Ok... Ok... It's not really all that exciting to anyone but me, or perhaps someone on my crew... Here's the deal... The nightmare show has to go out into a truck Saturday (perhaps Sunday if I can push the trucking company off a bit). Yesterday, the designer came by for a little visit, at which point my shop looked less than impressive... The platforming for the show coverd most of my shop, and was almost done being painted, but that just doesn't look impressive... Today, we came in and started putting the flats together... (flats are walls if you're not from a theatre background)... Now, let me digress a moment about these flats... There are around 30 flats and assorted headers, beams, etc... The design for this show incorperates a ton of odd angles, so building the flats was a bit of a pain... On top of this, the show is a tour, and they want to be able to set up the entire stage in 4 hours... So all this boils down to me spending an inordinate amount of time drawing every single detail of the show into AutoCAD so that theoretically everything just works the first time... Now, of course, I've been sick all week, so I kinda lived in a fog (103 fever will do that to ya)... At the start of building this stuff, I told the crew to please be carefull, and that everything has to be perfect... (normally, because of how most of our sets go together, you can be off atleast a 1/16 of an inch everyplace and have no problem) Well they moaned and groaned and called me names, but they must have listened... As of 7:00 tonight, the whole set is standing in place in my shop... There is less than a 1/16 inch of error over the entire set!... I took a minute before to estimate the number of cuts and assembly points in the process, and its between 3000 and 3500... The odds of not screwing up any of that many is just impossible to grasp in the world of theatre...
I've said it before... I'm sure I'll say it again... My Crew Rocks!
We're not out of the woods yet... There is still a ton of painting to do, and the moulding has to go up, but, I can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel...
I'm going to be buying atleast the first round for a month after I get healthy...
Of course the light at the end of the tunnel is the train of the next show hard on the heels of this one... Can you beleave the deadline is not only worse, but MASSIVELY worse than the current show... We will have all of 4 days to build a show that is almost the same size, though no moulding, angles, or complacations, and we don't have to paint it... Still, I swear the reputation we're developing as the go to shop when there isn't any time, can't be a good thing... Its a nice ego boost for me, but it means we'll just keep getting hammered like this at the last second... That's a perfect recepie for failure...
Thanks for reading folks!... I haven't been able to do any shout outs to the folks I'm reading when I can... Hell I haven't had time to re-do my horribly out of date blog-roll... I promise, I'll get back to being a good blog owner sometime around mid to late Febuary... Sooner if we manage to not get one of these bids... lol... I hate to loose a bid, but I sure could use a day off to rest...
Posted by Backstage at January 25, 2004 05:19 PM