Tuesday, October 11, 2005

The Hills are Alive with the sounds of dinner theater

So I spent the last two days helping a friend (for a paycheck) at the Candlelight Pavillon Theater(The Sound of Music) in Claremont. She anticipated lots of problems and wanted to bring in someone she knew because of all the confusion in the pre-production process of the show.

It tooks weeks just to get a copy of their house plot from the house electrician, and when she did get it, it was a jpg file (she needed the CAD file). It was obviously done in CAD but they didn't seem to know how to get the original and send it.

So she dragged the jpg into Vectorworks and created her plot over that. She told the house electrician she would adapt their house plot so that's all he had to worry about doing before she arrived. We showed up on Monday and lo and behold, house plot wasn't finished. Plus, there were speaker clusters blocking the view of many lights in the first FOH position (not on the plot).

So...

-The house electrician took it upon himself to "redesign" the FOH and change the purpose and angle of some lights for her benefit (uncircuiting everything putting us off schedule)
-Their additional electrician actually cut one gel out of the center of a sheet of gel and threw the rest away
-The additional electrician also refiled gels we had pulled for focus time, so we had to redo that
-We asked for two or three floor mounts, and they brought us the bases of mic stands
-A base went bad on a 6X9 so I asked for the cap off an altman ers we weren't using, the house electrician brought up a cap with the ground wire actually dangling outside of the connector and said "don't worry, if it's out of the connector it can't hurt you, it's not carrying a current."

So sadly, I could only help two days, so when she should have been sitting down to start building cues, she was now sitting watching yet another rehearsal trying to figure out where she could cut cues tomorrow. She's gonna have to rely on their electricians to finish the focus and fix any other problems that arise. I felt so bad leaving her there, but we couldn't work while the rehearsal was going on.

And before I left, we both happily noticed, one of the speaker clusters had a blown speaker in it. Looks like the director and audio's gonna have some fun on this run.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Knott's Argh...

**Original first paragraph's erased**

OK, on to other issues. I'm working at Knott's Scary Farm right now. I'm the video switcher for the Ed Alonzo show and I"m hating it! I took some tv and film courses in junior college before I settled on theater, and now I'm back at the damn board wishing I had said I wasn't available for the month of October. I was told I was going to be a stagehand which is why I said yes, but the day I walked in, they informed me (well, the TD informed me) that I was the new video person.

I think I used a switcher maybe once at Fullerton? And it was a lot easier since it was programmed by someone else so all I had to do was move the lever up and down, not push buttons. Sigh...

Oh well, October 31st isn't that far off. So I'm using this time to siphon all the info I can out of people about working for the cruise lines. Another girl, named Kaycee, just stopped working for them, and has given me loads of info. She didn't like it, but she said some people do. I'll never know if I'll like it till I try it, so... yeah.

Princess Cruise Lines

Carnival

Royal Caribbean

Disney Cruise Lines

Links to all of these and a couple more