Unusually my tummy was flying with butterflies, for the first time I was really nervous but very excited!! Finally after 6 months planning, cutting music the big day arrived we were finally ready!
Myself and Sam Todd met at 12:30 to grab something to eat and to go through the last minute bits to ensure that we had everything in place. Once we were in we met Andy and he had a chat with me about the way he wanted the cases to come off the van. When we went in to the theatre/dock I put my steel toes on and I was ready to and we started to unload the van!
Andy, Ben, Ian and the rest of his team began to rig LX starting Upstage and working their way Downstage. We started with Jack’s projector. Jack collected all of the kit together and I started to assemble the projector and called the Flyman to bring in the bar so we could hang the projector to get the weight once this was done we then cracked on with running network cable. Freddy teamed up with Jack to run two 50M lengths of CAT6/7 for Jack’s VGA-CAT5 and my Dante CAT 5 and one 50M length of Audio XLR for Jack’s projector remote.
Here’s Me and Sam starting to cable up the projector.
Here’s 5 techies trying to work out the best way to run our CAT5 Cables.
Here’s us running network cable.
Once we had run Network cable myself and Jack collected the consoles and took them to FOH (Front Of House) and started to set up our op areas. As I had the biggest console and the nature of my department I had to go central so I positioned myself next to the Install Console (Yamaha QL5) then Jack went auditorium left. Once we helped each other lift our consoles on our tables we could get on and start getting things in place. My first job was to turn the console on and allow it to run through its install process and I had turned the RIO rack on so they would sync up. However after many attempts to get the RIO rack working it wouldn’t sync up to the console. I had un-patched it so many times and re-patched it but it just wasn’t having it. I played around with it to try and solve the problem and changed to world clock settings from 48k to 44.1 to see if that would make a difference and it didn't. I even looked at the manual to see if it would say anything, now I was slightly worried as I probably should have packed an analogue multicore. Anyway, I decided to give it one more restart and that did help. However I un-patched the console and then tried to re patch it and it finally showed up as an online device so I has happy again!! and ment that I had HeadAmp Gain control. After I was set up I had to go and help Sam fly the sign.
This was my biggest worry and what I was most nervous about because I suggested that we did the sign back in January and I knew that if it didn’t work it would be on my shoulders. We began laying the sections of letters out on the steel deck. We then worked out where to place the steels using 1/4 tonne Shackles.). In the end we decided to go for 3 pickup lines instead of 4 as then the load would be distributed equally. Once it was all attached, we requested for the fly man, Steve, to bring the bar in and we flew it to working height! I was excited as it was going well! While Sam was putting in the festoons in the right places I went to ask Tom if we could borrow some lengths of 16A and 15A Cable so we could flash through all of the festoons.
Once all the bulbs were in and we were ready we tested it and unfortunately not all of the bulbs worked! But I knew what it was.. where the festoons are not fixed in the bulbs do not sit inside the holder correctly so we all we had to do was screw them in a little more and guess what..... It worked! I was actually really emotional when I saw the sign in lights as all of those months of hard work, designing, planning and building had finally paid off!
Here is a good picture showing which bulbs didnt work so we just had to screw them in a little tighter.
By the time we had finished this it was 9pm! Time to go home... We did a quick tidy up and completed the shutdown procedure for FOH.
I had a really good day! And a challenging one too.
