Get In

I arrived early to help mark out the spacing for the Prosc arch stage and the band rostra as due to the confusion between the technical drawing, the venue's claims and my model box John and I decided it would be best if I marked up prior to the arrival of the steel deck to ensure it all fits correctly behind the projection screen. It can then be put down as soon as it arrives. In the end I marked up the Prosc stage which did fit and left us to negociate the band stage once this stage and the Prosc arch itself were in place. This definitely helped to save time especially due to the unforseen circumstance of the truck breaking down which meant we were running late by around 2 hours and with the absence of Amber a few things were also slowed. However, once it had arrived the unload was very speedy.  the Prosc went up pretty easily once screwed together and was sturdy enough with braces and flats for stability without needing to be wired to the lighting rig. The lateness of the truck impacted on our overall time due to the scheduled plotting, meaning after these tasks were completed boarding the orchestra rostra had to be done in darkness with head torches. This was really inconvenient as it took so much longer to do everything, in the case of the boards we couldn't see their arrangement dictated by numbers on their underside which meant alot of time was wasted. This meant that after Wednesday there was still much to do on the set.

Working in the dark would have been forgivable as I understand we are on a tight schedule and the van breaking down wasn't the fault of anyone, however the plotting ran over the following day by 2.5 hours which resulted in a rushed technical rehearsal and no full run as planned that evening. This was extremely annoying and quite rude considering as the set team had kept to their times, even more so our first full run through would be Friday morning  with an audience. This left virtually no time to correct parts of the set or costume alterations which was not fair and put unecessary pressure on our set and costume team.

Plotting in progress - finally fixing boards down and you can see the peeling paper on the set that needs to be taped down and the iron/ planks still need adding to the Pros decoration.

Nailing in planks - Grace and Aimee were around to help speed this on.

Hammering nails into planks - some needed a few as they  were warped.

Reflection:
This was a good learning experience of working in the conditions of different venues and how important it is to keep to a set schedule. Each venue has different rules, regulations and equipment that can soak up time if you are unaccustomed to it. This industry will always be collaborative which requires tolerance and patience in some cases however, it is also an industry where allowances sometimes need to be made for it to come together. In this case however the technical manager of the venue didn't always see it this way which meant our time was very restricted and we were lucky to complete everything for the matinee on Friday.