ImagineerTom

My initial research was that it is a shell brand used (apparently exclusively) by dutest - I was hoping that so one might have some hands on knowledge to allay my fears. One of the biggest lighting/sound companies in the Middle East (not prg/gearhouse) has turned up and attempted to hang 25ton of kit in one of my structures using rather dodgy looking Gripton branded kit and waving Gripton branded calcs around. I have already refused to allow the lift and am doing my homework overnight before tomorrow’s inevitable shouty production meeting.

Has anyone any working knowledge or experience with “Gripton” branded slings and shackles. I’ve been presented with a rig using only that kit that I have concerns about and the official website for the company is out of date and lacks contact details or corporate information. I’m wondering if it’s a shell brand set up for a Chinese manufacturer?

Ok the first question should be “who?” Said that should be included - risk assessments should be written by suitably competent people who make informed decisions about actual risks and problems rather than responding to the crazy ideas complete strangers come up with so how much weight your give to this suggestion should begin with the validity of the person asking it

There is not one law relating to installing truss in chrurches for projectors. However this does fall under a raft of health and safety obligations, building regulations and standard industry practices. In short the church and the installer (whether a company or a volunteer) have legal responsibility (and culpability) to ensure that what they install is safe, meets any and all regulations or restrictions that apply to that specific installation venue and that can be demonstrated (in a court of the worst happens) that the people who did the sums and made the decisions about doing this task are competent and suitably skilled. i.e. retired Fred the accountant who bought some unbranded truss from Ebay and fixed it up with some pound shop screws definitely isn’t any of those things. A professional installation company with many years trading history installing brand name parts and who has produced cad plans / engineering statements to show why it’s all legit and suitable probably does meet the definition of competent

As of a few years ago it became a legal requirement that all businesses provided their T&C's to anyone else they were doing business with right up front (random googled article https://www.rocketlawyer.co.uk/documents-and-forms/terms-and-conditions-for-supply-of-services-to-business-customers.rl#). Officially it was to highlight payment terms, official addresses, billing procedures etc but like all such vague edicts it became slowly corrupted by having extra terms tacked on (usually as the result of a court case or article in a trade paper) so that now when we get T&C's from some companies they run to multiple pages and are clearly a catch-all document that their lawyers might be able to use as a get out of jail card in later litigation. It sounds like that is what you're getting; possibly because of the change of ownership. If you don't agree with any of their terms then you should expressly and specifically notify them in writing before accepting any more work. If you don't then they are deemed to have been accepted by you and are binding on you. If your T&C and their T&C clash and you haven't got a specific paperchain resolving the issues then one day a judge in court will have to decide whose takes legal priority and he'll be making that decision based on how much he likes the font you used, what he thinks of your spelling and how much he likes or dislikes you generally. So yes, you should be issuing a T&C's to business customers and they should have issued on to you. It's also wise to periodically (we do it annually) send a copy out so that you know they have an up to date version and likewise when someone sends one to you you should check over the key bits that impact you. The document doesn't have to be complicated - it can literally be your legal address/contact info, your payment terms, a summary of your responsibilities and a statement confirming which jurisdiction you resolve legal disputes in (for 99% of board members it will be "under the laws of England & Wales". This is all a legal requirement; this is nothing to do with HMRC and how they assess whether you're really a business or an unoffical employee; as with most legislation there's some crossover here that ultimately won't be resolved until there's been a few court cases to actually thrash out exactly where the line is drawn. Also, HMRC will do whatever they want regardless most of the time anyway so make sure you're complying with all the other laws.

Broadly speaking the "light up costume synchronized to stage lighting" industry doesn't use DMX and every maker and costume supplier in the market seems to have evolved their own propriety control systems because of the wide range of possible uses (from simply switching some pea lights on to fully mappable pixels that would fill a universe of DMX per costume) so there's very little off-the-shelf available that fits that market. Pretty much everyone has developed something around a Rasberry Pi or Arduino infrastructure as they have some spectacular LED control protocols built in to their base architecture that makes designing a system surprisingly easy. So in short... don't be afraid to look at coding up something specific for your project rather than trying to find a ready made product.

We bounce shows in and out of ireland several times a year; yes the local market is expensive and where possible we do bring equipment from the uk over because even with the extra transport and hassle it’s still often cheaper than local hires.

Whatever name/branch is on the invoice; sue that via small claims. A court would agree you’ve taken a reasonable step to claim against the correct body and if it is the wrong branch then they would have to prove that to be the case which would give you a slam dunk claiming against the other body. Plus it’s always the case that once a court summons appears on the desk of the councils in-house legal people a surprising amount of confusion and delay magically vanishes.

Nope, unless you have a foundation in 3D cad software and design principles solidworks will be impenetrable. What you’re asking is akin to saying “ive never used a lighting desk before, I can’t afford an avolites Titan, Someone has offered me use of a wholeHog for an hour; will I be able to program a west end music on it in an hour?” Google sketchup is the standard entry level cad software and you should expect several hours with that before you become vaguely proficient. Your best bet is to find someone already familiar with cad software and get them to draw it up for you in return for beer tokens

He doesn’t suggest inhaling it directly but I’m keeping an eye out to future google searches and the misunderstanding / misremembering of them.

DO NOT use anything other that something expressly and specifically designed to be inhaled. Air dusters are usually full of highly flammable gas that would probably kill someone using it as an inhaler and certainly pump lots of noxious and flammable gas in to the air. You really can't hear the sound of an inhaler over the sound of the person breathing in at the same time if you're more than 6ft away so an old/dummy one is fine. If you are adamant about getting the sound then speak to a GP about getting a low dose prescription specifically approved for the actor you intend to have using it.

I didn’t see what you saw at plasa but in all the demo videos and photos I can find online it /looks/ exactly like the sort of smoke the ultrasonic units produce, the box is physically the same size and layout as the ultrasonic units and the published data about power consumption and fluid use is very similar to the ultrasonic units. It’s perfectly possible they have legitimately invented a complete new technology but all the available evidence suggests otherwise...

JEM spent a lot of time and money playing around with the technology 20 years ago and perfected the way to adjust density and create different physical “layers” of smoke. Several of the Chinese machines I have seen also have a regular fogger in them which is used in conjunction with the ultrasonic system to produce a primate version of the JEM HOT system. All the Chinese machines have “easily changeable” fluid bottles. Just like any fogger they have external bottles. All the ones I’ve seen then pump this fluid in to a baking tray full of ultrasonic units and then have pumps/ducting to take the produced smoke out in to the real world. It is this internal tray that is the problem when trying to move/tour them

There’s dozens of heads inside them. One we looked at had a small smoke machine inside it too. Plus don’t forget the Chinese one-upmanship ratings & numbers on technical equipment.

That’s exactly how they work. Part of the problem with some models is that they are literally a baking tray full of pond foggers hence the difficulties moving them. I don’t know the Cheveut one but it looks a lot like a generic Chinese model rebadged and that one is a baking tray...

That was an ultrasonic based unit. Several manufacturers have similar products out. We’ve played with them; if it’s for an install situation they are great but real world touring they just don’t work - there’s basically a baking tray full of water in them so before you move them there’s a whole boot up / shut down procedure to do and if you forget to do it you end up dumping fluid/water everywhere. The Martin glaciator is industry standard. The antari DNG 100 or DNG 200 is a mighty machine for the money but tricky to get serviced / regassed so decide how durable and what sort of use you expect before buying. ALL chiller machines are very susceptible to air flows. I now always spec 2 machines (1 either side of the performance space) so that if the air is going in the wrong way there’s still one machine pumping fog on to the stage.

Fiddler does have a catwalk stage running through the auditorium. And for future reference http://www.theatremonkey.com/PLAYHOUSEstalls.htm# that website goes in to every production in town and compiles a view rating for every show based on the actual scenery being used & the relative value of seats.

H&S law requires that people working are "safe" - there aren't different laws for self employed people, employed people, amatures, council staff, etc. If your venue is routinely getting in crew on shows that are clearly too tired or present safety risks then management need to be making decisions about who they book and the extra conditions you impose on visiting companies.

the problem there is that the stadiums do have a great PA system for their day to day use but no where near the spec needed for a concert. The scale of stadiums the spice girls are touring to are venues that only get one gig every couple of years so there’s zero chance of them splurging on a system.

I’m sure there are exceptions but every pro festival I’ve been on in the last 10 years has included noise training in with the general H&S briefing, has ear-plug dispensers everywhere, have proper noise cancelling headphone for radio uses and has monitoring devices on every stage checking the noise levels and providing real-time feedback that departmental bosses can access. Certainly in this industry protecting hearing is VERY important!

That is INSANELY expensive for laser cutting. We have things the size of a3 full of complicated cuts made for £25. If you’re looking for a leicester based cutting firm I can heartily reccomend microkerf up in Birstall.

I admire your optimism but again I have to point out that for 20 years specific ground/remote operated follow spot control systems (most of which utilise existing moving lights just like the Robe unit) have been invented and put out by lots of companies and none of them have gained sufficient traction to plummet in price or been sufficiently practical and dependable to achieve widespread use. There are a handful of situations I can think of where a remote operated follow is the perfect solution, but I can think of a lot more where it just turns an existing, working, relatively cheep solution in to a much more complicated, much more expensive gadget that doesn't actually produce a better net result despite increasing costs by a factor of 10.

I’m not sure you can call it a game changer; all the big moving light manufacturers have had some sort of similar “remote” system to enable their products to be used as a followspot over the past 2 decades.

If they have screens and baffles and all that sort of stuff then why weren't they being used (or used correctly) for the rehearsal where this incident occurred then? Furthermore why didn't the managers/superiors (leader of the orchestra, orchestra manager, the conductor) note that important safety equipment was missing/faulty and take appropriate action. If a get-in team arrived with no steelies or PPE and were allowed to load in a show the crew boss / technical manager would be legally responsible and be liable for prosecution even if no accidents occurred. Clearly their internal systems and processes either don't exist or have fundamental flaws? Likewise if it took 2 days for the incident to be reported then it's highlighting that their internal processes are insufficient. Instead of an orchestra imagine this was a tech get in and one of the crew (who has already been allowed to work without wearing any proper PPE) got a huge electric shock, no-one noticed that accident occurring and no-one noticed that the crew member was missing for days afterwards?? The more I hear about this the more I'm inclined to agree that overall RoH are at fault because either they didn't have safeguards, weren't following best practice and apparently were allowing major systematic breakdowns of fairly basic safety and operational procedures to take place surely? ...and having just watched the Minotaur video I'm even more shocked. There's NO work done in that orchestra to deal with noise apart from a half-assed attempt by putting percussion in the boxes. Admittedly smaller pits on cruise ships involve musos on different hight rostra (so that no one has a trumpet right by their ear) and multiple screens to control sound, the touring circus bands I work with are on different height rostra and have musicians arranged so they aren't playing at each-other, having seen Gridgirl's pit's they have whole complicated inverted terrace systems in the pit, screens everywhere, baffles and coatings and objects floating above the musicians. Watching that RoH video was like watching one of those 1920's videos of people building skyscrapers compared to modern building techniques.

I'm going to disagree here - they took "sticking plaster" actions after the problem. Throwing around some custom earplugs every 5 years and putting up a few signs is doing NOTHING to prevent the risk ocurring in the first place and in any safety situation your first steps have to be taking reasonable steps to prevent the bad thing from ever happening. I'd bet if they had a monitoring program in place, could show that discussions about the artistic program had been held to ensure muso's were exposed to a range of sounds, had taken some steps to actively rotate performers, had re-arranged the orchestra and looked at sound deflectors and tried some different options to see how practical they were (even if they were tried and discarded because they weren't practical) then the judgement would have been very different. As I read it what they did was the equivalent of giving all lighting technicians (badly fitting) rubber boots to wear, rather than making sure the electrics were in good condition and earths / breakers were installed and considering that an acceptable, safe solution to people getting electrocuted daily. I think it's also worth stressing that the RoH aren't working in an ancient building with an old fashioned pit that forces them to work in a specific way. As part of their big refurbishment 20 years ago they completely rebuilt the entire stage, substage and pit so they have no defence that the building forces their layout, that building works are too expensive or that they don't know how to change working practices.