Retaining accessories with lanterns

[karl]

It's really annoying when you go up a ladder to gel a lantern only to find it has no gel frame. It's even worse when you then have to play hunt the frame all round the building to find the missing item.

 

Last year when I cleaned and tested the kit I did my best to reunite all of the lanterns with their gel frames, barndoors, etc. I have just taken everything down for this year's testing and almost half the lanterns have no gel frame in them. About a quarter of the fresnels have parted company with their barndoors. Having scoured the building I have found the missing bits on the SM's desk, on the fly floor, under a bench in the bar, basically all over the place.

 

So apart from wondering why people feel the need to strip lanterns of their accessories my real question is how do I stop this happening (apart from breaking people's fingers)?

 

I was thinking of finding some way of attaching them (certainly the gel frames if not the barndoors) so they can't easily be removed. Has anybody done this and if so how?

[dmxtothemax]

You can easily attach things like barn doors and gel frames to the latern with wire rope or small chains,

The simplist way is to use light duty safety wires

safety wires are only about $7.00 in Australia.

[GridGirl]

I was thinking of finding some way of attaching them (certainly the gel frames if not the barndoors) so they can't easily be removed. Has anybody done this and if so how?

 

Short safeties on the barn doors work pretty well - quite a few of our older units have them anyway for actual safety reasons! While I do sympathise with you, I'd be seriously annoyed if I went to re-gel a rig and discovered all the gel frames attached to their units - I just don't know how practical it is. I reckon I'd be trying to figure out when the frames are vanishing from the units - are people stripping the frames out when the units come down, and then putting them in a different place?

[dbuckley]

I'd say dont bother to try and attach them; get a handle on managing the bits.

[karl]

While I do sympathise with you, I'd be seriously annoyed if I went to re-gel a rig and discovered all the gel frames attached to their units - I just don't know how practical it is. I reckon I'd be trying to figure out when the frames are vanishing from the units - are people stripping the frames out when the units come down, and then putting them in a different place?

Do you take the gel frames away from the lanterns when you re-gel? I tend to take the gel to the lantern and swap them in situ. When I say attached I mean using a chain or something not fastened into the runners.

 

I'd say dont bother to try and attach them; get a handle on managing the bits.

Being an amateur venue every show tends to be lit by different people and lets bring in their own guys. I can't be present for every rigging/focusing session (I'm not paid enough for that - hell I'm not even paid!!!). I've tried in the past getting people to put broken kit in a quarantine area and I can't even get people to do that!

 

The other day we had somebody in lighting one of the lets. He complained that several lights had no gel frame in when he came to gel them. Ten minutes later I watched him remove a gel frame (with gel) from a lantern and throw it to the deck. When I asked why he'd done it he said he wanted the lantern O/W. I pointed out that was why there were no gel frames in the other lanterns.

 

Trouble is people do things like that and stick the frames on a table, radiator, a chair (probably with every good intention of putting them away later). Others come along and find them lying around and try to be helpful by shoving them in cupboards, draws, the scene store, etc.

[Brian]

It's really annoying when you go up a ladder to gel a lantern...

 

Do you take the gel frames away from the lanterns when you re-gel? I tend to take the gel to the lantern and swap them in situ.

 

At the risk of starting another ladder-access/working-at-height debate how does your risk assessment handle this? To carry out this operation you'll be taking both hands off the ladder

[Andrew C]

Gel frames NEED to be removed from the lantern, barn doors don't. I would think at $7 a wire, you'd soon pay for a pair of crimping pliers and consumables for making your own accessory bonds. Flints is your place.

[Jivemaster]

Barn doors -it's easy get some wire safeties and if needed some pop rivets, just leave enough slack to allow rotation but not to allow the assembly of doors to separate from the lantern body.

 

Gel frames are harder! people want to use the gel and frame as one piece when on ladders (etc) so they will need to be loose unless you fit new colour at floor level. A gel rack and a frame rack somewhere together?

[karl]

At the risk of starting another ladder-access/working-at-height debate how does your risk assessment handle this? To carry out this operation you'll be taking both hands off the ladder

But on a number of lantern designs removing/inserting the gel frame is in itself a two handed job. In some cases you can change the gel without removing the frame from the runners, so that has to be safer. A lot of focusing tasks require the use of two hands so I don't see changing a gel as being a huge additional risk above that of general rigging/focusing.

[MrBoomal]

Recently worked in a venue where the policy was to remove the barndoors every time a fixture is de-rigged. These are then stored on the opposite side of the room .

 

Why?

 

Iv'e never had a situation where having a barndoor is a disadvantage.

 

Absolute madness.

[The Seedage]

It's really annoying when you go up a ladder to gel a lantern only to find it has no gel frame. It's even worse when you then have to play hunt the frame all round the building to find the missing item.

 

Last year when I cleaned and tested the kit I did my best to reunite all of the lanterns with their gel frames, barndoors, etc. I have just taken everything down for this year's testing and almost half the lanterns have no gel frame in them. About a quarter of the fresnels have parted company with their barndoors. Having scoured the building I have found the missing bits on the SM's desk, on the fly floor, under a bench in the bar, basically all over the place.

 

So apart from wondering why people feel the need to strip lanterns of their accessories my real question is how do I stop this happening (apart from breaking people's fingers)?

 

I was thinking of finding some way of attaching them (certainly the gel frames if not the barndoors) so they can't easily be removed. Has anybody done this and if so how?

 

Back to the original, I found that the best way to combat is enforce the frames staying in the units, and keep either a spare frame for gel cutting, or a template table to be able to cut the gels.. What tends to happen is people nick the frames to cut the gel, and then leave them all over the place (typically where gel gets cut, or left etc...

[mac.calder]

Well... one solution - store the gel frames where you store your gel (pegs on the wall separated by size works for me).. Then when you are gelling up, you take the frames you need with you. When you sort out your "useful cuts vs rubbish" you put them all back on the hook. When you need to swap gels, you swap frames at the same time.

[tom_the_LD]

Just thinking, say you attached the gel frame by a safety. By drilling a hole through the frame for example and then fastening it to the yoke. Surely you have to remove the safety to swap the gel out anyway!? And as such I would imagine they would just get thrown down to the deck and then you end up losing safeties too!

 

As has been said best bet is to just store them all in a really obvious place so that people can see that's where the rest are kept and, with any luck, they may replace the frame with the rest of them.

[dosxuk]

We store all our frames and accessories (inc. barn doors, as we don't have enough for all our fresnels, so they generally get removed when the lanterns are derigged and stored here so we know exactly where they are, hopefully answering another posters question!) in the same filing cabinet as our gels.

 

As a live venue, most of our rig is pars, and we have a sufficient oversupply of frames meaning (unless you want to recolour the entire venue) you can often gel up beside the cabinet, go up to the rig and swap frames, collect the old frames together and put the gels back in their drawer and frames below.

[Just Some Bloke]

Open white is your enemy! People just throw the frame out of the lantern rather than the slightly longer option of taking the colour out and replacing the gel. What they don't remember, of course, is that all those frames on the floor then have to have the gels removed, replaced in the cupborad and the frames put somewhere so actually, in the long run, it would have been quicker to take the gel out and replace the frame.

 

I share your pain: it's my main bugbear and it makes me scream every time I go to a lantern with no frame. Nevertheless, the Technical Manager screaming every time he finds it thus still doesn't seem to fix the problem! :)