I just got back from taking a cruise. I didn’t go for a relaxing vacation, mind you, I went to work. There’s a new trend now where bands are chartering these ships and creating a musical ride for a few days. This particular ride consisted of 2,500 diehard fans who boarded the vessel for four days of alcohol infused, music blaring, full-on debauchery. That is for the people who paid. For those of us who get paid to control the theatrical lighting on one of these floating tubs, it’s quite an exercise in futility. I believe the majority of these ships start out with some pretty sweet light rigs. Somewhere along the way they seem to go to hell in a bucket.
That Queasy Feeling…
The upkeep of these once-divine lighting systems is pretty non-existent. The bottom line seems to be that once the ships are out to sea and a show is programmed, nobody wants to dump a dime into maintaining fixtures. A typical showroom day may have bingo games in the morning followed by the afternoon magic act, leading up to the evening’s performance of some musical act. A ship may just have two lone lighting techs, but they are never in the same room together. Reason being that somebody has to work the lights in the lounge while another works the showroom.
The ship does provide food and a whopping $2,000-per-month paycheck for these techs. This may be a deal for an up-and-coming tech to earn while he learns. But for the guest LD that I am, I gotta laugh just to keep from crying.
When I advanced the gig, they e-mailed me a beautiful light plot showing me a well-configured design. The showroom had 60 Vari*Lite VL2500 fixtures, 10 VL3500 spots and some Cyberlights from Barco’s High End Systems. A grandMA console was listed on the plot, and I was thrilled. I was actually thinking that I might just be able to clone my whole show into the console, then sit back and have a four-day easy ride. But then I walked into the joint.
Wanted: More Faders
The first lie I encounter is sitting in the control room. I have a grandMA light for a console. They work great, but it has half the faders that I require for a good rock show. Now that I’m out at sea, it’s a little late to acquire a good desk.
What the hell, I figure, I’m on a boat with a cold beer. I look my tech in the eye and say “Fire up the fixtures, mate, let’s take the rig for a ride.” He looks me straight in the face and says, “You have to do that.” I’m a little confused now, so I need to inquire why I should be the one that has to find all the breakers and switch them all on. He replies that he doesn’t really know where the breakers for the fixtures are, but there is a dimmer room per se, if I’d like to snoop around.
Now I’m confused. He explains that, first, I have to turn on all the fixtures on the console, then lamp them all on. So I figure “Ahh, they must have some non-dim relays utilized to turn the power on to the moving lights.” So I fire up the console and start searching the patch.
I’ve never seen anything like this. There must be 1,000 fixtures patched in the show file. Triple the amount hung. There are pages full of macros that activate channels which trigger pyro cues, smoke machines, confetti drops, even macros triggering trapezes to fly in. All kinds of neat stuff I can use to kill people simply by pressing the wrong button on my console. And all the palettes are locked somehow.
“Open Sesame”
Every macro, cue list, and preset palette is locked with a password so nobody can mess with the show file. I finally get to the bottom of the patch and find 8 channels that are labeled, “1st Electric, Balcony movers” etc. Yup, these channels activate a relay hidden in some dark room that will apply the electricity to the movers I so desire. I then find macros that, when hit with my finger, apply electricity to the fixtures. Viola, I’m in. Thirty minutes later, I have everything powered up.
Nobody knows the password to unlock the palettes. The NSP processors are locked in another room somewhere, and my tech not only doesn’t know where, he’s unsure of what I am even talking about. There are no patch sheets anywhere, so starting a new blank show is impossible for me without taking about 48 hours to ring out the system.
The tech is almost in tears as he begs me not to wipe his show from the console. He’s not sure if it is backed up on a floppy disc, and he’s afraid to change shows. The USB drive does not work on this desk and we have no floppy disks. So I copy his show file to a new name since, basically, that’s the only way I can turn on the lights anyway.
Not Exactly Ship-Shape
I turn on the fixtures and start testing them out. Out of 86 yoke lights, I have an even 60 that have light coming out of them. Mostly dim brown light. The VL3500 bulbs emit a beam the equivalent of a Maglite with a color changer on them. Out of 20 Cybers, I have 11 that even turn on but have broken color flags. I ask the tech if he has any new bulbs and more beer. For once, he had the right answer. We start changing out blown bulbs.
After swapping six bulbs that were bad, I fire up these fixtures. There’s a reason these lights had bad bulbs. Each one had either a gobo or a color wheel stuck in it. Apparently they sometimes run short of bulbs, so they simply stole them from broken lights and put them in working fixtures that needed a lamp. My tech informs me that he is a whiz at fixing Martin fixtures. But he is lost on the Vari*Lites. He’s also a Hog guru, he says. But they swapped out his Hog three months ago, and he only had a four-hour crash course on this desk.
I am indeed boned, but I’m not afraid. I write a bunch of new color presets and focus a few positions. Within an hour, I have a punt page written.
Of course, the console is in a control room high above the balcony. There is no way to see the fixtures to think about getting a nice focus. I deem this not necessary, as the sheer volume of alcohol consumption by the audience will far exceed any need for artistic focuses of my light beams.
Smoke on the Water
As the band comes on stage for sound check, I ask the tech if he’s got any hazers. “Sure, all kinds,” he says. He shows me the channels on the console and I hit ‘em. A soft plume of haze filters out from stage left as the artist walks up to his mic. He then leaves me to pursue why the F-100s are not working. Within seconds, they are spewing smoke everywhere, and nobody onstage can see. And, of course, I have no control to extinguish them. Minutes later, I am introduced to the ship captain and his fire marshal. It’s gonna be a long cruise.
