External Placements

Cruel Intentions

Technician (Shadow)

I got in contact with former student Holly Bewley who works as a freelancer in the industry to try and arrange a date to shadow her on her current show. I tried to begin organising as early as possible as I had set out to do in my project proposal, first contacting her on 5th March.

She told me she is currently touring with Cruel Intentions the Musical, and provided me with their list of dates so I could choose which location worked best for me. This is where I realised an issue I had overlooked, in that as I live in a very rural area the nearest venues to me are still a long distance, and require travel costs and potentially accommodation.

The nearest location and one that I could potentially have free accomodation at was Manchester. Unfortunately, the one day I was unavailable for a university interview was the only day Holly could offer me, so we had to put this placement on hold.

Theatre by the Lake

Duty Technician (Shadow)

I was able to arrange for two days of shadowing while the theatre is hosting the touring play 'Of Mice and Men'.

w/c 28th April

Tour and Shadow

When I first arrived, I was given a tour of the full theatre by Symon Culpan, the theatre's Technical Manager. He showed me their facilities and technical equipment. Their in-house sound desk is a DiGiCo Quantum 225, however Of Mice and Men is touring with an Allen and Heath SQ-5, which is the same make but a different model than our college sound desk. Their lighting software is ETC, consolidating my secondary research where I identified it as industry standard. They run two lighting desks, an Ion acting as a primary, which means it is always in place and running so that the software never disconnects from the lighting system. Then they use a Gio as a secondary, which acts as a controller and can be unplugged and moved around as necessary.

For the first night I was shadowing Senior Technician Oliver Davies and for the second, Senior Lighting Technician Robert Bullen.

On both nights I assisted by putting fresh batteries into the radio mics and checking the signals, at one point having to switch out a pack with a dodgy antenna and input the original frequency onto the new pack. We then distributed these to the actors dressing rooms and carried out a bulb check on all the lights, as well as a movement and colour check on the intelligent fixtures.

During the show I watched the Duty Technician for the night operating both sound and lighting cues, which Robert told me is quite common for theatres of this size unless there are live radio mics. This meant this show was slightly out of the ordinary, as they did have live mics but had an intriguing way of avoiding this problem.

They run QLab software for sound cues much like we do at college, however when connected to the desk via USB you can control the muting of channels for mics as people enter and leave the stage, or the addition of FX or changing levels. This could potentially help with college shows if I end up in a situation of operating alone.

They also operate QLab differently than us, using a MIDI control box with much more tactile and simple buttons than using a keyboard. I got an unexpected chance to use this when an issue arose and the Stage Manager on book gave permission for me to operate while the Duty Technician went to fix it.

In this show, I also saw the technicians side of a show stop and what procedures I should follow after an audience member become unresponsive. I saw how reactive and adaptable you have to be in quickly lifting house lights, getting cast off stage and informing the audience to stay in their seats to prevent further issue. Hopefully this knowledge will not be necessary for upcoming projects but it is certainly important to know.

Theatre Royal (Dumfries)

Freelance Technician

A local theatre to me, the oldest working theatre in Scotland hosting both in-house and nationally touring productions, posted an advert for a Technical Manager, and along with this a request for Freelance Technicians so I sent in a CV (attached below) in the hope of getting some work and experience.

Thankfully I received a positive response, and was offered a tour and chance to shadow, before being quickly offered my first show for the next week.

30th April

When We Were Young

lighting with the director, she was not satisfied with some of these, and there were a few states missing.

The theatre uses an ETC Element 2 lighting desk, which runs from ETC software that I looked at in my research. This was useful in figuring out how to create new lighting states and record them to submasters. Similar to our college software setup, there is a diagram of the lighting rig that can be used to select channels (shown on the right). However, unlike Chamsys the intensity must be set by selecting the intended channels, and using the buttons on the desk to input '@(intensity level)Enter'.

I was open in communicating to the director that I was not familiar with this software or rig, and eventually we worked to find the necessary lights to create the missing lighting states, as conveniently there were already two red gels on the side fresnels to provide the necessary red wash. You are also able to playback submasters at the same time, so for example instead of creating separate night wash and evening washes, I could manually create an evening wash by adding some general wash to lighten up.

As I was unfamiliar with the software and on a very tight turn around, I had to run the lights manually on the submasters rather than creating a cue stack which did provide me more control. Unlike college, the house lights are programmed into the desk allowing me to dim them from the box, making for a much smoother show start. The only mistake I made during the show was hitting the wrong submaster when applying the red wash and applying the blue ambulance light instead, however as it was in a post-death sequence it did not stick out as an obvious mistake and I was able to smoothly transition to the correct light to the directors satisfaction.

Prior to the show day, I was sent a tech rider which is industry standard paperwork I had not previously been aware of. (Attached on the right)

When I arrived, there were 4 lighting states recorded onto submasters as stated above. However, when going over the