the traffic lights and rich came to the ambulance. After getting checked over and hearing the rhythm of my breakbeat heart beat on the monitoring machine the paramedics said I was remarkably ok, I had gotten away with only bloody elbows and some deep bruising all over my body. I keep saying this and everyone else keeps saying it since, “I am such a lucky bastard to walk away from this”.

I Spoke to the driver the following day as I had to claim for my case and damaged phone, he was probably as shaken as I was. It was good to chat but also, again, quite surreal, he was just a normal chap who had lost concentration for a split second and ran a red light, in all circumstances were both lucky. Two months on I still have pink elbows and a little cartilage lump on my leg, “Lucky bastard…….”

Following Birmingham it was a short break, very brief trip to newcastle then a flight to hamburg to take out Re-Rite which had been up and running in the basement of the Elbphilharmonie.  Below, as a homage to Stephen Bewley, Edd does the getout in his smartest clothes.
On a side note, the Philharmonia digital department has been nominated for an award by the pro sound awards for best touring installation, fingers crossed for the awards in september.

Following on from  Hamburg I was working with Karl Bromage doing a project for Stage One which involves translating Artnet lighting data into a table in some custom software and then passing this on over HUGE a network via TCP to some custom electronics. I guess thats all I can say at the moment. Below,  computers galore surrounded by an Envy, MBP, Envy, ASUS, and a custom Amplicon. This was a great week and we got a hell of allot done!

Now were into the start of July,where I was at the Royal Opera House, working for Tal Rosner on behalf of ArtAV. It was really nice to be working with Tal, and our composer Chris, this was a R&D week commissioned by the ROH, sometimes bizarre, sometimes hectic but more often quite fun!

Faces in places! They’re  everywhere, I don’t know how many photos I have on my phone now but heres a recent one.

 

 

 

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A Philharmonia month!

Posted on May 21, 2013 by andy

This busy period had been approaching since mid last year when Rich told me that the Philhamonia/Rite digital and multiple bookings for various projects practically back to back in a very short period of time. The projects are Universe of sound and re-rite, 2 of the Philharmoinas sucessful video instalations consiting of many projectors and LED tv screens playing back synchronised recorded footage of the orchestra so visitors to the installation can find themselves inside the orchestra via the medium of sound and video. Both projects Universe of sound and Re-rite are similar on the surface but both required their own set of planning and logistics for each one of the venues they were touring to. In addition to this, there were two concurrent bookings for Re-Rite which meant a second entire system needed to be built to fulfil this! The diary went something like this..

Canterbury Christ church install of universe of sound.
Steve, John, Rich, Bob, Graham, Bea, Greg, Ash, Adam, Matt & Myself

Halfway through the install Bob, Graham, Steve, Bea, Ash go to Salzberg to begin the install of re-rite. The rest of us stay on and completer the install and open onetime on press night.

Rich flys to Salzberg to oversee the install and Myself/Iain/Richard fly to Hamburg to begin the install of Re-rite hamburg. After 1 day in Hamburg marking up the site  Bob and Graham join us to carry on the install and then later we wee joined by Dicky and John.
Rich fly out to Hamburg just before opening to oversee things and then we have 2 press nights.

At this point there are 3 of the Philharmonias video installations up and running in Canterbury/Salzberg & Hamburg. After a short break of a few days Steve, Rich go to Canterbury and meet Amy, Greg, John and the others to take out the instalation of UOS Canterbury. A couple of days later we (Rich, Steve, John, Bea, Bob, Graham and myself) are all back together in Birmingham to begin the install of Universe of Sound Birmingham! Currently where are well ontrack with the install and all is looking really good, at this point Bob, Graham and Ash are taking out the install of Re-Rite Salzberg and the past month feels like quite an amazing blur of activity. Re-rite Salzber/Hamburg, & UOS received a great reception and I’m hoping the people of Birmingham like it just as much when we open to the public on Saturday. Were installing it in Birmingham’s old municipal bank building which has remained closed for the past 15 years and is quite a cool building. Heres a quick photo recap of the past month!

Rigger Rich at work beginning on the truss work at Canterbury Christ church.

The lifting of the Dome at UOS Canterbury

A Sharpie birthday message to Marina in the office from us after enjoying some very nice Belgium beer in Canterbury!

Just one of the MANY marketing posters for Re-rite Hamburg, no pressure! In the background is the Elbphilharmonie building in where we were installing the gig.

Men not at work the bridge to work was up to let boats through so we were just a little late!

The beginnings of partitioning the car park where we were installing the projections, lots and lots of acro-props.

Beginning the projection lineup in “The Helix” we were mapping the spiral ramp which the cars climb to access the various levels of the car-park. With some tricky rigging and projector positioning we managed to hit all surfaces with the projection raster.

Using catalyst to visualise the mapping and draw the mask areas and render templates.

A little bit of self promotion for people on site visits to the Elbphilharmonie!

Mapping the orchestra onto the windscreen of a pretty expensive BMW!

The start of UOS Birmingham with John taking the lead with the clipboard!

Utilising the old post room to store kit, there was lots of random old stuff left in the building, apart from the army men, they came from Canterbury

Later in the week after getting ahead of the game with the install we soft edge blended 3 of the projectors on the UOS dome using Catalyst and had a movie night, watching Run Lola Run. Watching a bank robary whilst sat inside a bank was quite fun!

Updates to follow soon!

 

 

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Leaving korea

Posted on April 14, 2013 by andy

Almost all of the Les Miserable Korea tech team

I’m sat here on the flight back from Soul after spending 2 weeks working on the install of Les Miserable Korea, which will run in Blue Square theatre, Seoul until August this year (2013).  I think the last post I did we were just commissioning the automation floor tracks which involved spending allot of time on the floor on our backs tighining bolts and tweaking pulleys.

The following week we were into tech rehearsals where, generally in the morning, we did allot of running around fixing and maintaining stuff and then the rest of the afternoon was sporadic work when we got access to the stage.

It was around this time when we got into later starts so I decided to go for a run around he area by the hotel. I had sort of planned a route in my head and had a look on Google maps so I kind of had an idea where I was going. What actually happened was different, I ended up running to Seoul tower which was quite hard work but the park area its located in is pretty nice. However, on the way back down the hill I took a wrong turn and ended up not where I thought I was going to end up, I was lost! Luckly there was a police station near buy and one of the officers spoke English so she pointed me in the right direction and after another 30 mins of running I was back at the hotel, panic over!

My unexpected running route

Later in the week we did a projector clean and then a lamp change for the long run in Seoul. There was quite a bit dust on the robot/filters but with a good bush and some dry air combined with the new bulbs the image was rather punchy again.

Steep angles and wide lenses, such a small distance from the lens to the screen

The projection on the show consists of 4 projectors all together. 3 x onstage soft edge blended pointing at the back wall at quite an acute angle, and one out front which covers various scenic elements of the set, such as the show cloth and the sliders. All of the media playback and main/backup switching is handled by a pair of Catalyst servers, which in turn is controlled by the Eos lighting console.

Black projection surface which takes the image quite well.

Later on in the week when we all had a day off, Simon, Dickie, Ali, Booney and myself decided to have a walk up to Seoul tower and actually go up the tower to see the views. It was quite a warm day the steep hills on the way up got our hearts beating!

Ali, Dickie, Booney, Simon

During the last few days there was quite allot of time where we were unable to do any work on the show when they were rehearsing. So together with Simon combined with is VB knowledge and understudying of the automation system software and my skills in VVVV we collectively created a Les Miserable Automation set visualiser. This receved packets of UDP data from the automation which we could read the encoder count and axis number. From here we created a very basic 3D virtual world of the set which moved in real time when the physical set moved onstage.

Before we knew it it was opening night, he show went well and we all had snack and drinks in the restaurant adjoined to the theatre. It was good to see everyone the and have a good chat now that all the work was finally done. Ive met some really nice people whilst doing this job during all 3 visits to Korea, it was nice to be going home but also sad to be saying goodbye. What was disconcerting was the currently escalating concerns about North Korea and the war threats. What felt horrible was that even though we were flying home the following day was that for our Korean friends Seoul is their home at threat. I really hope the situation gets sorted.

We’ve had brilliant translators on this job who’ve helped make things easier helping us communicate and negotiate with the non English speaking crew. Also thank you Tina & Heaven for my Korean name “Sang Soo Kim”, which kind of translates to Stage Left Smith.

Tina, Heaven, Myself & Simon : photo taken by BJ

 

 

 

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A little bit of music….

Posted on April 2, 2013 by andy

Heres some music recommendations for a change, I love discovering new music, or not even new just songs/styles which I haven’t heard before. Im not sure quite how I found this but I first came across this SizzleBird remix of a track by Angus & Julia Stone but its definately worth a listen. After hearing this track i decided to find more origonal songs by the duo and it turns out that the album Down the Way is rather good too!

Its always nice when you trawl the internet and find some good music although i quite frequently find it takes allot of searching as there is zoo much stuff out there. Heres a few links to some artists/bands which are in my top list.

Saycet
Niki & The Dove
Talbot & Deru
Purity Ring Love THIS song
Fritz Kalkbrenner 

As a side, theres a noice review of the set disogn for the last Purity ring tour where parts of the set were used as instrument MIDI triggers realised by Tangeble Interaction. The write up can be found Here. I Hope you enjoy the links wherever you may end up 🙂 .

 

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From Tokyo to Seoul (and a bit of War)

Posted on March 30, 2013 by andy

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

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

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

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

Lying down on the job

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

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Cherry Blossom Tokyo

Posted on March 24, 2013 by andy

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

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

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

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

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A Brief Visit to the Laing Gallery Newcastle

Posted on March 21, 2013 by andy

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

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

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

 

 

 

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