ABTT 2006

[Ken Coker]

Probably in my scruffy green jacket, with scruffy jeans and chains. Long hair below shoulders.

 

Get a hair cut man!!

Sadly, I'll miss the reveal of the new grelco......finishing off marking.

Tomorrow I'm taking an artist climbing so she can be photographed as part of a work on "struggle".....how do I get these jobs?

 

See you all at PLASA.

 

 

KC

[AndyJones]

Well I'll be there today! blue top, blue jeans, skin head! can't miss me! say hello if your feeling in the mood!

 

see you later!

 

AndyJones

[Bryson]

I'm not at ABTT til tomorrow, but my new Squellys arrived in the post today.... Very interesting indeed.

 

Now, just a very, very long wait at the airport to go...

[Guest lightnix]

90% certain not to make it I'm afraid

 

Too much to do here sadly. I also seem to be under some kind of gypsy curse this month and am a bit scared to go out right now, unless I really have to B-)

[Pete]

Hoping to get round for a couple of hours tommorrow.

 

Then strike time!

[OB2]

so, any news from today?

[James]

So, Barley Mow @ 16:00 then.

 

See you there.

 

James

[WiLL]

My assistant and I went for a stroll through it yesterday and as always spent most of our time staring at the new toys on the market and drooling. Much impressed were we at the 'pretty pretty' LED colour changing star cloth. Deeply chagrined we were by the lads at the tallescope stand when we said that 'no, we hadn't had our tally inspected for a while', but, on the bright side, after making good our escape from there we spotted the super nifty, self-propelling mobile ladder things in the corner! I'm sure everyone who went knows what I'm talking about, sod using them for focussing, get a load together and hold a race event!

(ahem) moving on...

I bought myself a new combi-tool pouch thingy from setwear, very nice, all I need now is a huge carabina of keys and I will feel truly 'techified' once more, working in a private school for a while you can start to feel a little isolated from your technician brethren :)

We had a peer at the new tungsten wash mac, and our thoughts were; 'so?'

We waited for the guy at the 'slick' stand to actually get off the phone and talk to us about trussing.... he never did.

We sympathised with the bored looking people in charge of stands full of the more mundane side of theatre life, such as seating and whatnot, as lo; their stands were bereft of excitable technicians.

We sampled the free sandwiches at the source 4 stand, I had egg and bacon, and marvelled at the sheer size of the source 4 revolution (neither of us having seen one in real life before) It was as big as... well.... a very big thing.

I purchased a new wingnut spanner from lighting partners. Nifty.

We were cooked by some bright spark's idea of crossing two followspots across the aisle focussed at (what was to them) above head height. They were obviously 5'6''. I'm 6'3'' and spent several moments stumbling into things and cursing. They were nice follows though, the robert Juliets I think, although my vision was a little blurry when reading the specs, can't think why.

So yes, we walked away with a huge bag of catalogues and brochures and free swatch books, gel cutters, sweeties etc.

The bags split (cheapskate ABTT!)

We went back and pinched bags from Flint's... and a new catalogue (finally!)

We left.

Not a bad day out, beats the rigging and set painting we would have been doing otherwise :P

 

What did you guys get up to?

 

 

:) - unnecessary new topic merged into existing one. If there's already a perfectly good topic in existence, with ABTT 2006 as the subject, then there's absolutely no point in starting a brand new one - all it achieves is to clutter up the forum index and fragment the discussion.

[andy_s]

don't think I'm going, but they might be coming to us.....

 

Eh?

 

I believe someone's re-invented the 15A grelco - got to be worth a look.

 

That would be Stage Electrics and there so called 'Squelco' the square Grelco. Looks like the sort of 13A 2-way adaptor you can buy in your corner shop, but with 15s instead of 13s. About £4.95 each IIRC.

 

Hi JSB -

well we had Tom and Feiko from Alcons Audio demonstrating their LR14 line array to a few interested parties, so a bit of the show came to us.....and tonight we've got a group of delegates fromt he Theatre Engineering and Architecture conference (TEA - my sort of acronym) coming for a quick tour, and Stage Electrics is our corner shop - about 5 minutes brisk walk away - handy for that extra sheet of 202 at 11.50 on a saturday morning.

 

cheers,

Andy!

 

Oh and by the way, the LR14's sound very very good, and the line source column speaker they also brought has seriously controllable vertical dispersion - 2 steps down our seating rake made a difference, so a really useful tool for very reverberant spaces with a decent budget....(neither of which apply to us any more....)

[TeeJay]

So, having convinced the boss that the ABTT Theatre Show is essential to our professional development, we figured we had better actually turn up and have a gander.

 

It starts after a LOOONG bus journey across London in Subway, eating our way through a foot-length worth of sandwich and watching the boss confidently stride off in the wrong direction. She'll call in soon enough ....

 

Reach the halls and like so many others our first port of call is Flints. They have the new catalogue - WOOHOO! After our only copy of the previous version was handed to a Danish company by a thoughtful casual some months back, we've been praying that our quads and podgers survive.

 

Then it's a swing round to Canford to look at the new TecPro 2 station (boring yes, but if your current PSU is reaching the end of it's life ...) Meanwhile the boss and my colleague get to chat up the guys at Lyon. So I get electronics and they get to play at height. Hmmm. But I did get a free note pad. Hmmm. Then a quick shout at the ALD for an old college friend who's on duty.

 

Anyhoo, we continue pass Trantec (don't need any new radio mics), fight through the crowd at AETTI (which I never managed to get back to) and stop at ETnow. Several books later and the company credit card has come in useful :).

A quick pass-by of Lighting Partners (remember them, we'll be back later) and NewStageSound (have they lost the space bar?) and we head over to the Lawrence Hall.

 

The first question here is why is there a bloody great bike at the Triple E stand (Long Beach Long Riders ) then a hello at Avolites for another college contemporary. This is followed by a wander past Lee (did they have any numeric swatch books?) to Le Mark for a close encounter with the Setwear range. They didn't know about the PSA discount so no purchase today but they'll be getting an email through shortly for some gloves.

 

Then Sparks called us (nothing to do with the marshmallows in chocolate :P ) and it was this point that I ran into many, many people. Hello - I didn't get time to properly get re-acquianted with y'all. My apologises.

 

Final stop on this tour was Orbital where I so nearly purchased a full DAW system for under a grand! Then they realised what they were saying and hastily withdraw that particular offer. So I had to settle for a quote for the system instead. Maybe next time ... :)

 

At this point, my colleagues had to go back for tonights show and the wife called to say she had reached Victoria - where should she be? By the time I've gone to retrieve her and got back it's around 4pm.

She gets distracted at Light Factor by the Palco3 but I manage to drag her away (small tip - if you know someone in Italy they are a lot cheaper) - I need to get to Stagetext to discuss surtitles (I get all the fun jobs). Except they've b******d orf already! There's more than a half hour left!

 

She stops to check out the MAC700 and just happen to stop at Sparks (mmm, chocolate) while looking at Strands new board offering, which we both think looks good but white is just the wrong colour for a lighting desk. That's it for the Lawrence and we finish at Lindley back at Lighting Partners (I told you to remember them) where I steadily help myself to the free pens and buy a wingnut spanner while the good lady wife discusses the merits of Hog 2, Hog 3 and Hog PC with the guys there. A long distance view of the GrandMA desk is followed by a Neutrik rep giving us a 30-second tour of the A&H iLive ("Aren't you on the wrong stand?" "Yep, but it's ok, I taught myself earlier" "Oh. Ok.") and we finally end back at ALD, checking to see which pub beckons.

 

I get a call 30 mins later asking where I am (the Greencoat Boy where you told me to be) and we stop for a frosty beverage to catch up, the match not interrupting us too much ( the match I'm ignoring partly as I'm not much of a football fan - but despite the patriotic wanting England to win; I've got Trinidad in the company sweep-stake) We leave at 80 mins and it's at this point my boys in red give up and the whiteshirts romp to victory. So that's my money gone, then.

 

I head off home, only now noticing that I failed to grab a Canford Catalogue to replace the one at work that we don't have any more. Ho-hum.

 

Anyone have a spare CPC one around?

 

Tomorrow I will mostly be - wondering if HSL using beermats as advertising is inspired or deranged and attempting to contact StageText

[Andrew C]

ABTT 2006? Well, stood all the way up on the train. (Midday, mid week, what was that about?) Strolled across from Waterloo avoiding tourists (BONG goes Big Ben & 2000 people stop in the middle of the pavement to photograph a clock! FFS!!)

Anyway, to the hall and lets see, straight to Flints in case they run out of the now known to be non-mythical catalogues! :) Quick look at A&H digital offering (I have two 2200s, much more my £) and then to Newstagesound where I know one of the guys. Over to the other hall and find myself talking to AC about that fancy cargo net... I like it; another solution to a problem I have yet to have. (40+ DMX channels/m2!!) Meet fellow Mod Brian, then off to Strand to look at 24way wall mount racks, but the new desk is far more interesting. Not been a "Strand Fan" for a number of years, but quite impressed really. I'll get a proper demo if and when...

 

Time for a coffee and mod chat then back to the fray with a colleague only just arrived, so repeat above in reverse order adding a good look at Robert Juliat Lucy follow spot. Looks promising if it wont break the glass that an architect designed into our theatre. :)

 

Couple of interesting other bits, RB Lighting for spare parts for all that old tat in the rig, and a tip-up bench seat on Steeldecks stand.

 

A final tour around a Congo, and pleasantly surprised at the price point. Hmm...

 

All in all, met more people, and saw more interesting stuff than last year. Didn't tear muscle in leg getting back to train. Must be an improvement!

[Thirdtap]

ABTT product of the year must be the chocolate fountain and pimms?

 

I had a very good time at the show and it seems to be getting better every year. The exhibitors all were very helpful and chatty even about non theatre related subjects.

 

Anyone try the rope assemblies snakes and ladders game? If not it was themed around LOLER questions if you reached a snake / ladder junction. I won some nice rigging gloves whooo hoooo!!!!

 

The retractable curved seating stand good just now need the budget for a refit....

 

Sorry zero88 forgot my teddy though which was something I had planned to do.

[w/robe]

Dived in for a quick look yesterday morning.

 

Best product - Burnblock - a new Flambar type product that is non-toxic in application, once dry and when burnt and is made from fruit extracts apparently.

 

Promised to go back to Sparks for Pimms but time caught up with me.

[Pete]

Final stop on this tour was Orbital where I so nearly purchased a full DAW system for under a grand! Then they realised what they were saying and hastily withdraw that particular offer. So I had to settle for a quote for the system instead. Maybe next time ... :o

 

Think I was sat there while you were having that conversation.....

[soundo26]

took one of my techs down there yesterday, also went straight to Flint's for a catalogue (yes they do exist) glad I got one cos their website is no substitute.

 

saw lots of good toys although the thing I really wanted to see (High End DL2)was only on static display and the guys on the stand didn't seem all that interested in talking to me despite me showing an interest in the display one, never mind did spot a DL1 on another stand.

 

Played snakes & ladders and won a wingnut spanner.

 

Spent some dosh on some bits for our sony radio mic systems.

 

met lots of good people and got loads of literature.

 

Just about got home in time for the only bit of the England game worth watching (last 10 mins) I think that by the time the team wakes up they'll be on their way home (next game or two).

 

Now looking forward to Plasa (if it doesn't clash with work as usual)