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Charlotte_R

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Previous Fields

  • Member Status
    Working in the industry
  • Current Employment or place of study
    I'm a freelance lighting designer and technician. I also do event power. Alongside my work in the industry, I'm also currently studying for an MA in performance design at the University of Leeds
  • Professional organisation membership
    BECTU, ALD
  • Full Name
    Charlotte Robinson

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    http://www.charlotterobinson.co.uk

Profile Information

  • Location
    Leeds
  • Interests
    Theatre, sewing, electronics, hiking, rock climbing

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Charlotte_R's Achievements

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  1. We've all done jobs that turned out terribly and tbh we all end up fine eventually. I did a similar panto in 2018 (the director / choreographer / promotor / dame and his mother) and a star who was a TV actress from the 80s. You just have to grit your teeth and do it; don't make a big deal of it on your CV if possible and then in a few years you can look back and laugh.
  2. Sorry D_Y you really shouldn't get involved in this - you have no role in the school and they shouldn't really be asking you. There are a number of things about this install that I don't like from a quick glance and they need to pay someone to come in and look at it for them properly right through. The advice to employ an experienced freelance tech is the right route. My advice would be to contact the nearest Arts Centre or FE College with performance lighting - there is one in virtually every Hants district council area - and ask for their advice. Most of their techs aren't that busy at the moment.... +1. The dimmer pack 'install' is atrocious, for a start, and I'd be very interested to see a close up of whatever is holding the lighting bars into the roof trusses- it might be fine, but purely on the basis of a casual observation from the photo, alarm bells are ringing! Looks like they're attached by threaded rod to the beams via pieces of angle. It doesn't look terrible to me. I agree re: the dimmer packs though.
  3. I found 7909 to be somewhat lacking in depth; but at least one person dropped off the course because they found it too tough. Certainly, I went off to do further electrical qualifications (2391-52) to augment the learning. I would personally be wary of taking someone on who has 7909 and no other electrical experience.
  4. The code of practice has been updated recently, but I would consider dimmers and anything on the load side of them to be part of the "fixed appliances". In fact, this kind of confusion is why the COP has been changed as a lot of things that were hardwired were seen by PAT testers as part of the fixed installation and by electricians as not being part of the fixed installation.
  5. I agree. We're an industry that spends a lot of time working at height and we should really try to avoid ladders. IIRC, ladders are the most dangerous form of access at height and they should be way down the hierarchy - I believe they're statistically only slightly less dangerous than rope access; and we expect rope access technicians to do 2 years and 2000 hours of rope access before we allow them to supervise rope access techs.
  6. I was thinking LED tape personally. If you get the right driver, they can be DMX controlled.
  7. Going back to the original thread, I went to uni to study electrical engineering and I really did not enjoy it. I found the lecturers to be arrogant and disinterested in lowly undergrad students; and pastoral support was non-existent. I was on the MEng programme and tried to move to the BEng programme because I hated the maths and wanted out; only to be met by a massive propaganda campaign about how if you go on to do an MSc you're basically getting the same tuition but paying more. The best part of uni was the technical committees that I joined. After uni, I went to work in the railway for a few years before deciding to become a lampy, and doing various vocational electrical qualifications. Luckily, those qualifications coupled with previous learning allowed me to join NAPIT and that's got me through the pandemic. I think what I learned - at uni, in the railway and now working in the entertainment industry - is that I like being hands on. I've met various people who quit uni to go into an apprentice scheme, and I honestly think that I would have been happier if I'd gone off to become a spark. Equally, I've known people who have completed an apprenticeship and gone on to do HNC/HND/BEng/MSc and be much better than the people who did the "traditional" degree route. All the way through my education, the bright people went to uni and the "thickos" went to become apprentices. There was no talk of what an apprenticeship could actually lead to and if I'd known, I'd probably have taken a more vocational route. I think that's what's lacking, and I would urge any young people to explore all routes into the industry. However, I do agree about not learning a theatre apprenticeship / degree. My life experience makes me a better tech and I do think that there's a lot of people who live in tiny theatre bubbles.
  8. I've used an air compressor before. With a regulator and a moisture trap, it's done the job for cleaning moving lights. It was what we were given, I didn't choose it, so I can't necessarily comment on its suitability.
  9. The sockets in one of the downstairs rooms are safe (but not yet connected to anything), what more do you want?
  10. Neon Tubes 2 for headers, Maison Neue Extended for the body of the text. Please download the toolkit, the full branding guidelines are on there with all colours, etc that are required. The brand guidelines are very comprehensive.
  11. Just one. Sorry, I missed your statement that you were looking for a 5-way split.
  12. I've seen ones that look to be a standard barrel with a stuffing gland on the side and a flying lead with a powercon on it. I don't know if these are a proprietary item or if they were made up by the hire co?
  13. It feels a bit disingenuous for furlough to be extended without extending SEISS. The majority of staff in this industry are freelance and furlough isn't helping many freelancers.
  14. If you're looking for something cheaper, I've set something similar up for my mum for Skype. She's a piano teacher, so she has a forward facing camera, document camera (just a webcam on a gooseneck), a camera for her piano keyboard and a window capture. It's all run on a windows desktop through OBS. OBS is mainly designed for streaming, but I'm sure that there will be a plug-in that does pretty much exactly what you want.
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