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andy_s

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    Working in the industry
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    Freelance. Done a bit of stage management, a bit of sound, a bit of lighting, a bit of teaching and a lot of driving vans.
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    ABTT, Friend of the Theatres Trust, SMA
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    Andy Shewan

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    http://www.unicorntheatre.com
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    London

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Production Manager

Production Manager (14/14)

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  1. andy_s

    LED tape

    The objective is to create confusion by trees moving around and the lighting is on the trees to intermittantly light the actors and create the shadows, hopefully making the shadows dance around more than they would by static lights. I hit on that as soon as the request came in, I drew the parrallel with a fluo tube. We don't want the scene to be brightly lit [the LED tape is far too bright] and so far the GU10 looks like it is going to work [and there is a boxfull available], we will have to create a slot to restrict the horigontal spill which will be easy enough. If you like what the LED tape does apart from the brightness, you could try a bit of Lee 299 1.2ND. Won't make the shadows any crisper though... I was a bit confused by the Director's brief though - do they want patchy areas of gloomy semi-darkness where light doesn't penetrate, for a spooky atmospheric feeling, or to project recognisable silhouette shadows onto the surface of the scenery?
  2. Has it worked though?We had 4 chrome & black leather bar stools for performers use with the name of the theatre pierced into an additional cross rail, one by one they disappeared over the course of a year. couldn't tell you what the current situation is, I last worked there over 5 years ago... as I said in the post, I doubt it would be particularly effective against removal, accidental or otherwise. I would suspect a certain degree of distribution around non-stage areas of the building, as has been mentioned by others. To be honest, it wasn't really a serious anti theft measure, we just liked the idea of having our own branded stage weights - a bit like those schoolboys with nicknames on their Tees that were being discussed a little while ago.... :P
  3. when kitting out a new building in the early 2000s, we needed to buy sufficient stage weights for both theatre spaces. This was a large enough quantity to mean we could have them cast with the venue name. (Unfortunately, as we bought loose kit from both Halls and Flints, I can't remember which company supplied the weights, and whether Flints (given that Hall Stage no longer trades) still offer this service more than 15 years down the line... ) I think we needed to buy 50 or more weights, which would be a sizeable investment at current prices! I doubt this would stop them wandering, but at least if you go into a theatre, say for the sake of argument, in the North East of Scotland and see a stage weight with "Unicorn" cast into the top, you would know where it came from originally ! :D
  4. that looks great, but would standard 12.5kg weights fit? I seem to remember in the dim and distant past when I was at a venue that had 56lb cheeseweights as well as the standard 28lb (old money for 12.5kg) weights, that the latter had a bigger footprint. Having said that, making something very similar the right size and adding a lockable bar for not much money would be very quick easy for a metal fabricating shop. Maybe without the wheels if you want to discourage TWWOC (taking weights without consent) (E2A - apologies Bruce, just seen your 2nd post commenting on the size...)
  5. They're almost as much as the Meyers, tbh. The Anakonda speakers are B A N A N A S. Goodness me. I thought you meant they use sub-professional connecters of a fruity variety.
  6. I think as soon as you replace the portrait of the Queen with another image, you are breaching their conditions. So possibly all would not be well. From the Bank of England's guidance: "You must not produce novelty versions of our notes, for example ones that feature a celebrity. This is because some notes that have been altered in this way have been mistakenly accepted as genuine." I would imagine that if it is double size and panto'd up, then no-one is going to mistake it as genuine! one would imagine so. The rule does seem somewhat cautious.
  7. but wouldn't that wipe out any cost savings by requiring twice the quantities, and make it a lot heavier as well as adding more stages to the fabrication process? I suppose you could use 9mm instead of 18mm. And you can of course get 10x5, but they've always seemed disproportionately more expensive than 8x4 when I've looked into it. I suppose there are swings and roundabouts, but on the whole I still think I would prefer using softwood battens.
  8. What if you want to build bigger than 8ft high? Though truth be told if I wanted higher flats I would specify 3x1 rather than 2x1. But regardless, I'd prefer the stiles to be a single length rather than have joins. PS if your timber merchant is sending you rubbish, time to find a new supplier.
  9. I'm aware of Vocaleyes, but in the area of audio description. I didn't know they did captioning, will look into it. thanks. So I've had a very quick play around with Qstit and Subtivels, which both seem to offer something apparently similar to Glypheo on non-mac platforms. They both seemed very clunky compered to Glypheo, but that could be because I'm very rusty on PCs, and don't fully understand their logic, and I was looking at their mac version, which may also be not so good if they weren't initially deigned for a mac platform. I think I will probably recommend to my friends in Milan that they look at Glypheo - I think they could probably find a Mac to run it on if needed. Thanks to all for the replies.
  10. I do have Photoshop and whilst I was not going spend £3 paying for the files, I did do a screen cap of the twenty from the samples page and tried to open that - got the obligatory warning and refusal to open the file, so yes - they ARE copies of the old legal tender and as such that site IS breaking the law..... Although it's actually quoting prices in Euros, the site is clearly (unless hiding behind a false location) outside of the UK, so probably thinking the long arm of British law can't reach them.... I guess if you're on the internet you're safe. I didn't look very far into the website, but I'm sure it said "download novelty banknotes for free".....
  11. according to the BoE website, their conditions apply equally to current or withdrawn notes, so yes, a very fine line indeed.. Still, I suppose they have to get caught first.... a few years ago now I worked on a play set in the 1950s and we needed banknotes.... We went to the local antiques / flea market in the Pannier Market in Barnstaple, found a stall selling coins and notes, and bought a ten bob note and a pound note, then photocopied them back and front, (b&w only, colour copiers very rare in those days) onto white airmail paper, and our ASM spent a couple of days hand-tinting them. Luckily the character who handled them wasn't supposed to be very rich, so we didn't need a lot!. We were playing community halls, village halls, theatres, and in some of the places the audience was less than 4 feet away from the actor handling the notes, and people thought they were real. I think this would probably be frowned upon by the BoE now..... Of course there was no intent to defraud, the notes were long since out of circulation, and of course with them being pre-decimal no one would have been taken in by them in a real world situation....
  12. Hi Ian, The man who was doing the shows in Milan (a local academic / writer / translator, but not, I think, a surtitler) was using a pdf. We were part of a two-show package, and the script for our show was pretty fixed, but the other show that followed us had made some text changes since the version that had been sent through for translation, and this seemed to cause enormous problems, as the pdf couldn't be ediited on site (?). Even I (as a non-speaker of Italian) could tell there were lots of discrepancies between what I was hearing in English and what I would be reading in Italian, (if I had the ability so to do). At least with PPT, I suppose you could edit text or cut slides as needed. I haven't played with it very much, but with the Glypheo software, I can import a word document (I think it will bring in .txt as well) and it will break it up into individual captions, which can be edited within the programme, copied and pasted to amalgamate lines, etc. You can also type directly into the caption box as well. You can format the size of the screen, the point size, choose a font etc as well, and it looks like like you can have text running in two or more parallel "tracks", and you can make these parallel texts visible or not, so I suppose you could use this for dialogue, for example by having character 1's words appear in track one, formatted to be top left, and character 2's words in track two, words appearing bottom right, or in a different colour, and so on, or alternatively have the original running alongside the translation, with only the translation visible, or possible more than one translation - for example an Italian opera playing in Aberystwyth with surtitles simultaneously in Welsh and English... I think, thought I haven't tried sending it to a projector, that you can shrink or enlarge the image with some kind of zoom effect. This would have been really useful in Milan: we projected onto our pale-coloured backdrop (I made sure the stage lighting didn't spill too far up the cloth), but the captions were very wide - which meant in the horseshoe-shaped "opera house" style auditorium a lot of people on the sides couldn't see the ends of the lines. There didn't seem to be an easy way of re-sizing the image. How speedy! sadly, I don't have access to a PC at home, but will have a look when I can...
  13. thanks, I'll have a look. I've also found something called Subtivals, which seems to be available for Linux, OSX or Windows, but on first glance it doesn't seem anywhere near as user-friendly as Glypheo
  14. I think as soon as you replace the portrait of the Queen with another image, you are breaching their conditions. So possibly all would not be well. From the Bank of England's guidance: "You must not produce novelty versions of our notes, for example ones that feature a celebrity. This is because some notes that have been altered in this way have been mistakenly accepted as genuine." Which begs the question how does the company I linked to earlier get away with it... Loads of celebs (real and cartoony) on there and the notes 'look' pretty much like the B of E style (don't have a twenty handy to check at the mo)... Once you've been to the cashpoint, you'll be able to see that the design is nothing like a real banknote. The only thing that is even vaguely similar is the colour, and that works by suggestion only, compared to the real thing it's not really accurate. I think what you are not allowed to do is take a "real". note and replace an element of it. (i.e. using photoshop or similar). If you design your own note from the blank paper up, which is what effectively the company in your link has done, (creating a "novelty banknote" as opposed to a "novelty version of a BoE note) then you could get away with it! :P
  15. After a slightly painful experience in Italy with locally provided surtitles for our show performed in English, I've been asked to suggest how to make improvements, as they are keen to invite more English Language theatre out there. Just wondered what recommendations people might have for suitable software? I'm aware of Glypheo, which seems to be pretty simple and straightforward, but my googling hasn't produced much for PC use, (Glypheo is Mac-only), apart from some suggestions to use Powerpoint. Somehow, I don't think that can be the best way....
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