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With a couple of days off i was back on a plane all the way to South Korea to do the setup and some video programming for the Korean mount of Les Miserables in Seoul. The first week was a rather busy week setting up and getting the system ready for Jon arriving the following week to take over the programming up until press night, by the time everyone had their desks setup in the auditorium it was very much like mission control.

On the sunday we had off Jon and Myself went to the aA Design museum in Seoul.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we turned up there but the place is actually a cafe first, and a kind of museum/shop second. Unfortunately the shop was closed when we were there but the decor of the cafe and the feel of the place is pretty cool, definitely a place to visit. Of the few places we managed to get around in our 2 sundays off in seoul this area around Sangsu rail station (37.547767,126.922955) was quite a neat area to visit!

Upon returning home from Seoul i had decided to build my first Hexacopter and after quite a bit of research settled on the DJI F550 kit with the NAZA controller. The kit was pretty straight forward to build but quite a learning curve getting into the whole radio control business and such. After a few school boy errors in setup myself and my good friend Iain had a very successful first flight with the copter and we were massively impressed by the responsiveness of this thing. More about this in future blog posts!

Whilst I was in Korea i had a call from Roy at Stage one Creative Services asking for some advice on a project they had where they needed to transmit power and data down a slip-ring to a huge mirror ball which had LED screens on the outside. I managed to find a product which would do the job and thought nothing of it until a couple of weeks later I saw a huge LED mirro-ball outside the TATE gallery, after quick mail to Hayden at the Colorsound Experiment who were StageOnes’s client for this and low and behold it was the same project!

By the end of November I was back on a plane to South Korea again this time to work with Simon Wait on the automation side of Les Miserable Korea for its move from Seoul to Deagu. It was very good and rather busy 10 days working with Simon, Shin, Bak and Jong Min.

 Thats it for now, im currently sat in Starbucks in London with a strong coffee watching people walk by on a very wet Oxford street! Next update will once again be sooner rather than later!

Andy

BLUEBEARD, SAN FRANSISCO June-2012

On the back of last years mini tour of the Philharmonias production of Bluebeard’s castle we were invited to stage the whole show again at Davids Symphony hall, San Fransisco. This was the first time we had done it since November (I think) last year. Sticking with the theme of Bluebeard technically not being one of the easiest gigs, here we had 6, yes SIX HD20 Barco Projectors because of the size of the set and also, because we could. Lining 6 projectors up onto a set with varying surfaces of different focal points was never going to be an easy thing, and we had spoke about this numerous times beforehand thinking of alternative ways, and different projector configurations on how to do this. In the end  Nickin pulled the rabbit out of the hat and spent a long time using the internal warp boards in the projectors to pull the focal point of each projector into alignment on each surface, bloody good work man!

We didn’t have allot of time to setup, lineup, and remember how to use the Chamsys again after what felt like such a long gap. Coupled with the rather strict American union rules, where we would have worked through breaks to get the job done here back in England, our breaks and hours we could work each day were fixed and limited. We did however manage to get everything setup and running for rehearsals, it felt like we were all swimming upstream against the tide for many hours the first few days but as usual it all came together with enough time to play and for me to put pictures of everyone on the set, which helped with our sanity levels at that time!

Opening night came and i think we had a full house, everyone seemed to enjoy the show and the whole concept with the projected visuals, moving set, opera and orchestra fused together this way. There were quite a few audience members came up to myself and Nickin at the operating position saying it was wonderful and asking how we did it.
During the run we had some troubles with the automation provided by a company who shall remain unnamed where we completely lost one of the automated axis for part of the moving set. It would have been nice to have spares and Steve spent rather a large amount on calling the UK for “support”

All in all it was a good version of Bluebeard’s Castle and it was great to have the whole team back together again. One or twice we did get a limo provided by the venue, below is Rich Nick and Nickin pimping it up just before a camp night in the pub as it was the evening before pride!

The following day Steve and myself decided to head into the centre of town to see what happened at Pride in San Fransisco. This day Steve decided to shave his beard leaving a classic village people style tasch and a local policeman whas more than happy to have his picture taken with the famous Barco Ninja (Steve)

Ten Billion London-Avignon

Literally a few days after getting back from San Fransisco I was straight onto the next job, video programming 10 Billion, a new show with a scientest called Stephen Emmott directed by Katie Mitchel and Video by Tim Reid associate of Fiftynine Productions. I met Tim at the offices in Hoxton where he was trying ideas in a model-box set before we loaded in and setup projectors etc at the Royal court in the following couple of days. The show itself was less of a theater production but more of a lecture/talk about the worlds population continuing to increase at a vast rate and how we as humans are having an impact on the environment around us. There’s a better interview with Stephen in the Guardian here.

We eventually got in to the royal court and i met everyone and figured out how the hell to get our projectors into place in such a little theater space. You never know what its going to be like when going to a new theater with new people but i was pleased that tey are genuinely such a good bunch of people at the Royal Court.

Above: Tim Working hard at his laptop

I cant exactly remember how long we all had to setup, tech rehearse the show but i do remember tat it wasn’t very much time at all!  Also it was the first time i had used the ETC Ion so it was a bit of a baptism of fire to get up to speed on this with such a limited technical period too. God knows how much time i spent at the control position pictured below but i think we all went a little stir cray at some point!

It was fun working with Tim and i could see he was right up against it given the time constraints. Many ideas were tried, some stayed and some didn’t, id like to work together with Tim again sometime with more than 2 days to tech a show from scratch!

This was part of my pre-show checks, before every show, maling sure the projectors were in focus, pointing at the correct part and that the catalyst keystone mix lineups were in the right place! Oh memories!

Following on from doing previews of the show in London we then took it to the Avignon festival where it was presented at a brilliant old theater space called Chartreuse de Villeneuve, converted from an old monastery. We had allot of fun here and had one or two bloody mary’s on some of the days pictured below.

Giles, Pippa, Stephen & Dan making drinks.

Tariq, Katie, Dan, Mark and myself also went and took in some of the festival atmosphere after our show and ended up in the “Dancing Room” at the festival bar. This was such a brilliant night and we all danced like idiots for a good couple of hours. Below is Dan doing the classic windmill move.

10Billion was a hard show to start off with, averaging 14hours a day for the first week even during previews but I’m so glad i was working with the people I was. So much infact I decided to make some thank you cards which also folded up into a tiny model of the set!

The card unfolded

Folded!

Rings of Colour

During 10Billion being performed at the royal court the whole Olympics was going on. I had been working at Stage One  earlier in the year as part of the technical team designing some of the hardware and specifying part of the automation infrastructure. A good friend Karl was in town at the time and he invited me along to come and help out (see) the control center for the rings on London bridge. It was pretty cool to be up to the top of one of the towers. Stage One provided the rings and the lifting mechanism as well as the custom weather alert system programmed by Karl which gave constant updates on weather around the bridge via text and email to the main operators. In the event of high winds the rings would be lifted horizontal for safety.

Its always nice and pretty cool to get invited to places like this and see the views.

also during 10Billion, the day we arrived back from Avignon was the opening ceremony. Megan (my fine lady) was working as assistant to the video director for 59Productions and we were both invited to 59’s studios in Hoxton to watch the opening ceremony with many other people who had been involved too. We both had had some sort of high end involvement and it was pretty nerver racking watching this knowing our friends were inside the stadium pushing the important buttons and making sure it all worked!

In the end it did all work and it was a bloody brilliant show, we left Hoxton pretty pissed and relieved that night, a great end to a long few weeks!

Friends at the Proms

One Sunday by good friends and partners in crime were also pushing the buttons at the Wallace and Grommit’s Musical marvels at the proms in the Albert hall. Nick Hillel got us in to see it and we met Steve and Iain pictured below, who had all had a long morning of rehearsals and technical surprises! It was a fun show to see and great to catchup with some friends.

Iain on the buttons.

ReRite Overhaul

Following a busy year for the Re-Rite Kit, from a  long stint in China and then another long stint in a dusty old disused tobacco factory in Turkey it was due for an overhaul and some hardware improvements to make the installs quicker and easier!

It was ace to finally have some time in the Philharmonia’s new warehouse space to get the whole kit out, clean off the the dust accumulated after a busy 18 month! It was a good few days with the kit prepped and packed ready for 2013 wich looks to be a busy one already!

Media Player Custom Plates

Earlier this year working with Steve Holmes we installed Universe of Sound, a large synchronised video instalaltion for the Philharmonia orchestra. As a progression and improvement for the next install I designed a custom plate and mounting method for the media plates used in the install. Below is the prototype incorporating the projector mount, media player and projector in one unit.

The final production units were anodised black and the overall height was reduced to the previous versions. the whole unit sits in a flight-case fully plugged up with the hanging bracket already attached so on the next install it will dramatically reduce installation time.

ARTAV Isaac Julien Copenhagen

Mid August i did a job for ArtAV at GLStrand in Copenhagen installing a 1 screen video piece for artist Issac Julien.

It was quite a straight forward instal but had to be incredibly precise with the focus and projector position as we were using one of ArtAV’s custom borderless screens (pretty).

After a good long day and a bit assembling the screen, mounting the 5:1 surround system, and projector, and then making the cabling invisible, it was pretty slow and precise going but was the only way. The colour balance was important and ended up having a long phone conversation with Isaac explaining how he likes it to be saturated.

I had a few hours to pass in Copenhagen after the install was complete and Jon from GlStrand recommended i went to Christiania, a huge hippy area in the centre of Copenhagen. I highly recommend it, its a pretty cool chilled out area, and this poster below pretty much sums it up, if you find yourself in Copenhagen, go visit this place.

HOLIDAY!!!!!!!

Finally I booked a holiday for me and Megs to Vancouver, we went all over the city, hired a silly little sports car and drove to Whistler, and met up with some old friends living out there.

Also on our wanders around the city Megs discovered Vancouvers answer to Charity Peter. This was a great break after an already busy year for both of us!

Berwick Film & Media Festival

And finally, at the end of this, MEGA (thinned down) catchup, I spent a couple of days with Steve, I’ve worked with steve allot this year, working on Berwick Film and Media festival. One of the taking installs was a 24Screen syncronised video piece by Jason Dee with was pretty nice. Below is Steve debugging and getting the playback system to work FRAME ACCURATE!!

So thats the end of my mega catchup, I’d like to think that im going to keep ontop of this blog again and not let stuff slip so much but to be honest it may be a week, a month of even 3 month before I repost, We’ll See!

Andy

This seems like agens ago now but it was only a couple of month back in May (2012) whe I was working with the good people at the Philharmonia working on the install of Universe Of Sound at the Science Museum London. Roll back to January this year and we were doing the filming for Universe of Sound at watford. After much painstaking editing, stretching, tweaking and cutting of the footage it was time to install the infrastructure for the exhibition. To explain what Universe of sound is, heres an excerpt from the website:

Conduct, play and step inside a virtual Philharmonia Orchestra, joining 132 musicians and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Orchestra’s Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor, performing one of the most spectacular pieces of music ever written. Universe of Sound is an extraordinary free interactive digital installation, allowing you to explore an orchestra from the inside out as they perform Holst’sThe Planets.

Using giant visual displays, touch screens, unconventional projecting surfaces, movement-based interaction and planetarium-style projections, you can take part as musicians, conductors, arrangers and composers. Universe of Sound has been created by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

The installation also features a new companion piece to The Planets, by composer Joby Talbot, called Worlds, Stars, Systems, Infinity.

SOURCE

The week started busy, and then to the middle of the week it continued busy, and nearing the end of the week and right up to the opening, it remained BUSY. Our task was to install the technical aspect of the install wich included all of the Projectors, LED screens, network/power infrastructure and construction of “The Dome” below in its flat pack state.

In addition Chris Plant was also involved creating the interactive software patch for the Conductor pods, where your hands get tracked by a Kinect camera and you try and match the movements of the conductor. Its great fun and it was nice to finally meet Chris, pictured below, patching in one of the conductor pods.

As the week progressed we continued mounting projectors, fabricating, stands and mounts for various speakers and dome additions. there was allot of network cable to terminate and general stuff to be done, so we were joined by some guys from RNSS and XLvideo for a couple of days to keep us on track. As install and construction was taking place we had a team of people still editing video and Steve was working relentlessly autoring and setting up the synchronised playback system.

I must say it wasn’t the easiest install partially as there wasn’t a huge timescale to do things and partially because we had to use the museums preferred suppliers for certain things, which on some occasions was quite frustrating. It was as always good to be working with friends which made the long days easier and we soldiered on getting things in and up intime for the opening night.

The install is currently up and running and thoroughly good way to spend a couple of hours for all ages. For a better ilustration of what the install is actually like take a look at the excerpt which was featured in Newsround a few weeks back here: UNIVERSE OF SOUND NEWSROUND

The install will run until the 27th of august at the Science Museum london.

Im back dating this post back to May (It’s now July) when we were in Izmir, Turkey installing Re-Rite. It was a busy week with Rich, Bob, Graham, Mark, Bea, Hillelabad, Ash and myself.

The trtip started well meeting Rich and Bea at Heathrow for the start of our journey to Izmir, flights had been delayed as bad weather in Izmir and we got stuck in istanbul airport for a few hours. Luckly for us we got a free drink and a really rubbish sandwich with non discript meat inside it which made everything allright!

We eventually got to out hotel in Izmir at silly o’clock in the morning, met everyone at breakfast and then headed to the museum building where we had a meeting about the fourth coming weeks work. During the meting the adopted museum cat made a visit and took quite a shine to bob!

After the meeting the work began and we got all of our flight cases unloaded in to the venue which was an old disused tobacco factory we done a recce on earlier this year. Some of our kit was still stuck in Izmir due to some customs issues with our kit leaving china, whilst Rich got on with sorting this, we unpacked what we had and marc setup his office.

Due to the storms and the gae of the building we had quite large pools of water lying around the venue where it had leaked through the roof onto the third floor above us and then continued to leak through the floor onto where we were, creating various large puddles! The floor below us was not used , so, Graham had a grat idea of drilling drain holes to clear most of the water!

We worked on diverting water upstairs to try and avoid any future storms flooding our floor again and repositioned some projector positions to make sure the electrics didn’t get wet! As many other jobs like this progressed, along with allot of work, there was allot of friendly piss taking, Graham outdone himself when he used his Ipad to make an islaney! Ha!

The week continued very much like this with lots of graft and lots of silly banter, Bob & Graham did well with putting up many fixing points for our screens and projectors and some places there were ready made holes. The old disused fan ducts in the commentator rooms were ace!

During the week, even though Rich was working in another room, the eye of Slaney never blinks!

The final room was the conductor room with a 4 projector setup and an interactive screen where you can conduct alongside Esa Pekka, Bob & Grame did well getting all these fixings up, I mounted and cabled and Bea done the final focus which looked ace! when we had all od the content on, good fit!

It may have been around this part of the week when we had a massive storm and it rained like hell with some amazing thunder and lighting all night!

Luckily with the pre planning non of the lit got wet and there wasn’t too much water on our floor! The rest was pretty plain sailing getting the install finished ready for opening night. Keeping witht e fun and games of the week Rich and Bob had a hand wrestle, you can probably guess that Rich won outright leaving Bob shattered and in tears.

The following day were were on our way home, after a few celebratory beers from a successful opening night. The plane journey was pretty uneventful so Nick and myself entertained ourselves with the inflight pillows. I dont think the cabin staff appreciated this as much as we did!

Contrary to all of the silly photos allot of work went on this week, another successful re-rite installation!

With all the best intentions in the world I’ve been generally shite at keeping the posts and updates of this blog regular. So in an attempt the blog everything I’ve neglected to in the pat couple of weeks I thought I’d would write an uber long blogpost with all the details of whats been going on. Instead, beacuse its easier, and im a lazy bastard im going to pad this out with lots of photos!

So the last post finished of with me trying to stay up as late as possible before flying home from China in a vain attempt to rejig my body clock back to UK time!

The following day (same day, 2 hours after falling asleep) Dickie, Graeme and myself were in the car taking us back to Beijing airport, we slept most of the way but woke to see  a HUGE complex of tower-blocks being built along the motorway. Still currently under construction but it went on forever! Take a look at the picture photographed from the car, and have a guess at the numbers, i took a video and it took 3 minutes to get from one end of the set of tower-blocks to the other, you do the math!!!

We eventually got to Beijing airport, got a coffee, chatted for a while and then Graeme and myself headed to the checkin whilst Dicky was staying at the airport to meet his wife who was coming over for a week.
The flight home was awful, i can safely say it was the worst flying weather conditions I have experienced yet. The wind socks where horizontal on takeoff, it felt like the plane was fish tailing for about 20 minutes getting bounced side to side in our seats, I was genuinely fucking scared.When the plane stopped shaking i watched the new muppets movie on the inflight entertainment which was brilliant and the perfect distraction!

——-[Imagine there is a picture here with some relevant connection to the new Muppets movie,I think it’s 2012 but i have been known to be wrong with these things]——-

We eventually landed at Heathrow, only 1.30hours late which wasn’t bad at all, got to passport control, queue’d,  got through pasport control and went to bagage collection, waited, picked up our bags and went to leave and got stuck in the lifth for 15mins, baaaah, it was impossible to leave. Eventually we were free of Heathrow airport and headed into London. Me and Grame said bye at KingsCross and I headed up to Camden for drinkies and catchup with Meg’s. A great arrival home, and fun dragging a suitcase around Camden pubs on a Friday, yessss!

The following day i had to find a present for Jon;s birthday which loads of people were meeting at Jons for on sunday, Luckily, Lance the Sanity Panda was around and a suspect PVC Purple cat were on hand to help :-)!

Sunday was Jons, Birthday get together day, it was an ace day with lots of people coming and going and a great bunch around for the treasure hunt in the park! On the evening we all descended on the local pub for beer and food. Jo & Kat had baked the most awesome birthday cake in the shape and form of a projector, down tot he most intricate detail that it even had an HDMI input in the icing sugar backplate, IT WAS BRILLIANT!!!!!!

The following day, [Monday300512] I took a trip to see the chaps at 59Producitons new office in Hoxton, 1: to see people, 2: to talk about up coming work, and 3: because i wanted to see the new offices! Nice office space and good location, this notice in the loo in the corridoor amused me!

I arrived home that afternoon and packed my bags again for a week at Stage One starting the following day! I spent the next few days working on stuff for this big gig in the summer. In the meantime, a series of conversations had happened between me and Rich from the Philharmonia which resulted in me managing to book an IPAF 3a & 3b couse at stupidly short notice so i had my scissor-lift license for the beginning of the install of Universe Of Sound the following week. So this is what happened…….

Thursday, get conformation of the IPAF course for the Friday.
Drive home thursday night.

Friday: Do, IPAF course at NIS training, it was a good IPAF centre and a well taught course, get 30/30 on the theory and pass the practical! Yesss!! Below is a pic of Darren who I was doing the course with and Peter the instructor.

After the IPAF training I attempted to go to the GYM, but was raught on the way by a MASSIVE water leak in the road! I managed ot park the safe side and get to the gym to d a 7.5k row, I’ve neglected rowing for the past few weeks!

That night I went to James & Leslie’s and was treated to tea and a good catchup! :-), the following day i was back down StageOne to do ome stuff for this big gig in the summer!, Sat/Sun, back home sunday night and them time to have a bit of a life on Monday!!!!!!!

Monday was ace, loads got done, Mitch came around with his petrol strimmer and we tackled the Jungle/Garden, took a cabinet to the tipp which I’d been meaning to do for ages, put up a blind in the kitchen, tidied the spare room and set up my MA Command wing with the new touch-screens, measured up my drive for a rework, washed and laundered my clothes from the previous week, and managed to get to the pictures to see the Avengers Assembled with Mitch and James(Cheers for the suggestion Yvonne 🙂 )

Tuesday I was back at StageOne, again, more work, lots of soldering, cutting and planning. Si Bye, sent me this which is Ace!

I made more stuff the rest of the week, below is a picture of my new Apple which is a little different to the previous models…….

Finally, today [Thursday100512], it was a good day so Karl had the genius idea to have a cheese and wine night in the hotel lobby. Jo did his best to seduce Smithy to come and join us but in the end it was Jo, Karl, Musah and myself drinking wine and talking rubbish, what a brilliant night!

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while, and as usual, time appears to have escaped once again in the madness of work! So, ZENDEH!! Zendeh are a Northeast based theatre company lead by the brilliant Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh and her fine team, have a look around the Zendeh website for more info. I recently worked with Zendeh on their recent production Found which played Northern Stage & Berwick Maltings.  To give a brief explanation on what the piece is about here is an excerpt from the maltings website:

Take a walk in Anna’s turbulent imagination, where the modern world collides with memories of her Jewish grandmother in Paris during World War Two. FOUND explores the places and times when we find ourselves at our most vulnerable, and feel truly lost. It marks the journey of beginning to hear your own voice, finding the strength to listen to it, and move forwards.

Informed in part by the story of Abdol Hossien Sadari, an Iranian statesman and diplomat, who gave assistance to Jews in occupied France and saved many lives.

I was responsible for realising the digital projection aspect of the piece. In early January I had a meting with Nadia & Nazli to begin to get down some of the projection ideas and begin with a framework for the piece which turned into rather a nice hour long chat over coffee and fruit teas! After that I would be working remotely, as I was away in Berlin for 7 weeks working for59Productions. As I was away the Zendeh team were developing the piece and we were in communication via email & Skype (although not a particularly good internet connection at my end:-/).

Philippa Nazli & Nadia developing the piece in rehearsals at DanceCity

After finishing the daytime work on AlGran in Berlin on the evenings I had been getting basic framework from the ideas and began slowly bringing together different footage/media which could be edited down and used.

It was decided that we would map video onto various elements in the piece from several hanging orbs to the voile at the beginning of the piece. James managed to get me some measurements, photos and put together a great Sketchup so i could create a mask and begin to place the elects of video so they would line up with the real word orbs.

The above was one of the earlier setups before it was decided to cut some of the orbs used, but you get the general idea. We later, once orb numbers and positions were finalised did a LiveTrace* of the orbs in their position to get the most accurate mask. Well, when I said we, I really mean James kindly did the trace for me.

It might have been around this time I met Al Orange, over a very intermittent Skype meeting who was stage managing Found and now I can say is great fun to work with!
Also, Al did a FANTASTIC job of the soundtrack for the piece, good work on squeezing in that deep dark and dirty house track in there, t’was perfect!

It wasn’t until Late in february where things began to move pretty quickly, I was uploading content to Dropbox and we were exchanging emails and I was making changes, re-rendering and uploading. I can safely say it was a very productive week, doing technical rehearsals for AlGran during the day and then working on video content on the evening. Eventually I managed to turn all of the folders for the master project video files in the DropBox green which meant that was complete!

I finally got to meet up with the lovely Zendeh team at Northern Stage for the install of Found and put my input in with the projection setup. Louise Gregory had done a very complimentary design for the piece and didn’t seem to tire of my requests to “dim that lighting state, just a little” to help the projection punch through, (Cheers  ).

I finally saw the show on opening night at Northern Stage, it was strange because I had been involved in the process but had never seen the whole thing through, only fragments. The piece came in at under an hour but really didn’t feel that long, the story was sometimes hard to follow in some places but at the end left you with something like you didn’t fully need to understand everything but were left with the exact feeling it portrayed, definitely a WIN in my oppinion!

I haven’t had a proper chat with anyone on how the berwick shows ant but I expect everyone done a sterling job again!
It was great working with, Nazli, Steven, Nadia, Philippa, James, Al, Molly, Nichole, Phil & Louise top team, lots of work & great fun.

*LiveTrace
LiveTrace is what I call it anyway, other people pay call it other things but this makes sense to me! Basically, to create an accurate mask  so we only projected onto the things we draw directly onto the object via the projectors output.
Step 1: Is to set up the scene and the projector position, in this case it was the orbs and, a measured projector position from the orbs (height & Depth).
Step 2: Is to use some illustration package such as photoshop, hook your computer up to the projector as a second output.
Step 3: Make sure your resolutions mask, if you are going to be creating content at 1024×768 then the canvas must be fullscreen with no borders @ 1024×170 at 100% zoom.
Step 4: On a black background draw out or colour in the areas which you want to project onto, in this case it was several circles. This gives us a pixel accurate mask.
Step 5: Use this mask in an animation package or image manipulation suite to begin animating your video content which when played back fullscreen @ 100% will lineup perfectly if you get all of the real world elements in the correct place.

This is a very brief overview and i may do a full post on this method later, as always there are may other ways to do the same thing.