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.

If you go down to the woods today

There used to be a tradition in our family that every christmas day, after indulging in far too much turkey and spuds, we would take a leisurely walk across the common, collecting bits of firewood so that once we got back to the house we could make a fire and toast some crumpets and let the adults have a good snooze in front of the flickering flames while we, the children played with our latest shiny toys. 

This all stopped when it was discovered that the house had subsidence and the whole front wall of the house was trying to lie down in the front garden. Apparently someone decided to build the houses so they straddled a perimeter ditch that was filled in with sand, which has a tendency to shift over time.

We were relocated for the greater part of a year to another house while the house was underpinned, which also allowed us to completely redecorate the whole house in the absence of any inhabitants. Part of this plan involved taking out the fireplace, leaving a hole in the wall, which was to eventually be filled with another fireplace.

Fourteen years later and the fireplace still hasn't arrived to take its rightful place (Due to the fact that no fireplace has been ordered) At the moment the hole is covered up with some of my sisters artwork, which is held up by our VHS and DVD collection.

Hopefully by next christmas we will have a new fireplace, so we can toast crumpets again, that would make my christmas!

Home is where the heat is.

There are many advantages to going back to your parents house every so often, free food, a new set of hand-me-down boots to keep my feet dry, and most of all, a nice warm house that you don't have to pay bills for. There is something really cosy, authentic and solid about a parental house that so far i have been unable to emulate in any of my past few houses.
There are always little oddities that only the inhabitants know about, like the starlings that nest above the boys bedroom window, knowing to pull the front door as you unlock it, or the procedure to light the ageing grill without filling the kitchen with gas.

Home, there's no place like it.

We always tend to leave things to the last minute in our house, which was why when I arrived home on the 23rd I found the front room pretty much the same as when I last visited some time in November. My sister and I started putting up the decorations before her phone buzzed and she escaped into town for a social engagement, leaving me to do the manly job of getting the tree in, making sure it's in a waterproof pot, covering up said pot and eventually decorating it. The parents have opted to buy a tree that still has its roots so that we could potentially use it for the next couple of years christmases, that will remain to be seen!

As I was perusing the back room for anything I owned so I could help with Operation RescueThe Table From Crap, I found a hefty book, the size of which only one type book tends reach.
This King James bible was the Lewzey family bible, though apparently none of my parents family were very religious i think it was just the done thing.

If the roman numerals inside the cover relate to the books print date and not the first print or commission date, then it is over 140 years old! (The date inside was M.DCCC.LX.VI if you want to work out the date for yourselves.)
It's funny that this version of the bible has gone from such a substantial size to being a bunch of 0s and 1s on my phone that barely takes up the same space as a song!

A very Merry Christmas to everyone who humours me in what I write on this blog. Enjoy yourselves at this time of sharing and loving and don't forget the event that kicked off this whole celebration: Jesus being born over 2000 years ago to an unassuming couple, as a gift from God to mankind.

Cli-clunk, Whrrrrrrr

Thanks to the wonders of modern digital photograph, merely a week after finishing Little Match Girl and performing at Alchemi, photographs have arrived on my virtual desk of the two events.

As LMG was my first proper foray into theatre lighting (using all my own design and programming) i feel particularly proud that nothing went monstrously wrong and i even enjoyed the experience! Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's my dissertation.

LMG in a dream world

Drunk old crone

Cast singing the main theme song

LMG being wrongly accused

Tart singing about poor people enjoying a drink

LMG threatening a rich man for not giving her any money

If you've made it this far, well done! Usually after sifting through a bunch of photos of theatre I tend to blank anything else that happens after them and i imagine others may do likewise.

December'd Alchemi happened to fall on the evening of the church christmas play, which allowed us to tart up the room with lots of expensive things. If it pleases the court, may I present Exhibit A:

Photo by Ceri Herbert

I didn't have the foresight to take a before picture to go with this after one, but the church itself looks VERY different from the picture above.

Theatre, dahling?

Two weeks of almost solid theatre work and it's over! I've acted in three different capacities on three different plays, but surprisingly I'm not worn out by it all! 

The first production was "The Tentmaker" with Going Public Theatre Company, where I was a one-man technical team, squeezing every last drop of performance potential out of Microsoft Powerpoint to try and make it all appear as professional as possible.

The second was a week-long run of "The little matchstick girl" with Pukka productions where I was lampie. Once we had got past the halfway mark, I had refined all my lighting cues, and the actors managed to remember all their lines and cues, making the whole thing very enjoyable and fluid. On the last day of performance we had a matinee, but none of the windows in the church-cum-theatre were blacked out, which meant scene transitions were visible to everyone in the audience, but they all went off without a hitch!

The third and final production was a play based on the nativity story at temple baptist church. Having a bunch of current and ex-glamorgan technical students, the christmas play is always a very technical effort, with lighting, staging and video all being squeezed into a little space. For this I helped program the lights, made a few of the videos and played in the band during the performance. It was probably the most haphazard and sketchily-prepared of all the productions but from where I was stood it all seemed to go as well as a typical church christmas play goes, with kids not knowing how to hold toy sheep, forgotten lines and some managing to turn off their microphones before going on stage!

To help round off the week, the techs kept the christmas play rig up so we could use it in the evening for the second of our Alchemi events. After giving one of the non-technical helpers a crash course in intelligent lighting for events, I hopped up on stage with the rest of the band and played our little hearts out with modern twists on christmas songs and modern worship songs. There was a talk by Hedd, talking about what our "nightmare before christmas" might be. hopefully there will be some photos coming up soon of the matchstick girl, christmas play and alchemi, ill put them up when they appear.

For now though, here is the title video that was played just before the talk to help people get into the right frame of mind for the challenging talk that followed. (Soundtrack by BRIGHTLIGHTS)

There's no business like it

Time is running out before the start of Pukka production's next play "The Little Matchstick Girl". I've been at the venue spending the last two days getting all the lighting infrastructure in place, being told that a sparky would be along to connect us up with 63/3 mains on the first day. 

I went in today hoping that the sparky would turn up mid-afternoon so that I could start focusing lights and making sure all my patching is right. Nothing.

I'm going back tomorrow mid-afternoon in the hope that he has visited in the morning so I can start preparing for the tech rehearsal tomorrow evening. If he doesn't show, no tech rehearsal!

I'm going a bit panorama crazy recently so here's one from yesterday when the truss was empty and the fixtures were on the floor waiting to be rigged. The original file was 86MB, I wasn't going to wait all night for it to upload, so it'll have to be this lo-res version instead.