The efficiency of the load in and out of any show is directly related to the cable management of everyone involved,” says production manager/rigger Dano Rowley. The man is right. One of my pet peeves is a sloppy stage with cables strewn all over the place.
This summer I had a master electrician who wasn’t taking care of his cable management. Dano put a photo of his ugly cable mess by the dimmers and posted it on Facebook. It shamed this electrician. The load-ins and -outs were probably taking an extra hour because of the spaghetti-like mess on the floor. Lighting cable coils that blocked the stage access impeded other workers from setting up simultaneously. Within a week I taught the guy the proper way to set up dimmers and to touch a cable only once.
Don't Anger the LD
You may ask yourself, “now why does old Nook care about cable management? He’s the LD, not the tech.” Well, it’s like this.
I’m watching you. And if you are taking forever to cable trusses, test fixtures and get your gear up in the air, chances are that I’m a little pissed off because I can do your gig in half the time. Waiting on you means you’re cutting into my time. If you’re cutting into my programming time, you’re cutting into the amount of beautiful looks I can provide my client. If my work is compromised, I may lose future work. If that happens, chances are I won’t want to use you on my gigs. And I won’t want to use the company that provided your services.
Handling gear twice just shows me that you are new to stage work and I probably won’t like that. If I focus a leko once, I will not send you up on a truss to focus it somewhere else later. If you place a light where I have drawn it on a plot, you should never have to move it. So why do some electricians insist on touching the same cable so many times? They don’t have to. It shows incompetence. Let me explain.
In a typical scenario an electrician has stagehands run cable on to a truss and plug it in. Then he has them pull it out of a case and coil multiple looms on the floor creating a virtual sea of cables waiting to tangle like a bowl of spaghetti. Then he has to flip each coil upside down for the truss to go up in a vain attempt to avoid creating a bird’s nest of cable. Once the trusses are up in the air, he now plugs the cables into some dimmer racks in no particular order. Now he can test the gear to see if it works. Then when something doesn’t work, he has to lower the truss to troubleshoot the problem. You’ve now touched the same piece of gear multiple times, wasting time while denying other stage workers enough stage space to do their job.
Use a Fly Loop
I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t use a fly loop when they wire and fly their truss. In a nutshell, a fly loop consists of all the cable that will go from a flown truss to the ground. Say your front truss is going to trim at 30 feet. First run the cable out on the truss and plug it in. Then take each cable from the end of the truss and run the excess parallel to it for 15 feet and loop it back the other way another 15 feet to return it to the end of the truss. This loop of cable will disappear as the truss is flown. From the end of the loop, simply run the excess back to your dimmer area and coil it in a figure eight before plugging it into its proper receptacle. Notice you have now touched each cable once and you are done with it.
Because everything is plugged in, you can now turn everything on to see if it works while the truss is floating at head height. Is there a bad lamp? It’s a lot simpler to change when the truss is floating head-high. Got a moving light with a stuck gobo wheel? It’s a one-minute fix when you can stand there and slide the lid off to realign it. There’s no climbing, no need to lower a truss and no cable mess. It’s just common sense. Did I mention that I hate stopping my afternoon focus for someone to change a lamp or replace a moving light?
Reverse the procedure to load out. There’s no need for 10 stagehands to coil individual cables into individual boxes. Lay the cables back down in a fly loop. Whatever cable is on top of your figure-eight by the dimmers is the first cable you coil into a box. You may argue that there is no space on stage for a fly loop. Bull crap. I can always find room, so don’t even start with that silly argument.
Bring Plenty of Spares
You should always have plenty of spare cables as well as spare circuits on a truss, especially on a TV or trade show. When you are figuring out cable management, take the time to figure out exactly how you are going to circuit everything. Count the amount of AC jumpers and DMX cables you will need to make everything work and multiply that by 20 percent. Put the extra in a road case, because no matter what, you will find yourself short on these cables when you load in. Then you have to embarrass yourself by calling a warehouse and having to pay someone to drive the extra cable to the gig while you (and me, the guy watching you) wait. If you have a box full of extra cable, who cares? In the words of master electrician Ritchie Steffa, “I’d rather be looking at it than looking for it.”
Believe it or not, there are lots of rental companies who send out faulty multi cables. They just don’t fix their gear on a regular basis. So if you have not left a lot of spare circuits in your electrical layout you are boned. Now you have to use your spare multi cable (if you brought any) and may be in trouble, if the LD decides that he needs to move a few fixtures from one place to another.
I try to never move fixtures around, but in TV work, they constantly move cameras around. When they move cameras, I move lights so they are in the shot. If the electrician has not brought enough spare cable I cannot move my lights. Then I have to question myself why I am working with this electrician. I may even suggest to the rental company that they keep him in a back aisle of the warehouse for a few months.
Always figure out in advance where the client wants you to place your dimmers at a gig. More often than not, they want them out of the way, like in a back alley or down some distant hallway in an arena. The same goes for figuring out how much power your show requires and where you are going to get it from. Once you know both of these answers, you can calculate how much feeder cable (AC mains) and multi cable are required. Shortages of either of these can stall a load in. That and a sloppy cable job will lead to a shortage of future work for your company.
