Today’s production tip: disconnect electrical cables before sticking your fingers in to fix the wires.
I’m taking out a fairly nice rig this time, mostly consisting of newer fixtures – Martin MAC 250 spots and washes. For 250-watt fixtures, they’re satisfyingly bright…the washes, anyway. The spots are a bit dimmer than I was hoping for, but they get the job done. (The production “producer” originally wanted to send 250 spots next to 700-watt washes. I told them they were idiots.) They feature Martin’s characteristic gobos, and they certainly look better than what the MAC 2000s or VL2500s have. (Yeah, I said it. I don’t like the VL2500 rotating gobos.) Limbo (a crushed glass gobo great for layering) is there, of course, and Fan and Eclipse are nice, and a two colored ones that look good layered or by themselves. The one rotating gobo I don’t really like is “Fat Bar”. I like having the traditional “flat bar” rotating gobo in my lights, and this one seems just a little too small – lets too little light through – especially in a rig where the wash lights easily overpower the spots. A few of the gobos on the fixed wheel look too much like each other, too, but I understand that it’s there for texture, not necesarrily air light effects. I tend to use the fixed wheel in conjunction with the prism to make big sparkly textures on walls and ceilings when I have it, and it’s also fun on people – the prism helps knock down the brightness of the light to tolerable levels so it’s actually kind of a cool effect to look at. My only other complaint with the MAC 250 washes is that the color mixing seems a big sluggish. Maybe I’m just used to the faster method (I assume) of using the sqaure flags instead of the wheels, or maybe it’s my console (A Hog iPC). Either way, snaps are not quite as snappy as I had experienced with stuff like the MAC 2Ks and even the Elation washes I used last tour, but it’s definitely not something the average viewer in the audience is going to notice.
As far as the rest of the rig is concerned, this one goes up quite a bit easier than last tour. The bendy truss I used last time was a cool idea on paper, but turned out to be a pain to get into the air, and I didn’t account for extremely low trim heights and how much of a pain it would be when the truss started hitting the lights. Pre-rigged truss would have solved many of my problems, but we can’t always have everything we want. I also learned from the last tour and color-coded everuthing in my rig, so I can have a volunteer lay out a loom, plug in the multipin connector, and then say “Go down this line and plug in all the green plugs to green outlets”, which has helped with setup times a lot. I also went a bit overboard with the looming this time, and in fact the only things not in looms are the DMX runs (it’d be impractical given varying stage sizes) and the two extreme downstage floor mover power runs. Given fifteen volunteers, we can have the whole rig up in just a little over two hours.
There’s more, but I am very tired right now and I should go to bed.
Goodnight.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks