Once we shut the doors on the last truck going south, we had a full day to think about what we might have missed, and how we would load this thing in... Now, we had thought out the process of the in before naturally... We had to after all since the trucks were staggered leaving our shop...
The set was laid out roughly as it was last year, so we decided to run the order of things the same as last year, which while a rough load in, did work... So that meant the first thing to do, before anything else was lay the carpet... Keep that in mind... Lay the carpet first...
Now, since we were working in a location that is very full of itself, they wouldn't allow a truck to be seen in front of their establishment during the hours of 6am - 11pm... That means pretty much all our stuff had to load in over night... So the way we decided to work it was my partner would do the overnight dumping of trucks in to the pre-function area, and I would do the assembly during the day... I went to sleep feeling like I had a handle on the first day...
When I came down in the morning, I noted many things in the pre-function area... What I did not note, was any carpet... None... Not one damn square foot... I would have been able to miss the pile, there were no less than 18 rolls of carpet in question... On questioning the TD, it was found that a decision had been made at 4am or so that there was no more room in pre-function, and so the carpet would stay on the truck... Now, I can't imagine how that particular decision was made, but it was made right?... Here I am with a crew of 16 stagehands, and not more than 1 minute in to my day, my entire load in plan has been destroyed... It has been destroyed by my business partner, who was now blissfully asleep... There was no point in waking him up to yell, as it was too late to do anything about it... So what does one do?... Well one punts...
First thing up were the walls that sat off to the side of the carpeted area... I'm now working on two runs of flats, that mirror each other, around 56' apart, and once assembled they will be a bitch to move... But that's what we're doing and I hope to heaven that we'll be able to connect the ends with the parts that sit on the carpet as soon as I can get some carpet... The walls went up fairly well actually. We managed to convince the management that we had to run a truck around the front of the building for 10 minutes to pull two rolls of carpet in, and that went down reasonably well... After a number of long hours we did in fact connect the two side walls at center, and found we were only off by 5/16"... The back wall went in... It went in badly... It wanted nothing to do with standing up, and was constantly trying to tear itself apart and collapse... This was not good... Granted I knew that this would be the case, but the people above me refused over and over to give me any space behind the wall for some structure... Eventually we sorted it out by the third day of load in, but it was a close, and fairly ugly thing...They ended up giving me the space I wanted before, and in a particularly nasty way... Wouldn't it be nice if they listened once in a while?...
We had problems with just about every aspect of the set due to the rush before the load in... The mouldings didn't work as nicely as they should have, and required some late night cutting... The custom spandex projection screens came in too small from the manufacturer, so they all had to be stapled rather than just velcroed... The custom sewn sheer material for over the control booth windows came in too big, so they had to be cut and stapled rather than just velcroed...
The one and only aspect of this show that went exactly as planned was the railing... Perhaps it was because I had spent the better part of a month in the engineering of the damn things... Perhaps it was because I knew going it in would take unending hours to deal with... Perhaps it was because I started ignoring the 4 micro-managers above me and just focused everyone on the rails... Whatever it was, we did the railing in 7 hours... I had estimated 8... Had the people above me left me alone completely, I probably could have swung it in 6, but we still beat my mark, and that was cause for celebration in my book, since it had become a show about a railing... I also knew that once we got that in, the focus of the micro-managers would turn from me, and refocus on the sound department... I had the mental image of the red burning eye of Sauron from the Lord Of The Rings movies, swinging from me, to sound, and it was a weight that I was happy to be relieved of...
The rest of the in was relatively painless... Annoying to be sure, but not so bad really if we weren't so dead tired... The reality of the producers having spent an outrageous amount of money on the railing/sound system and it never really having a snowball's chance in hell of working in the short amount of time allotted took all the pressure off us for the remainder of the time... Granted I felt bad for the squeaks a bit, but hell, better them than us...
After 3 days of hell, I flew home to work on the other shows that we were trying to deal with concurrently... One was coming out the day I flew in, so I did that strike, and then jumped right in to the build of the next show the following day... I ceased to really care about Florida as we were way behind on the New York show, and the client was adding more stuff... I was actually supposed to fly back to Florida for the strike, but the reality of it was I simply couldn't afford the time, and since I had pulled most of the puppet strings putting the show in down there alone, my partner would certainly be able to strike it solo...
More on the other two shows next time...
Posted by Backstage at February 16, 2006 08:04 PM | TrackBack