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paulears

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    Runs a media business, manages summer seasons and pantos.Music seems to be making a comeback for me, and I was playing in bands again until this year - which was great! Sadly, the UK Beach Boys didn't come back after Covid!
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    Paul Johnson

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    Music,Theatre, Radio - things with plugs on!

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Production Manager

Production Manager (14/14)

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  1. Over the panto season I made a series of youtube videos, and I picked one to share - somebody asked me what I put in my show reports. Might be interesting to newcomers, and old lags too!
  2. Over the panto season I made a series of youtube videos, and I picked one to share - somebody asked me what I put in my show reports. Might be interesting to newcomers, and lags too!
  3. 'Takes' sort of works, but we'd also use clips - but using your example, if I'd recorded them I'd probably describe them as Capture 1 close, capture 1 medium or capture 1 distant, or capture 1 position A etc. Describing them I would be happy with "listening to clip 3, distant perspective" or Clip 14, position 6 ..." Personally, I'd probably use clip or capture almost interchangeably In my head, I'd use 'take' for clips that are re-recorded over and over again - so take 3 would be the third attempt. I have 'capture' more as a good word for a process, so the microphone in the recorder would capture the sound in the room, and stick into a number of audio clips that can be collated and used later? So for me 'capture' would be really a verb? Does that help? Other may well have other terms they'd use. As it's all digital nowadays a file could be a good description, but I don't think I'd use in in your context? 'Takes' sort of works, but we'd also use clips - but using your example, if I'd recorded them I'd probably describe them as Capture 1 close, capture 1 medium or capture 1 distant, or capture 1 position A etc. Describing them I would be happy with "listening to clip 3, distant perspective" or Clip 14, position 6 ..." Personally, I'd probably use clip or capture almost interchangeably In my head, I'd use 'take' for clips that are re-recorded over and over again - so take 3 would be the third attempt. I have 'capture' more as a good word for a process, so the microphone in the recorder would capture the sound in the room, and stick into a number of audio clips that can be collated and used later? So for me 'capture' would be really a verb? Does that help? Other may well have other terms they'd use. As it's all digital nowadays a file could be a good description, but I don't think I'd use in in your context?
  4. None of my expensive or cheap LED gear flickers - a thing of the past really. Garden or workshop floods are hardly that useful for event lighting - but most of those are flicker proof on video now.
  5. None of my expensive or cheap LED gear flickers - a thing of the past really. Garden or workshop floods are hardly that useful for event lighting - but most of those are flicker proof on video now.
  6. paulears

    Lee Colour

    I guess a Lee swatchbook and thumb through or an RGB LED and white screen and experiment.
  7. Yep - get the other things, but such a shame that theatre is one of the three most impossible areas for young people to work in. I even tried to enable it for a university student, and discovered that while old enough to be outside the Childrens Act blanket ban, the insurance in place did know about the legal issue and had determined that any student required serious paperwork with responsible persons having to supervise and sign off - and I could not, as a visitor too, be that person. Clearly theatres are far too risky places, full of iniquity and danger.
  8. paulears

    Lee Colour

    Pantone Reflex Blue seems to be the colour, but apparently this is very difficult to match to both RGB LED or Gel colours as it's one of those colours that isn't quite what is seems and attempts to create it only get close. Just one of the colours that works as subtractive in reflection, but doesn't work by illumination. Like Lee 126 violet - where to the eye the colour of the gel is obvious but when you look through it red and yellow get sort of reversed. I suspect it will be a torch and swatch book - because the look up calculators fail on this one - producing a purple that is not in the flag version.
  9. Sadly, this will probably be a non-starter in any theatre who know the law. There are three places where it is illegal for people in school, so up to 16, to work. Abatoirs - I get this one Nightclubs - this too really, but Theatres. My local theatre were approached by the council for a work experience placement. I mentioned the law, they laughed and said don't worry - but then in five minutes, discovered it was accurate. It even applies to amateur theatre - unless chaperones and licences are done. Of course you might find somewhere where they don't know ....... but what if there's an accident? TV is OK, but theatres are on th naughty list.
  10. Having seen a few, the real killer is toppling - the audiences are very excitable - so anything tall has to be stopped from falling over. It's not cheap to do this properly and safely. The simplest and most stable one I saw was 4 lengths of ladder truss - the two chord stuff that was a square about a metre bigger than the ring on all sides - suspended on 4 wind up stands. They hung lights, then four people wound it up and it seemed pretty stable and solid.
  11. That sounds a bit like sales blurb Steve, they're not exactly cheap!
  12. No, the wrap is simply to get enough friction - if the cable is now a bit short. a few less turns will be fine. The killer is always that you must work out where the travel starts, and of course no joins at the winch end during the travel. What usually happens is you run out of good cable and discover you can only open partially. They're just fiddly.
  13. Madscans! I'd forgotten about them. The plastic covers I managed to break on all of them, but they did the job and were not bad really. I asked a friend about manufacturing. He's an engineer in a non-theatre/events field and he looked at that video and told me that that is perfectly acceptable engineering in the non-mass produced assembly style. He said that jigs really do not have to be ultra sophisticated. All they need to do is be precise enough for the job in hand. Location setting and angles being common. He said he looks for different things when assessing manufacturing. It's the removal of manual tools for mechanical ones. So you have screwdrivers and spanners replaced with at the first level, rechargeable power tools, then the next step is air operated tooling. Tools that are quick and efficient but are not limited to single processes. You can make a simple jig that is automated, quick and requires minimal operator skill - but you then need people to fix them, and when they fail, everything stops. The manufacturing processes are quite straightforward, but if you are going to make a batch of 200 units, that is very different from 20000 - if you want 2000, that's a difficult one. Spend a lot and hope you eventually need 20000, or just continue the 200 system. I guess we all see the Chinese equipment continually change. we complain that after 3 months the DMX attributes may have changed or the 3 facet prism is a 5 facet prism. That is just their product evolution. These things won't ever be mass produced. It's a bit like loudspeaker production - you could automate so much, but slapping sheets onto CNC machines manually, and then assembling by hand seems the way they still do that. People with filler and sanders.
  14. Hi - this is a common request, but the answer always depends on what you already have? Don't forget we're mostly European/UK, so while we do have members in the US, our answers have a bit of bias. In schools here your budget would be blocked by two things - The supply of old fashioned lamps is drying up and increasing in price. Most pro theatre, events and even schools think buying old incandescent kit is foolhardy. Your school are crazy to spend money on equipment with very limited life. Electricity costs and the green lobby mean that old kit is being sold at dirt cheap prices- just look on ebay. LED is the only way, and it is expensive. Even Chinese LED is hardly cheap. Questions - do you need to be able to project gobos and have hard edges? If not, then tight zoom LEDs are much cheaper - and you can get Chinese ones for your budget - just. 6 fixtures is not a great deal of choice, but you have too little for Source 4 LED (or even Chinese versions) so even though you have a grand, that's not a huge amount of money. Worse - as a student, it means you will blow the budget on what next year's students will see as a waste. It's nice they've trusted you with a budget, but you cannot buy what you need, so face the unhappy condition of blowing it on a compromise - effectively perhaps wasting it. Give the money back to a member of staff who's job includes making these decisions. It's really dreadful they've put the responsibility on a student. It always backfires. Comments down the line will be "we trusted in-sanity, and they blew the budget on junk" - when somebody next year needs 7 people to be lit, or your choice won't go wide enough, or the amazing deal on a job lot of source 4s needs $500 for new lamps and there is no money. Giving students real money to spend is ALWAYS bad news for the student. Duck out, and tell them you cannot get a good deal that will do what they want.
  15. I had lots of messages before I did the last one, saying please share what went wrong - then ironically a reply yesterday saying he actually came to the show and it was good - when it was the most stressful so far - ASM off, and one of the Flawless dancers pulled a muscle - so frantic re-arranging to sort that, and of course I had to cover the ASM stuff - including one line where it said "put on costume and make a dick oif yourself on stage" - as in snowmen! We have a flying scooter that flys out into the audience and while being very happy with how her controls work, it occured to me I didn't have a clue where a couple of things happen and worse, discovered the controller is variable speed, and I'd never given that any thought - so some handing off of critical stuff. You might well be the boss, but part is recognising when you just cannot do it as well as others who've done it thirty odd times. We sorted everything, and good to notice that somebody in the audience didn't even notice anything.
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