Nothing to see here...

I'll probably write a bit about the last few days touring soon, but we've just got back to Cardiff from Ealing and I'm dog-tired. But before I go I'd like to share an amazing thing with you good people.

Choons, Chilling and Chester

He looked at me as if to say "bust a move or I'll bust your gut"

We are just over halfway with our stint of north Wales, combining Cath's tour, Dai's tour and some schools work and by some miracle we managed to end up with a day off! We heard about the various charms and attractions that Chester offered, only an hour and a bit away along the A55, so after a lie-in and a leisurely breakfast we pootled across in the VW to see what we could see; cruising to the latest offerings from Soul Survivor and Beth bullock.
In the end, we couldn't see as much of chester as we had liked, because as soon as we reached the park and ride, a dense mist had set in all across the city. We weren't put off though, so we soldiered on into town, stopping off at a few shops in the main shopping centre before breaking into our individual errands around town. Dai opted for the Wifi in starbucks, Cath wanted to have a nose around Jack Wills and I found myself walking around not even looking at the shops, but looking at all the old buildings that there were.

There is an archway halfway down the main shopping street in Chester, which I found could be accessed from the street and forms part of the city wall that encompasses the city centre. I had an hour to kill so I decided to have a quick stroll around and see what cultural tit-bits I could find along the way.

Part of the city wall

As well as learning bits of the history of chester and seeing how the old city has integrated with the demands of 21st Century travel infrastructure (Roads needing widening and turning part of the wall into a footpath over the railway) I found remains of some buildings built by the Romans, including a half-uncovered Amphitheatre near one of the city gates.
The wall is almost continuous around the city centre, breaking only once by the river for a road to go over. At one point the castle, which now accommodates part of the university, looks over the weir almost menacingly. The castle was a royalist stronghold when they were fighting against the parliamentarians and also served as a base for attacks against the Welsh.

I hope some day I can go back to chester when it's sunny and there's no mist, although the mist did lend itself to a sort of victorian london look, making the Abbey and tudor-style shops look quite majestic and timeless.

3 for the price of 1

View from FOH at The Interchange

This week I am braving the wilds of North wales, visiting various towns along the north coast as part of the three separate but related tours. The first tour is my current stint the The Tentmaker, the second date of which we performed in Colwyn Bay on monday.
The second tour is to promote the album of Cath Woolridge. I'm not technically (excuse the pun) involved with this tour, but as one of her dates is in the same place as a tentmaker date two days later so I've been roped in with that as a moral supporter.
The third tour isn't really a tour but involved visiting two schools in Llandudno today and doing a short play and a workshop on the effects of alcohol abuse. This is a brand new show being presented by Going Public and it's had a warm reception from two very different groups of kids.

Sometimes you get the luxury of walking into a venue and finding that you hardly ned to touch anything to get your show going. This was the case with monday's tentmaker at The Interchange. All i had to do was plug in my laptop to the sound desk and projector feed, put a CD on for walk-in music and make sure I could see my script when the lights were dimmed.
Of course i couldn't let it be that easy as I started to fiddle with EQs, different lighting states, trying to improve on the system that seemed a little rough around the edges. I'm not sure if I achieved it but it gave me something to do between meals.

As part of the deal with churches organising the first half of the north wales tour, the members of the team were put up with various church members for two nights. I was housed by a lovely couple who go by the names Steve and Sue. Both evenings that i was at their house we would watch some good quality TV, sandwiched between cups of tea and talk about our churches, life experiences, and all manner of good things like that.
Staying with these guys has been as much a part of this leg of the tour as the tentmaker and schools work has been, and I have been blessed so much by their caring and selfless attitudes, allowing a scruffy bearded stranger like myself into their home for two nights.

On my first night Sue asked me whether I had any phobias. Apart from a fear of heights I had none really. At that point she told me she was glad because she keeps all manner of creepy crawlies in the house to take to schools and show the children. I'm not sure what she would have said should I have professed to having a fear of snakes, spiders or mice! (Incidentally the mice aren't alive, they're for feeding the snakes!)
The next few days should be cracking, Cath has a show tomorrow night (she has a poorly voicebox at the moment so it could get interesting), then spending a day in Chester, then its back to Bangor for another tentmaker show. It's gonna be a blast!

Share the wealth

As promised, here is one of the songs recorded at The Depot in the Swansea Grand Theatre, enjoy.

A talented cast

Well that was exciting!

Library Photo

First night of The Tentmaker 2011 tour has come and gone and I must say it's a great feeling to have survived the new format. It was also a great chance to test out some shiny new sound equipment that Going Public have just bought.

Breaking from tradition, the play had a support act beforehand in the form of the elegant Miss Beth Bullock and her songwriting skills. If you haven't heard beth before I recommend you hop over to her Myspace page and check her out. I covertly recorded her set and may put a track or two up here, but not before I get permission from the lady herself.

The Depot at the Swansea Grand Theatre is a great little performance space; tiered seating around 3 sides, with a mirror and black curtain along the back side underneath an overhang that houses the PA. There is a gallery running above the seating which houses the lighting rig and operator, while the sound tech has a mobile desk and rack by one of the exits. 

We weren't able to use the PA without incurring extra charges for the host church so we took along a new HK audio system comprising of an active sub running two 10in tops on sticks. The tops themselves seem to put out a fair amount of noise on their own, but add the sub and it's a perfectly adequate system for an audience of around people.

Photo by Andy Crowder

When setting up the projector and screen I was presented with a problem. The throw of the projector wasn't short enough for the image to fill the screen without the screen being halfway downstage. Then I had a flashback to my days at college when we put on a concert and we had exactly the same problem, which was solved by one of our technicians by facing the projector backwards and having a mirror reflect the image back in the right direction, thereby essentially cutting the throw distance in half! This is exactly what I did with the wall of mirrors behind the stage and with a flip of the image so it was the right way round, we had a working screen! Maybe I should start packing a mirror in with the rest of the gear...

I may have mentioned that this was potentially the best venue that we would visit on the tour, but new information about the Ealing date has revealed that the The Depot is more akin to a secondary school rehearsal room when compared to the Ealing Christian Centres main auditorium and the amount of kit they've got! I'm very excited about this date now, but first I have to brave a week in the wilds of North Wales!

Now, where did I put that canoe...

Boys on tour

Tomorrow I am starting a second tour of The Tentmaker with Dai (Dave) Woolridge. This time around we have lost fellow techy Steve; the audio to my video, the Ying to my Yang. Instead we have managed to cobble together a single show file that I run from my laptop. It runs all the slides, videos and sound effects from a single bit of software. The weakest link in the chain is that the software we have made the show file from is Powerpoint, which has a habit of cutting the last split second off the ends of videos (when the video is a matter of seconds long, is quite a bit).
We already had a quick practise of the new format before performing at Ignite back in december, where the whole thing went off without a technical hitch (though maybe the odd human element crept in once...or twice...) so we know it works. The challenge this time is that because we now have two techs instead of one, there is the chance that load-in and load-out times might suffer quite a bit, especially when we are in venues where we have to provide our own lighting.
No two churches are the same, and as they are run by volunteers, there's an element of uncertainty as to what the church has in the way of equipment, and sometimes how much room there is to perform in! On the last tour we played in village theatres, sports halls, traditional anglican buildings, as well as a few chapels. This tour is taking place predominantly in wales, but makes short hops to the richer side of the border to visit Cranleigh, Ealing and Chippenham.

I tried to take a photo of something interesting from each venue last time, be it a gap in a newly built wall, or a mess of cabling underneath a "mobile" AV desk. Hopefully I'll keep it up, maybe soon I'll start  jotting down bits about each one and create a little black book of venues from the various tours I've done these past few years.

The sort of venue that we won't be playing in.

Embeding and smartphones

Just a little test to see how the video shows up on various browsers, and to see if the embed code works for iphone playback.
The video isn't mine, but its a great video using a fast shutter speed and sophisticated slo-mo software so the frames flow nicely.