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.