current mood: artistic current music: Earthsuit - Do You Enjoy the Distortion?

The Fourth of July was a bad day.

Not a bad show, mind you, and not an unhappy day spent. A bad day from a lighting perspective.

The rig was fine, focus went fast, even though I cut into the soundcheck a bit, so I was running around on stage making weird hand signals to the light board and my buddy up in the truss. (Without a harness, despite my strenuous objections.) My console was the good ol' LP-2000, which I've come to find out is pretty much the standard when dealing with rigs of all PARs. The day was going fine up until showtime.

I have two things that I normally do before a show. One is run through the console one last time to make sure that no critical lights have gone dead, and the other is run through a talk with my followspot operators. This talk consists of letting each person know who they are, (For example, Dick, you are spot 1, Jane, you are spot 2, Spot, you are spot 3.) and giving them an overview of my expectations for fade-up times and pickups. One person always stays with Terri, and any extra spots I have are used for pickups. During my talk, I always say two or three times that I never, ever want them to "chop" the light off...it always needs to be a smooth fade. (I always say two seconds.) And I always let them know sometimes the show moves pretty fast, so they need to be ready to pick up someone at a moment's notice.

Now, followspot operators are pretty much the low guys on the lighting totem pole. I've never done it outside of a church situation, but I can't imagine that it pays much. Nevertheless, there are a few things that I expect from followspot ops, and one of those things is to pay attention to the stage. And that was the biggest problem with last night's operators. Not only were they not paying attention when I would call cues out, but several times Terri or another performer would move and the spot wouldn't. It's difficult to understate how ridiculously unprofessional that looks. There is absolutely no reason, short of mechanical failure, why a spot should not be able to follow a moving performer. I should never have to yell "One, keep your spot on Terri!" at a spot op. Another thing that irritated me was their inattentiveness. Being a second late on a pickup, I can understand. Being to the right or left of your intended target? Understandable. But when I say "Electric guitar is going to solo here in a few moments, when you see him walk forward, pick him up." and a few seconds later when I look up and Justin in playing in the dark, it's a Very Bad Thing®. I try really hard not to come down too hard on people, but at the end of last night I so frayed that I was practically yelling at them over the intercom.

Part of the problem is that during the shows when I'm running things on the fly, I can't take my hands off the console every ten seconds to call out followspot cues. There just isn't time, which is why I depend on my spots to pull off the Herculean task of remembering instructions that I give them at the beginning of the songs.

"One, there will be a guitar solo after the second chorus. Pick him up when he walks forward."

"Two, the fiddle will have two short solos, at the ends of the first and second verses."

Is remembering instructions for a three-minute song too much to ask? Obviously, if I can reach over and hit my com button and give and walk them through each and every step of the show, I will, but on the faster songs my fingers are flying pretty much the whole time.

In the future, I'll make up sheets for each of the operators detailing their cues so that, especially during the faster songs, they can at least have something in front of them to help them remember what they're supposed to be doing. And if I happen to get particularly inexperienced operators again, I'll set up my console so I can run it with one hand, so I can reach over and talk to the operators if necessary. The console at the show I'm referring to had really stiff faders, buttons that didn't work, and the fading itself was very glitchy - either the console itself, or the dimmers, not sure which - all of which compounded the issue. Gah.

But enough griping.

Other than my aforementioned problems, it was a good show. As an added bonus, my parents (And our dog, Ginger.) came out to the show from Iowa to see it. Fun times.

In the meantime, I'm back in Nashville for five days off. I'm spending my time designing a new theme for sparksNotes, doing some set design sketches and doing sound for a youth conference camp thing with Gary Morgan from Mosaic.