Lost In Berlin

Posted on March 6, 2012 by andy

Its been quite a while since I last posted on here…blah blah blah etc….who cares, heres the madness which has happened in-between!!!!  Again I’m not going to talk much about work as we have been going over scenes constantly each day refining reprogramming and rehearsing it all. We finished tech-ing the show were working on Al Gran and are now up and funning with only 2 more performances left to go (as of 06/03/12). We also made the front page of the newspaper.

Prior to the show opening there have been many hours of work and may hours of socialising with friends to balance things out. I was Betinas birthday on the 12th, bet inis our show caller/ASM and has been doing a stunning job of calling the Cues, lighting cues in german and video cues in English, AMAZING. We all meant in Monarch for her birthday (134, Skalitzer Straße ) which we never would have found as its the most unassuming entrance. The socialising continued on the ubahn Jack making sure Megan knew where she was going…….

Right next to Kraftwerk where we are working we discovered the most amazing side of a building pained. I still really don’t understand it, but, I believe, the cow is spoking a pipe whilst the sky is licking the sun like a lollipop and a strange looking cat like creature is appearing out of a hill, double pause,  FANTASTIC!!!!!!!

Thomas who has been our technical contact front the Staatsoper came and cooked us all a magnificent meal called Käse-Spätzle which was ace, it was fantastic to see the making and cooking process, thank you Thomas!

Jonathan also cooked some mega meals and made the most fantastic vinegary onion sauce stuff which made Megans eyes sweat. We watched all of the episodes of the TV remake of Sherlock Holmes even if we didn’t get in from for till late which made Jack jump. and occasionally we had some phalic like deserts, ahem…….

It was Jacks  birthday so Megan and Momma Megan cooked a cake, unfortunately the chocolate didn’t dry quick enough before we had to leave to go to work. This it travels open top style gaining strange looks of passers by. Ubahn Cake, Reichstag Cake, Cake by random advertising board.

Not the greatest photo but i think Jack was pleasantly sup prised when he was presented with the completed cake, topped with creme fresh and berries!

We visited the Reichstag with Family Warner, Family Kearney which was a great couple of hours seeing one over Berlin’s magnificent buildings. Im not quite sure why but Jon and myself are looking particularly pleased in this photo whilst leaving the Reichstag, who cares, it was a fucking great day!

There are many other things which have happened, far to much to put there in one post, saves me right for not keeping on top of this blogging malarky! So currently I’m now alone in 254 Hermanplatz planning some adventures on the days off!

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AL GRAN SOLE CARICO D’AMORE with 59productions

Posted on February 18, 2012 by andy

Mid February 2012 and I’m in the great city of Berlin working in a old power staion ontop of the cult techno club Tresor  with 59productions for the re-mount of the Opera “Al Gran Sole Carico D’amore“. This is a technically intricate opera, live video show consisting of 5 live roaming cameras filming the scenes acted out live onstage and reprojected onto a huge screen above. Alongside this we have a full orchestra all inside the space of the old Kraftwerk Mitte building Berlin.  I’ve been here just over 3 weeks now and it has been a steady working regime and lots of fun working, and having fun with friends. So, lets get the classic work photo out of the way ……….. I push buttons.

And onto Berlin…….

On the first sunday off, (were working every day apart from Sundays), we (we, as in family Warner, Bruno, Megan and Myself) decided to have a walk around Berlin ad see the sights. First of all, it was frikking cold, and I mean really cold, we left the apartment around midday and headed toward the centre. Getting off the train at Alexander Platz  we walked by the river towards the Holocaust Memorial which was recommended to see,this is well worth a visit a very grand but tasteful memorial.

Following on from here we continued wandering round taking in the sights and trying to keep warm we ventured towards the Brandernburg Gate. The buildings around Berlin are ‘ace’ , everything is so big and grand which is quite deceptive, as quite often something places look closer than they actually are!

Heading back down the away from the gate, being the gown ups which we are, we passed the a bin which looked like the cookie monster and only thought it right to take a photo. Maybe we were the only people who found this funny…….

I think it was later in the week when Leo suggested that we try and get everyone together for a meal somewhere. Chris one of the camera operators on the show suggested a pizza place close to where we were living in Hermanstrasse. We eventually found our way there that evening ordered and were presented with the biggest pizzas I have ever seen, Jon took the challenge of cutting this up.

After getting through some nice wine and great food, Chris, who had suggested the Pizza place recommended we went to his mates bar in Kreuzberg. In the end 5 of us went to the bar which was a very cool old building stripped back to brick with smoothly sanded individually crafted tables. We spoke to Duncan who owned the bar and his plans to open it up during the day soo to sell teas from around the world, the place doesn’t have a name just T, or Tea, or Tee. Anyways we sat round chatting drinking Rum and ginger beer out of jam jars till late. You wont find this pace via a google search but if you go to the corner of Kopischstraße at the top of the hill on the corner you will find it.

So thats a very slimmed down account of the past couple of weeks, more work, fun and frolics to follow.

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From Universe of sound to Al Gran Sole!

Posted on January 28, 2012 by andy

So!………. Another roller-coaster of a week starting with last Saturday 21/01/12 spent my last weekend at home for a while catching up with friends and family. Thnkyou James & Charlie for a pleasant lunch on saturday and Dan for a funny night of Beer and mysterious shots (Coffee Tequila!).

Sunday night I traveled down to Watford to spend a day with the Philharmonia helping prepare for the new video installation Universe of Sound following the success of Re-rite. This was a 36 camera shoot of the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa Pekka with the installation due to go into the Science museum later this year. The rigging had been done the day before and Lighting were making a start with a load of Spacelights!

We started early 08.00am, and began plugging up the kit, multi-viewers, SDI camera looms till we had a controll station with 4 plasmas several smaller monitors and lots of cable.

Mark from the Philharmonia had been working on a recording skeletal tracking data from the Kineckt to track Esa conducting but was having trouble with the amount of light around the place from the space-lights which was tricky. Erick may have solved the issue using some F:Stop Gel but I’m not sure if the conditions made it possible to capture this data as I wasnt there for the shoot. Hopefully he managed to capture something but sometimes its impossible to anticipate these things which crop up now and again.

We worked quite late, until we had all of the cameras out and a signal running through, at this point the whole room looked quite techie and rather matte black.

Callum, Ana’s fella came around to lend a hand and he showed me the GoPro Hero2 camera and some footage he had filmed and cut with it which looked great check out his Vimeo here: Callum Cooper. I headed back to the hotel arround 0:30 whilst Richard, Marina & Mark stayed a little later to finish off with the audio guys.

The following day I was on the train back to Newcastle at 08.00, at around 09.00 i had to call the police station as my card had been broken into on Sunday night, the window smashed and the police had had to take it away. Lucky James had my car keys so he helped me out HUGELY by traveling to where I had parked it dealing with the police on Sunday eve. Between 09.00 and 10.20 on the train travelling back I spent ages on the phone to get my car released from the compound. I was passed between departments so many times and to so many different people it was a chore to say the least! I very much dislike the 101 service to call the police, when you just want to speak to a duty sergeant at one police station it is nearly impossible to do this at ant speed! I finally got the answer to ay my car had been released, and Iain had offered to pick me up from the station so i could pick up my car, take it to auto-glass to get the window repaired then I had to leave for the airport at 15.00, to catch a flight to Berlin for 7 weeks. Thanks to Iain, i managed to get sorted and was set and in a taxi to the airport mostly on-time!

A short flight, a switch at Amsterdam and then a short flight to Tegal Berlin, I landed, grabbed my bag, and followed Jon’s directions on how to get to the apartment. i managed to get off the buss one top early and found myself a little lost until I got on the next one to Jacob station.

I was then to get the train from here to Hermanplatz, i got so far then we were transferred onto a replacement night-bus, thats what I assumed at the time and thankfully I was right! After a quick call to Jon after i got lost again, (my sense of direction can be somewhat terrible on occasions)  I was in the apartment which is to be home for the next 7 weeks.

Im working video programming for 59Productions for a remount of an opera called Al Gran Sole Carico D’Amore which were staging inside a disused powerstaion on-top of the famous Tresor Nightclub which was still going at 10.00am this morning (28/01/12) as we came into work. The opera directed by Katie Mitchell is hugely complex which involves 5 live cameras filming actors acting out the scenes and this being projected and cut live above the stage where the action is happening. As well as this there is an orchestra playing a score written by Luigi Nono, Opera singers and a full choir bringing music and atmosphere to the production.

Its big, complex, geeky and exciting!

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Creative Distraction and layering Google searches.

Posted on January 17, 2012 by andy

Over the past 6 month ive been making a habit of noting down interesting things on my Iphone in various lists I have which vary from films to watch books to read places to visit things to learn etc heres a snippet:

  • Reggie Watts Performance – Find Music
  • Get laura marlin CD
  • 8051 Microprocessor – Investigate
  • Learn the names of the ligaments and bones in the hand
  • Lana Del Rey New Album
  • Niki & The Dove
  • Find the Nordic word for tree at the centre of the earth:Yggdrasil!!! 

Basically I’ll do that, in the past I’ve forgotten so, so many small things I wanted to investigate hear visit see and do that I’ve kind of just begun jotting these notes and revisiting them. On top of that I take pictures of things to remind me to do things or just generally of things which appeal! This was walking through the streats of York last week when going out for some food with Jo & Musah.

And this was at work today after glancing over and seeing the wire-numbers bully was using set in a easy pick container.
Its always Hues, I dont know why but things like this just look appealing, long may there be more of these kinds of things pop up day in and day out! Anyway back to what I was trying to get at, because I never really sit still, when i find someting I like, I go deeper generally with the help of Google. So after hearing a song on the radio last weak which I really liked I managed to catch the name of the band and stick it in the music list on my Iphone. Later on in the week at work I decided to Google the band “Niki & The Dove” and ended up with their Youtube playlist on whilst I was working and the music was superb, many influneces, lots of detune synth and great rhythms, I was sold!

 At one point I looked over to the YouTube player to see the video posted for the song Under the bridges which consists of a dance school doing some incredibly good dance movement. I’ve seen quite allot of dance of many flavours in the past from doing lots of gigs at Dance City and other touring stuff and this choreography looked interesting, similar to seeing the balls of wool mentioned earlier. So I dug deeper, the choreographer is called Kate Jablonski , digging deeper agin she had choreographed a piece to one of Laura Marlings songs “I Was Just a Card” (Which I like, and her album is on my “LIST”!) so I clicked to watch. All I can say is that this is SUPERB!!! The Coreography is excellent and the camerawork and lighting (L201?) captures it well allong with a great song!

Kate Jablonski – I was just a Card

This was definitely worth the distraction and had to share!

 

 

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Priscilla Brazil, Dragons, Re-rite Turkey with a little bit of Xmas imbertween

Posted on January 8, 2012 by andy

It seems like an age has passed since writing a post on here, and in-between that time many things have happened, one being an attempted hack which kinda ruined my old word press installation so we currently have the standard layout, which actually, I sort of like.

So anyone reading I last left you after spending a week don london preparing to take the Priscilla bus apart prior to her facelift (cut & shut) and her trip to Brazil! picking up where we left off, I had a brief spell at home which consisted of catching up with friends and frantically getting in Xmas shopping, not quite last minute and in a flash I was back down York at Stage One were its still frantically busy and were I’m finishing off the Automation playback wing which is looking rather neat if I say so myself and will be used on the How to train your Dragon tour beginning in Sydney Oz. I cant currently post a full photo but heres a Geeky teaser!

Theres allot of exciting projects going on at Stage One so were all being kept busy, working together we all go a little stir crazy at times but Smithy remained very sensible and turned the rip in his jeans into an advent calendar with a tin of kippers behind the denim doors, bloody good work sir!

I finished for Xmas on the Wednesday and headed back home to Newcastle that evening ready for a break and to finish off present buying. On the friday before Xmas there was a get together in Tynemouth with all the lads which also involved Jamie Moore buying everyone a curry for helping with the Nitelites warehouse move I wasnt around to help with the move but J still bought me one too. It was top craic and good to see may people I hadn’t seen in quite a while. There were may photos from the evening but this seems fitting the most. Not even near everyone in it but here we have, Jamie, Gaz, Pimpy, Uncle Dave, Tim, Stu, Sad & Myself.
Two days later it was Xmas, no where near as exciting as it was as a kid but it was  great to get over to my Sisters along with my parents for a top sunday dinner. I arrived around 11.30am first greeted by my niece and nephew, Sophie and Daniel who had already been up for many hours!! Shorty after my parents arrived and we had a top meal cooked by my Sis and the family.
It was a great fun filled day and I’m happy to say the kids have developed a great use of sarcasm which kept us all entertained!
With Xmas over with the next couple of days I met up with my good friend Chris who was back home from working in Holland, we ventured out in town, I showed him a few card tricks and sleight of hand, another top night of catching up!
I was due to do another job but not before being invited to Graeme Nixon’s house-party Xmas bash, i was flying to Turkey the following day so didnt pend too long there but once again, had another top night of seeing people i hadn’t seen in ages, very glad I went after humming and haring.
The following morning I was up at 05.00 in a taxi to Newcastle Airport by 5.30, on a plane at 06.30 and had landed in Gatwick at 8.00, I had 4 hours to kill before meeting the others so I continued reading Carter Beats the Devil on my new Kindle. The kindle was a bit on an impulse buy but the book i was reading i had started around 5 years ago and had never gotten round to finishing. I finally finished the book, which is FANTASTIC read and also the Kindle is Amazing, such a nice clever surface to read off and incredibly thin.
I finally met up with Ana, Richard & Graham where we went through and begun out journey to Izmir via Istanbul, we were off to do a site visit for the installation of Re-rite as part of the Izmir International Festival.  Around 6 or so hours later we arrived in Izmir, to a surprisingly cold climate, got a lift to the hotel in a fast taxi checked in, had a beer, looked for some food places, eventually bought a bread based cheesy thing after we hand aimlessly wandered around releasing most places were closed, got back to the hotel and slept ready for the following day.
We were p early for breakfast and then went to meet Ceyda from the festival who was looking after us and showing us the venue. After a good introduction and a great Turkish coffee we went to the venue, an old tobacco factory based in Izmir.
On approach the place looked like a James bond Villains den and once we got inside it was a little crazy, nothing had been touched there were holes in the walls, some holes in the floors and lots of general “oldness”, it was great! My task was to draw up and measure allong with Graham from ‘Theatre Structures’, we spent the first half of the day exploring and sketching the rooms measurements and noting bits like the big hidden hole in floor on the second level in a dark corner! We broke for lunch and had some great Turkish cuisine, got shown around some of the city and then continued back to the venue to CAD the layout of the building with Graham whilst Richard & Ana discussed how to fit the video installation into the place. The air was cool but the sun was shining through various parts of the building just enough to stand in the rays and warm up again!
Cracking on, we managed to draw up all the rooms we were interested in, in CAD just before we all stated to shiver and became too dark to do anymore. We headed back to the hotel, I continued to draw the building from the notes and then made an accurate model in Sketchup to make planning easier.
Ceyda had invited us out for some food, so we met at around 20.00 and ended up at a fish restaurant, generally i would always go for a red meat given the option but I had half a Sea-bass which was frikkin amazing! We continued on around town after dinner and Ceyda took us to a nightclub in Izmir down one of the main streets aparently. Im not sure what the event was but i think we had ended up at a private party as at one point tin the night (after the raffle!) the music changed and EVERYONE seemed to be an amazing salsa dancer!!! It was surreal but fun. After the club we said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel to get some sleep before another 12 hours of traveling. The following day at the airport Ricard decided to show us the magical powers of his “Pointing Finger” by producing a series of number out of thin air near a call box in the airport!
Unfortunately, the power of Richard’s ‘point and happen finger’ was no match for the cue we had to wait in before take off………….
Twelve and a half hours later I was finally home after, 2 flights, a taxi a train and another taxi, one sleep later it was new years eve! I managed to go round and see friend and family, and then spend the later part of the evening out with a couple of friends drank a suitable amount of alcohol and had a great laugh! Two more sleeps after that it was back to work down london to carefully take apart the bus from Priscilla Queen of the Desert. The show Priscilla had spent almost 3 years in the Palace Theatre London and is to transfer over to Brazil. This should be pretty straight forward but the buss is too large to fit through the doors of the theatre so we had to dismantle it bit by bit, cutting securing and marking cables etc so that sides front back roof and chassis travel as independent parts with their relevant automation, lighting and video component arts still attached! Its a bit of a crazy job/idea and schedule but over 5 nights we managed to get her (Priscilla) apart and put her into hibernation for transport.
One of my good friends Iain Walton is off with Priscilla to reinstate the video & led which I programmed and pixel mapped 3 years ago. After the strip-down I expect it is going to be a difficult rebuild but nothing the team over there wont be able to pull of given enough time and resources.
So thats it, my mega long post of whats been happening over the past 20 days, it never rains but it pours 🙂
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The Big Pink Nightmare before Xmas

Posted on December 19, 2011 by andy

When I say nightmare I may be being a little harsh but this work week just before Xmas has been and will be bloody difficult! Lets rewind almost 3 years to January 2009 where I became involved with the video mapping, hardware and software on a big pink bus called Priscilla which was abut to make her journey to London’s West End. This was the beginning of my involvement with Priscilla Queen of the Desert London and it started in a freezing cold aircraft hangar in the depths of Yorkshire.

I was quite late onboard and was set with the mammoth task of planning the custom led layout and pixel-mapping this puppy. We spent a couple of weeks int he hangar with may people working on the bus Automation, scenic, LX and myself and a team doing Video/LED. I can safely say that this was one of, the most taxing, and intense jobs to date, 2 weeks had flown over and the bus was disassembled into its component parts ready to be shipped to London. The reason for taking apart what we had mostly put together was because the dock doors to the Palace Theatre we too narrow to fit the bus through and access in the centre of the West-End in London is tricky to say the least.

I wasn’t around for the load in but got a massive shock when I arrived at the theatre to see the bus, which looked much larger than it did in the hangar, onstage, with the frame fully assembled. How this thing managed to squeeze in through the relatively narrow dock door in I still cant comprehend! The following month was spent as part of the team putting together Priscilla my role as mentioned earlier was to look after video, the entire bus was to be pixel mapped which involved flashing the firmware on over 50 Artnet Driverboards, (Custom made by Stage One), and the use of around 400 universes of Artnet (2 sets of 200 on separate networks). I was responsible for programming and creating the media Server which runs the video on the bus.

THE MEDIA SERVER
The video content ran on the bus, created by Jamie Clennet is stored on 2 PC’s located at the rear of the bus, each PC takes the video source, samples the correct points of the video and route’s the colour information directly to the correct pixel, all in realtime. There is a secondary RGB mix layer allowing LX to mix the ‘Perfect Pink’, which there was much discussion over with the creative team. Also there are shutters which enables the LX operator to blank off any side of the bus to black which is used to black off the most upstage part of the bus away from the audience so as not to blaze light from the video-screen up-stage. All of these parameters are controlled over wireless DMX from Lighting and can all be changed in realtime. In essence, its 2 x V-Media servers pushing out  400 Universes of Artnet to 40,000 RGB pixels wrapped around a wirelesly controlled fully automated bus which can manoeuvre anywhere onstage, an Amazing piece of technology.

The whole process from getting into the theatre to pre-opening was massively labour intensive and hugely taxing, physically and mentally, another week and I may have broke. In the end we had a show, Priscilla had her quirks and kept everyone on their toes.

Fast forward to December 2011, almost 3 years later and Priscilla Queen of the Dessert the musical London is coming to a close. The show in London is closing, but Priscilla is being sent to Brazil to begin a new life! The challenge over the following weeks is to disassemble Priscilla in a fashion which she can be put back together again after being shipped to Brazil. This is no mean task and plans are been drawn up on how to achieve this. Im not taking Priscilla to Brazil, so I enlisted the services of my good friend and colleague Iain Walton who im passing on every detail I know about the bus in prep of the strip-down and rebuild in Brazil!

Iain looking very Russian after discovering how much is involved with this crazy bus, during our Recce on the bus to markup infrastructure ready for strip-out we may have found a blue fur covered box in which we proceeded to wear like a hat.

Shortly after this photograph Iain struck me down with a large fabric stuffed banana shouting, “why didn’t you tell me about all of this before i agreed to do this crazy move”

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Technology weekend!

Posted on December 7, 2011 by andy

Following on from my last post, this weekend was spent in the lodge at Saltwell park, Gateshead continuing preparations for Enchanted parks 2011. I was providing support for some of the artists on this years event, as well as being involved in our own installation as Filament, to read the back story follow this link “Enchanted Buttons‘.

Saturday was spent bringing together the different elements for the install, which finally we had in the same place for the first time. Rigging the buttons to the vvvv patch worked first time and with a little bit of tinkering sending dmx commands to trigger the Swisson worked third time, rather satisfying. A few mods need to be made to make the buttons fit the plinths but everything was coming together, just the LED dimmer for the button lights to install, install the sound card and program the lighting sequences which were looked after by Neil & Steve.

MultiMinded & Bloom were another project I gave a bit of advice to and provided some equipment to for their piece. Their installation involved timed synchronised video, and lighting comprising of 2 projected screens as well as immersive lighting in the trees, linking the screens together. At-least thats what had been described and I’m hoping to see it when I get home this weekend. After a few exchanges of emails about the best way to realise this I suggested using vvvv or Quartz Composer, a week later I got a mail from Martin Davies of Bloom Studio letting me know the decision to go with vvvv and a link to a video of the patch. I was impressed, good quick work in a short space of time.

Finally I was lending a hand to Lucy Walters who is doing Fine Art at Newcastle University and presenting a 3 screen synchronised video piece at this years event. We spent the sunday getting the footage from Lucy’s PC onto my Mac mini triple screen playback rig. Something I hadn’t encountered for a while was trouble getting large files (over 3gb) from a PC to a Mac. There was a weirdness in trying to write the file to any mac formatted memory stick/hard drive from the PC ,and the only way to get it over, was on a windows formatted hard drive and read this drive on the mac, now how exciting was that! Anyway, once that was sorted we tested the setup on a triple monitor setup, and then setup Lucy’s custom picture-frame rear projection screens. Everything worked as expected and was automatically played back from a simple custom Quartz patch on startup. Ms Walters looking rather happy, or a little stir crazy with here piece set up in the lodge  🙂

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Enchanted Parks Gateshead 2011

Posted on December 1, 2011 by andy

Its that time of year again for Newcastle & Gateshead to host a schedule of winter festive activities one of which is Enchanted Parks 2011, a winter walk light trail with light art from a wide selection of artists and designers. This year as part of Filament a creative company I am part of along with Steve Holmes, Neil Colebeck & Dan Addams we have been asked to be part of Enchanted parks 2011 with a design of our own. Last year we presented lighting in Saltwell-park-dene where visitors could interact with he lighting through a series of control on the bridge overlooking the installation, Mr Holmes done a grad job of the interaction programming between the controls and the lighting now this year its my responsibility to do the pre programming whilst Steve is away jet-setting on site visits to Miami and Florida. The idea for the installation was conceived a couple of months back which was the easy part, putting it into practice was another challenge all together, between us we came up with the idea of an interactive piece where visitors were presented with a set of buttons on brightly lit plinths overlooking part of the park. When one of the buttons was pushed part of a song plays, when another of the buttons is pressed another part of the same xmas themed song plays (chosen and edited by Dan).



One of the buttons, it doesn’t look like much yet!

For each button push and song segment a light show is triggered designed and programmed by Neil, the kicker comes when each of the four buttons are pressed in the correct order a bigger song and much larger “Wow factor” light-show is triggered as a reward for ‘Breaking the code’. We meet this weekend prior to the full park install on monday to fit up the rig and see if there is anything we have missed to make this work. I have programmed the interaction using vvvv taking care of the logic of the button pushes, light triggering and sound playback, it had been a while since I used vvvv but in still never ceases to amaze me how good it is for creative applications!

vvvv discretely handling the clever stuff!

There were allot of interaction problems, re-triggers and feedback loops to overcome whilst programming the patch for this which was addictive’ly challenging and much much trickier than appears on the surface. Now, after spending several hours of tweaking and streamlining the playback and interactivity seems to work a treat.

Current Buttons Schematic, beauty in simplicity.

So thats in in a nutshell, if you have read this and I have given the game away then you must have been searching pretty hard to find this post so well done. As I type this I’m chatting to Steve whilst he waits in San Francisco to come come to the delightful weather of Newcastle in December, remember your jeggings Steve.

Also, this little guy has been helping out within Filament too 😉

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Abbey road, Polar bears and Musicians

Posted on November 20, 2011 by andy

06.00 friday morning Steve picked me up from my house along with extra bits of kit for our long early drive to London from Newcastle, we were off to Abbey road studios for rehearsals of BBC Planet Earth Live. Incase you don’t know Planet Earth Live is the live show of the BBC David Attenborough series Planet Earth where George Fenton and the BBC Concert Orchestra play along-with footage cut from the original series. On the way down we listened to a couple of RadioLab podcasts, I cannot recommend this podcast enough, every eppisode is fascinating and if your wondering what its about this is a quite from the website:

Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we’ll feed it with possibility.

If you like Science, Philosophy and and amazing stories from people around the world go subscribe now!

Before we went to Abbey road we had to stop by XLvideo to pick up the Media playback rack which was meant to have been brought up to Newcastle for a small rebuild but during the hectic schedule and logistics of Bluebeard previous to this it ended up somewhere in the XL warehouse. Getting to XL was easy enough after getting over the crazy Uber Roundabout made of roundabouts.

Undeterred we picked up the rack, and headed over to Abbey Road, it was quite exciting to go to the famous Abbey Road studios with all that history and check the place out. We arrived arround midday and aproaching the studio I was amased to see the wall of the front car-park was covered in what I later realised was fans graffiti/drawings/messages & art. You could spend an entire day reading all of this and comeback to something different as each visitor adds their own thing.

We got parked easily signed in, loaded our kit in and proceeded to get to work on prepping the playback rack for the gig, Mike turned up shortly after who had been running and calling the show when it was touring the states, before we knew it we had the rack ready, plugged up and the orchestra were tuning up. The score which ran with the visuals was perfect and there was a good atmosphere in the room as this was going to be the first UK showing of the piece. As quick as we had started the rehearsal was over and we were packing down to move out kit into the vocal booth where steve needed to do some updates to the system prior to tomorrows show. Below, Steve (Barco Ninja) Holmes hard at work in the vocal booth.

The following day we were in the Barbican, with a HUGE screen and 2 Barco HD20’s, the local house crew at the Barbican had a busy schedule and had only had a few hours off when we arrived at 08.00 but were more than happy to get back on it assembling this giant screen.

The screen went up easily enough, Colin Pink turned up who was doing sound for the show and offered to get in the coffees and morning sandwiches, a very good way to make friends, and the coffee was much appreciated! After a quick coffee, we got the projectors in the booth and began setting up the system. I have never met anyone who hasn’t said that Barco’s are a pain in the ass, and they’re right, they are clunky, the remote interface is slow, but, they do the job and I still cant believe they still have a huge market share here in the UK, give me a Panasonic any day!

Anyway, rant over, we got setup, had a little fight with the projectors over, resolution & scaling for allot of the morning and then we were into rehersals again. In respect, today was an easy day for me, this was Steve’s baby and he was beavering away, checking over Cues, triggers and settings calling up the relevant rehearsal marks for George the conductor during the afternoon. I was on bitch duty so promptly went out and got some coffee and sandwiches. Again the time vanished, and we were nearly at showtime, it was busy in the foyer so I gave Steve the calming words of, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine as long as you don’t fuck up” which I know he appreciated. Steve had spent practically all afternoon and the show in the roasting tech box with those projectors and did a good job of staying focussed.

The show went incredibly well, with the added pressure of David Attenborough and many of the BBC cameramen who filmed the footage in the audience. After the last of the audience had left we packed down, managed to get all of the kit in the van with the help of the superb crew at the Barbican, good people to work with. It had been a thirsty successful day, so we couldn’t think of anything better to do other than have some really dirty hotel food and a beer. Actually we could have thought of better places to go but in the town that never sleeps it was the only closest place open after midnight!

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Durham Lumiare11

Posted on November 16, 2011 by andy

After landing in Newcastle from Dortmund I had a rather busy afternoon/evening ahead which went a little like this:

16.30 Land in newcastle, get through passport control, Steve and myself pick up my car and I drop off Steve at the Sage to pick up his mini and drive home.

17.30 After dropping off Steve, I travel to Dance City where James took delivery of some kit for tomorrow’s (monday) gig.

18.00 Get to Steve’s in Tynemouth, and pick up some more kit, monitors computer bits etc and then head off home with a car full of technology.

18.30 Arrive home, unpack car, put washing in machine, set up mac pro, and do a clean install of Snowleopard for a clean Catalyst machine.

19.30 Managed to tidy the house, build up the rack and panel to contain the dual Matrox DHTG anlaogue.

19.40 Collected 4 x 1024×768 monitors from around the house and set up to program Catalyst for the install I was providing technical for at Lumiare11

 

20.10 Iain one of my friends came around who was lending me some kit and we preceded to have a bit of a GeekOut, at this point I was completely Knackered and probably taking gibberish but got a good photo of Iain in my temporary emergency makeshift workshop, my living room.

Iain, in the ‘Workshop’. Taken using Photosynth

Soak testing, 4 clips of 1024 x 768 running in sync, easy-peasy.

After tweaking bits and pieces, marking up cables and leaving the system running for a while all seemed fine, I packed it all down ready for Mondays install. It was arround 23.00 there was flight cases strew around my house, clothes to get out on the radiators, I just about managed to get the washing on the radiators, and collapsed into bed……. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Monday morn I got to site around 11.00’ish, there was no massive rush, the structure which I was installing the system was still to be built. I had been asked by HiLights theatre services who were overseeing the technical’s of Durham Lumiare11 to come and do the projection system design & install for the artists, Richard Wolfstrome & Ira Lightman, who’s piece it was, a description of the piece can be read Here, unfortunately I never got to meet the artist.

UPDATE:16/03/12
I received a nice email correspondence from Richard wi has a good description and nice video of the project here: Lightwriting and some nice stuff on how blog. well worth a look around.

Technically my task was to, line up 4 projections which were played in sync and consisted of many circles forming and words and stories, each of these circles needed to perfectly match the circles which had been cut in each side of the cube in a matrix fashion, 3640 holes PER SIDE!

Once the structure was up I bundled all the required kit inside the cube and began setting up, with projection like this and super wide lenses its good practice to be as square and accurate to your surface as possible. In this case, due to the nature of the beast, nothing quite lined up, to the eye it looked ok, but when you begin shooting beams of straight light at it, things become clear that its all slightly off. I persevered helped with the early darkness and got the projectors as close as square and lined up as possible to the surfaces utilising as much of the raster as possible, we don’t want to be wasting any of that light! After getting as close square as possible I broke out Catalyst and tried to like up the images using the 4-cornerpin keystone mix, and kept trying but it was no good, I had to move up to use the 16point Curved screen mix setup giving me 16 points of image manipulation per side of the cube to pull everything into place. For anyone who wants to GeekOut, below is a schematic of the system, thank you Jonathan Lyle for pointing me towards Omnigraffle for doing schematics(rubs knees, oooh shcematic).

PDF: LUMIARE11 SCHEM Rev1

So to cut a long story short, I done some successful lineups on the first night and came back the following day to get the finalised content which was to be a set of 4 clips for each day of the festival (4 days in total). Much of the day was spent re-rendering the video to optimise playback and sync, once i had all of the content in I tweaked the lineups so everything was pixel perfect for all the footage. I set up a wireless interface using an ipod touch so whoever was looking after the install each day could logon, select the preset for that particular day, check the lineup and let it run for the rest of the evening, it worked a treat, nice and simple nice and easy. After a day of careful rendering, re-aligning, cable management and system setup I handed the install over to Hi-Lights. I do like little gigs like this where theres a bit of a challenge but with the opportunity to make life easy for the client and do a pixel perfect lineup.

Unfortunatley I missed taking a photo Without the Heras fencing around!

 

 

 

 

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