Downton Abbey gig

Last night was a random one-off in Providence, RI. It was a white-tie affair - dinner for big PBS donors, followed by a sneak preview of the first hour of the final season of Downton Abbey.

I don't have a copy of the show, so please don't ask. :) But this was quite a fabulous location, with great food, at the Roger Williams casino. I was the video lead and had a great seat.

I am a major gear head, so it was quite ironic that I wished I could have replaced the rather large pile of gear that went into a single screen and two PA speakers for a single computer to projector connection. Realizing that PBS might not have wanted to provide a video file for the screening to cut down on piracy options, I wrote some scripts in Qlab (of course) during my dinner break to use the DVD player application and control the full screen options, etc, and run that all in a cue list. You know, should I ever run into this kind of situation again... Would have been so much simpler and less poking at things that don't work the first time.

-brian

Two Shakespeares for the Price of One

Now that "Psycho Beach Party" is done and I am over my hours, I am back to NVCC, where I will be sound designing two Shakespeare shows that are in rep over the course of a couple of weeks.  I'm excited to see some of my students starting to pick up Qlab over the course of these shows.

The two shows we will be presenting are "Much Ado About Nothing" (set as a Mad Men-era piece) and a more classical edition of "Romeo & Juliet," which opens tonight.

I was surprised that R&J actually stole my interest in the process of sound design, and let me solve some common workflow issues in sound design and the limitations of our space and gear. There were a lot of little flourishes I was able to make to help reinforce the sense of place for each scene. I enjoy trying to make things as real as I can and have the opportunity to do so. Sometimes that is literal - like my use of bird and bug sounds that are indigenous to the Italian countryside (or figuring out how the heck a peat fire differed from a wooden log fire for "Dancing at Lughnasa" last year). Sometimes that means giving the audience expected cues with how they perceive a sound to be - the famous example being a gunshot in the movies or tv sounds nothing like one in real life.

For this show, the latter situation is in the grave at the end of the show. I wanted to give that feeling of being deep in the earth, trapped away from everything, locked in position as the world slowly spins on its axis. So I went with some sounds that are not unlike what you would hear on the Starship Enterprise - sort of an ominous engine hum. The trick is not to make it draw your attention, and most of the audience may not even notice it is there. Psycho acoustics are fun.

But the real fun belongs to my birds. I found some samples of parakeets that are native to the area of the play, both male and female. So during one of the scenes, there is a whole subplot involving a courting pair of parakeets that call to each other, move around the room, and then fly off to stage right.

My solutions: because these two shows are in our black box theatre, the sound system in there isn't quite as good - we have zero outboard gear available. Luckily, since all of the sound is playback, I took this as an opportunity to learn about effects and audio processing in Qlab. That was how I tuned the room, something I saw Pilobulous do a couple of years ago when I did audio for their tour when it came to the Quick  Center. I also finally figured out how to do multiple sound outputs that could be controlled independently through the same hardware - one for, say, soundscapes and another for cues, which run at different volume ranges. I designed a production of "Merry Wives" over the summer and wished I had thought of that sooner in the design & tech process.

-brian

Psycho Beach Party (UNH)

This is my second semester at UNH, and we are about to open "Psycho Beach Party" - the first of our two shows for the semester (looks like I'm running out of hours this semester to get involved on the second show). One of the proposed design ideas was to have actual sand on stage...anyone who has been in the position to have to execute and build a show that takes place on a beach knows the conversations I've been having over this semester.  :) This was also a rare opportunity to have to build a building with a roof on stage, which is usually the bane of lighting designers (but they seem to be making it work on this show).

It's my birthday and I'm covered in sawdust...

The real enjoyment I am getting out of this show is working with the student sound designer, Terrence, who's a sweet kid with lots of ideas and chops. We've had a lot of discussions on soundscaping and, of course, designing in Qlab. The audio gear is a little limited there, and locked down, but along with the rest of the student sound team (Kyle and Sam) we've been able to pull out some great effects and tricks. There were a lot of spreadsheets to help keep things consistent from show to show. It's looking good!

Last season, when I worked on "School for Wives" here, I had to build a shop before we could build a show. This time around, in the interest of further organizing things, we took inventory of the whole space, and, among other things, color coded all the cables and lighting instrument barrels. We were in a bit of a holding pattern early in the season, getting things approved, so what do I do when I'm faced with free time? That' right, I clean!

-brian

Orange is the New Black

Greetings from Boston! I will be here for a couple of days working on an event that is a luncheon benefiting a women's shelter called Rosie's Place. I'm on Team Video, the governor and first lady will be here, and the keynote speaker will be Piper Kerman, the author of the book "Orange is the New Black" - you might have heard, but they're making a TV show about this...

Being "Indecent" (at Yale!)

A few weeks ago I got a call from Yale, asking me if I could come in and be the A2 for a show they had opening.  Just wrangle the wireless mics, but they didn't know exactly how many they'd have. Things were still up in the air. Could be 3, could be 18.

Well...

This has turned into quite a production for me. This was supposed to be a little side gig for me, outside of my time at UNH, during the time when NVCC would be quiet and the season wouldn't have really started yet. Instead, my little side gig is paying me overtime for the time I'm there!  I'm hitting 90+ hour weeks - luckily the two schools are so close and I only have to go up to NVCC once or twice before November.

The play is called "Indecent," and is the story of the production of "God of Vengeance" by Sholem Asch in 1907. This is the world premier, and after this month's run it will be moving to La Jolla Playhouse in California, and then on to the Vineyard Theatre in NYC! In all these years, it's my first play that will be headed to Off Broadway. The cast is amazing - in talent and in spirit, and I'm extremely lucky to be here with them. I have to spend a lot of time in close quarters with all of them, and am the only tech with a workstation actually IN the dressing room. There is a true ensemble here, and it's wonderful to feel that they have included me in their ranks.

The show is quite demanding. It is being treated as a period piece, and so all of the tech has to be hidden. I've been customizing mics for every actor and musical instrument, to be as hidden as possible (12 in all).

As if that weren't enough, there is a ton of video and automated moving set pieces and rigging through the show. The music is outstanding, and is musically directed by Aaron Halva and Lisa Gutkin (she's got a Grammy from her work with the Klezmatics, among other titles)...really, everyone's resume is impressive. Every single one. This has been quite a talent pool. I haven't stopped being emotionally touched every performance.

Of course, the thing that everyone will be talking about will be the thing that demands my extra attention - every night it will RAIN 500 GALLONS at the end of the show. Yup. It's impressive (and means doubling up on moisture protection for those actors' microphones)! The crew here has been very supportive of my role here, and getting me what I need. 

But man, I need sleep...

The workflow I've developed for this show, aside from having an extremely organized workspace, is my laptop with a separate login on it for this show. My time is limited, running from theatre to theatre, so I do all of my prep at the end of the night, so I when I walk in I only have to pull out my laptop, plug it into the cables I've installed, and load up a user profile that automatically brings up notes from the prior show that have been emailed to me, and my digital script which is legible in the dark, containing all of my notes and cues. When my days are this long, working smarter is the only option!

-brian

Wedding Photos are in!

A few years ago, I met a girl who was TD for the show I was hired to mix FoH. Her name was Mary, and we got married in July!

Thank you to Jeanette, RJ, Alex, and all of our other theatre, film, and music friends who helped pull off an amazing night, with all of the rest of our friends and family.

-brian

Shakespearean Sitcoms

This summer I'm working on three or four shows. But the one I'd really like to mention quickly is "Merry Wives of Windsor." I'm teaming up once again with my good friend John Regis, whom I started working with on "Wizard of Oz" last Spring. We did "Fiddler on the Roof" with the 8th graders this Spring. But over the summer he does the high school program at Calhoun school in NYC, and he asked me to come and work on Merry Wives for lighting and sound.

The kicker? It is set as a '70s sitcom. Complete with laugh track. Yup. It's different and zany, and we're having fun with it. The end scene, where the whole cast pranks Falstaff...we really pull the full Dumbo, with the trippiness of music, dance, ballet-style dance lights (the entire stage is a thrust, so the audience is getting hit with lights too) and gobos galore. Lots of fun.

My digital prompt book is easier this time around, because John presented me with his whole edited script as a Google doc. I don't really watch the show - with no SM, I'm bent down scrolling my iPad, my other hand on the Qlab "Go" button, firing lights and all of the laugh track cues. My long train commute is giving me all the programming time I need.

-brian

Hairspray, x2

This season is just not letting up. I'm getting married this summer, and we are paying for the wedding ourselves. Which means we're not doing the typical $36,000+ American wedding (we are kind of not into that anyway) and we are trying to pay for it in cash. So I'm...working. A lot.

I am designing/building two totally separate productions of the show "Hairspray". (If things pan for one of my director friends, I'll be doing the show a third time, next Spring.) The first show was luckily just an 8th grade production, because I was the technical director and built the set, sound engineer and designer, AND the lighting designer. It almost killed me, but hey, you do what you have to, right? The kids got into building the set, as did their parents. Combined with building "School for Wives" at UNH, I've never been covered in so much sawdust!

Teaching junior high kids to paint faux finishes (jail)

Found materials and ripping off another production...I just had to show them how to do it. :)

That was the Jr. version of the show, of course. On to the full version, which went into tech two weeks later! This is my first big show in the main stage space at NVCC, so there was a bit of a learning curve in designing the sound system and mixing the live orchestra, to figure out how the normal configuration worked or didn't for our needs, and growing it from there. Luckily, a bunch of my sound cues were already designed, hahaha!

This version, of course, has the big can of hairspray that explodes at the end of the show. I just bounced down the final version of the sounds for that, and am now firmly in the belief that I need to integrate the sound of depth charges into my designs much more often. I think I found the right frequency that shook the space just right. :)

I didn't work on the set, thank goodness, but here are some photos, for comparison (though there really isn't any, LOL):

Camera look familiar? :) I got to have some fun doing some voiceover work for the TV news report:



-brian

"School for Wives"

After the Fairfield University gig wound down, I got a call from the University of New Haven to come in a TD their big spring show: "School for Wives." This is really the first show I've had to oversee and build, on this level, by myself.  Most of my shows are tours, and when I get them, it's just needing to be hinged and coffin locked together. For "Dancing at Lughnasa," Mary took lead on the set pieces, and I handled more of the electrics and audio. So this was a big shift, starting with a shop that had a pile of wood covering the floor that was as high as my knees, and having to make sense of that. Here is the before, including a panoramic photo:

This is literally what I walked into on the first day. So, before we could build the show, we had to build a shop! 

Much better! Organizing things is a big part of what I do and offer, and this was a fun challenge.

They already have an adjunct who takes care of the lighting, and, being a school with a very strong music and studio program, a very capable student who takes care of the audio end of things.  

When I first met with the designer, who is a student, I was told that there would be a wall, and towers & scaffolding, grass, and a moving water feature. Well, this has been quite the adventure, and flying a wall that big (well, flying half of it and assembling in the middle, since we don't have a fly space and we were rigging to the battens for stability) was a chore. But hey, we had towers we could climb to get into positions we could work on the wall from.  

Why yes, that IS mirror fabric you are seeing, and high gloss paint on the deck.  

Great kids, and I was proud to help them along in building their new program!

-brian

Spring, 2015

After such a difficult Autumn, here I am, doing it again...

This Spring finds me Technical Director for "School for Wives" at University of New Haven, "Hairspray" for a middle school in Fairfield, "Fiddler on the Roof" (and events overall) at a school in NYC, Sound Designer for a different production of "Hairspray" at another college in Waterbury (my NYC school may be doing "Hairspray" next year too...), in addition to the usual litany of smaller projects. This is why I have a separate hard drive for my "design" work - fast Firewire 800 external drive boosts system performance when used as a scratch disc for video or audio. It is also becoming my Audio SFX drive, where I am building quite a little library of sounds. Looking into audio library and database options...

The interesting thing is that I'll be doing a lot more carpentry this season than I've ever done before.  Not quite sure how I feel about that, but it's an exciting set of skills I am learning...which involves building an 18'x32' wall.  Go big, or go home!

As a side note, I won a contest last month for having the "worst tour nightmare" as judged by Chamsys, the lighting company that makes MagicQ.  I almost died on tour with my friends on the Pain of Salvation tour a couple of years ago.  For my trouble, I got some new hardware shipped to me from the UK - the ability to run lights via a USB to DMX adapter for my computer.  I can't wait to learn this and integrate it with my work in Qlab. I already run most of my lighting from Qlab - now to just get that pesky lighting board out of the way!

-brian

It's the Power of Love

Happy New Year!  Sadly, I still haven't gotten to rest. But I just did an awesome gig last night with the Power of Love, a Huey Lewis and the News tribute act, at the Sinclair in Cambridge, MA. My job was directing the lighting while I mixed a video wall on the fly. We had one rehearsal, just before Christmas, and made some content changes.  Below is the result. I used a combination of QLab and VDMX to mix the video, controlled via OSC over a wifi network I brought and my iPad.

This was a challenging gig for me, but worth it. As the band finished their encore, I collapsed into a chair in the control booth, practically panting, I was so exhausted from keeping the show flowing and interesting behind the band. What a rush!

-brian