{"id":34,"date":"2011-10-13T07:46:04","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T07:46:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/?p=34"},"modified":"2011-10-13T07:48:46","modified_gmt":"2011-10-13T07:48:46","slug":"sandance-dubai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/?p=34","title":{"rendered":"Sandance DUBAI!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Its hot, humid, dusty and this week im working on a beach in Dubai! Im lucky that working in the industry i do takes me to different places arround the world and this week just happens to be a the Atlantis Hotel Dubai<\/a>\u00a0prepearing for a beachparty called Sandance where around 10,000 peoople will be enjoying a party on the beach. One of my good friends Shaun Moore<\/a>\u00a0asked me to be part of his Geordie lighting\u00a0team working for Gearhouse<\/a>\u00a0who are looking after the technical side of this gig.
\nIts currently the morning of day 4 and so far it has been a really busy\/productive fun week. Its my first time out here and as with all new places, I wasnt 100% certain what to expect. We landed on Sunaday evening late and got picked up on Monday at 09.30 (local) and taken\u00a0 to site by one of our new\u00a0work colegues Andor. We met the rest of the team, Neil, Dave, Matt, Steve, Jules, Chandi allong with a load of local crew. The following 12 hours of work consisted of hanging and cabling many lighting fixtures, rigging truss, dringking LOADS of water in the baking heat and sweating most\u00a0 of it back out again. The only thing whch slowed down the day was whist we were waiting for the tide to go out s the truck carrying out generators could drive around the stage (Stage right of the stage meets the shoreline when the tide is in) to put the generators in place. Whilst doing this the truck managed tog et stuck in the sand\u00a0 with one side on the dry part of the beach and oneside almost in the water, you dont see that very often!<\/p>\n

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\nThe truck with our generators on being towed out of the sand!<\/p>\n

Luckily for everyone we had a Telehandler onsite to tow the truck so our lighting power could be delivered! The working day finished arround 22.30 and we were taken to a local bar for a few afterwork pints which was very much like the Cantina bar out of Starwars, this was great craic and a good end to a long day!<\/p>\n

Tuesday we continued to\u00a0place the rest of the lights getting all of the rig up and runing way ahead of schedule, it great when that happens! We finished arround 20.00 and Chandi offered to take us (Geordie techs) out and show us arround some of Dubai. After a\u00a0grabing some\u00a0quick food and having\u00a0superfast shower we were onroute to\u00a0“The Mall” to see the ?Burj Khalifa<\/a>, the wolds tallest building standing at 828 meters. The tower is actually amazing and without actually seeing it, it is hard to describe the scale, so big\u00a0I had to take a picture of it in 2 as as it was too big for the lens on my phone!<\/p>\n

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Burj Khalifa, taken on my Iphone<\/p>\n

The tower is surrounded by a huge shoping complex, bars, places to eat, its all a little bit like Vegas in allot of ways. Walking tough the mall on the way back to the car I couldnt beleive it when i saw a Gold vending machine, where you could buy small gold bars, Krugerrands and other solid god items!!<\/p>\n

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\nShaun & Sad (Lee) with the Gold vending machine!!!!!!!<\/p>\n

The evening ended with a drink in a nightclub\/bar called Bar Zar next to the Burj Al Arab hotel with some really cheesy club singers provinging the entertainment, even next to the worlds first 7-star hotel you get cheesy club singers, another fun end to a hard days graft.<\/p>\n

Wednesday was a later start for myself and Shaun as we were working the later shift to finish running power & data arround site to the sitle lighting and focusing whilst is was dark. After bing onsite for a couple of hours it was arround 16.00, Matt, on of our production managers startd shouting for ous to get down of any structure, ground all of the hanging PA towers and strap things down as a sandstorm was comming! Looking over the bay the building s and cranes had dissapeard outof sight! we had a small time window but we managed to make everything safe and everyine managed to get down fromt the trusses in time. The picture below doesnt really do it justice but you should be able to see the hotel behind the stage.<\/p>\n

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\nOur own personal sandstorm, normally you can see the hotel behind the stage!<\/p>\n

The dustcloud eventually passed and we continued to work through till the early hours, continuing with site lighitng to make the rest of the site look pretty for the gig.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0Jules, Andor, Sad(Lee) & Neil catching some ‘shade’<\/p>\n

There has been allot of graft done in the past 3 days as well as allot of fun squeezed into a couple of hours of free time, its a good bunch here and we all seem to mange to continually take the piss out of each other for\u00a0evereyones amusement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Its hot, humid, dusty and this week im working on a beach in Dubai! Im lucky that working in the industry i do takes me to different places arround the world and this week just happens to be a the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andy-coates.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}