By now, most of you should know the number one rule in the entertainment business: “Never Assume.” By this we mean, never assume a lot of stuff. You can never really assume you are going on a gig until you step foot on a plane to take you there. You can’t assume that because you spent days designing something, your client will like it. And you can’t assume that everyone responsible for pulling your gear for this gig tested everything before it left the shop.
Don’t Assume
“I dunno, it worked in the shop, I swear.” How many times have I heard this? Too many. Gear may work fine in the shop, but did you actually physically attach all the pieces that will work with it at the actual gig, or did you just assume? I have seen opto-splitters light up and look great when plugged in at a bench. Looks like they are passing DMX, but when I get on site, they are actually kaput. If you didn’t test it by actually setting up the system entirely as you would on the road, how do you know? You won’t. And I bet you will pay whole-heartedly for your decision to save those three minutes one day.
Due to the hard working schedules of lighting shops, we all know that certain gear needed for a show isn’t always available while you are prepping a system. This is understandable. Nobody wants to go buy another expensive snake to go from the console to the dimmer area if you know one is coming back to the shop the day your show leaves. This is a no-brainer. But what proves that you indeed do not have a brain is the fact that when the snake did come in, nobody opened the box and tested it. They just assumed it worked on the last show or someone would have mentioned it to the shop. Wrong.
Dropping the Ball
I can testify to this today. I am in a rehearsal studio with my new snake. When I was at the lighting shop preprogramming, I ran Ethernet lines from my consoles to the media servers, dimmers, etc. Ran MA-Net and Art-Net protocols to different places. But for ease of programming at the shop, I never hooked up the whole system as it was designed by the techs. I was gone before the real snake showed up. But I blame myself, not the crew. I know better. I dropped the ball. Today we have just spent two hours wondering why my console cannot talk to the media servers backstage. Not sure if I have a bad Ethernet switch, snake, data processor or a number of other bad lines. We assumed we could run Art-Net and MA-Net down the same fiber snake because we saw it work before. We find out way later that we should be able to but can’t today.
So we go about it a different way and, sure enough, we can get it to work. Now there is a second multiconnector in the snake. This particular lighting company uses these connectors from old analog snakes for intercom lines. I seriously doubt anyone ever checks these lines in between shows, because I cannot plug this one in anywhere today. It appears to have been run over by something heavy like a cable box or a forklift. My round connector is somewhat oval. I need my large dimmer guy and some channel locks to remold this piece of lead back to something I can possibly plug in. Both ends are bad and I cannot plug in either without 300 lbs. of stagehands holding the rack from tipping over while I shove.
I think the same about cables in my light rig. Many lighting vendors are good at checking their cables upon return to the shop. In the ‘80s, when I worked as a young tech, not a single piece of cable went from a case to the storage bin without being tested for bad circuits. I think this still applies in many shops, or at least I hope it does. But I have a bigger gripe than just having a bad circuit in a multicable—and that’s having a bent connector on a cable (making it extremely hard to plug in) show up on the first day. Of course, every tech wishes the guys in the shop would test their cables ahead of time to weed out these nuisance connectors. But if you did not plug them in and see them work while you were prepping your show, it’s on you. You left the shop with crappy connectors and now have to fix them on the road. This week I have a couple of motor cables out here that I simply could not plug in. They had metal burrs in the grooves of the sleeves, and I was not happy. I had to stop what I was doing, borrow a file from someone, and take 15 minutes out of my day to work on this metal connector until it could plug in again. Simple rule for the shop guys who pull cable: If a particular cable is quite difficult for you to plug in while testing, it’s really gonna suck for the stagehand to plug it in on site. Put that cable in the “rainy day fix me pile.”
Test Lights Together
Each lighting fixture these days has a lot of different modes to run in. Testing moving lights individually then putting them in a case for the next show just doesn’t cut it. To test lights properly one should set up a bunch of them (preferably with the cables you will use on that particular gig) and look at them together. The main reason to do this is to compare light outputs so you can weed out old brown bulbs. But it’s also to check modes that are set on the fixtures. I may have 10 Sharpy fixtures in a row, and when I turn them all to red they do what I ask. But once I am out here and start running cues, I see that a few of them are running sluggishly or do not bump colors at the same time. Nobody in the shop checked every fixture to make sure they were in the same color or pan/tilt mode. And now somebody has to head up on a truss to correct this gaffe.
Physical hardware is the biggest culprit that can be overlooked. I doubt there is a single reader of this column who has not gone on a show site at some time and realized they did not have enough truss bolts to fly their rig. I was guilty of this once. I figure I can read my plot and count every truss connection, then multiply by four the amount of bolts I need. Wrong, I will always forget some corner block. So I always figure out what I need and add 20% more for that error margin. My other pet peeve is the cheeseborough clamps we use to attach pipes to trusses. If you don’t check the threads and weed out the bad clamps in the shop, you will hate life later. It takes mere seconds to twist a bad wing nut and weed it out.
Nook Schoenfeld, Editor Emeritus of PLSN, is filling in for Chris Lose this month.
