Fashion Show Load Out

Last thursday, I got to go on my first real out of the shop project. Scott had just finished running a fashion show which he said "got really stupid." What he meant by that was that it was a large show where stupid stuff kept changing and he had to work with stupid people. Like for instance something simple like saying that you need a few extra lights on the overhead truss work can mean an extra hour of work because you have to get power up there which means probably running an extra line of mult, then getting a dimmer and signal up so that you can turn on and off the light, etc... Thats why lighting rigs are always carefully planned in advance. The other thing that made this particular event stupid was the video guy was a dumbass. First off he didnt actually watch all of his videos before the show (basic common sense) so that when he played them back he didnt realize when they were gonna stop. Also, he couldnt crossfade his videos for some stupid reason, so he ended up starting and stopping them which looked real bad. Lastly he was positioned in the balcony, his projectors were on truss above the stage, and they were projecting on to screens on stage. To interface with his projectors from the control, he ran VGA cable. If you know anything about video, thats really stupid. Youre gonna get such a substantial voltage loss over that distance that its gonna look like crap. 

Anyways, those are my reflections on the show. What I actually did was to help with load out. That means taking everything down, putting everything back in its place, coiling the cable, and loading the truck. I am not etcp certified in rigging and i also dont have much expierence in arena rigging or truss structures so my job was to focus on the stage and balcony lights, and the cable that went along with them, while the rest of the crew took down the truss structure over the runway. What i really ended up doing was coiling a butt load of cable (for reference: 1 butt load = 1.2 metric crap tons). I started on the stage, putting away some color blast trx units, then i went into dmx land... I pulled and coiled probably well over 1000' of dmx. Next came the super fun part... Mult. Mult sucks. Mult stands for multicable and its basically just 6 power cables bound into one and its about that heavy. Its basically easier to run and then fan out. but anyways i got to coil about 500' of that the another 200' of 30 amp motor cable, then about 200' of feeder cable. i got quite the workout doing all of that, but in the end we got the load out done in about 4 hours which was pretty good given the amount of equipment present.

attached are 3 pictures of the beginning middle and end of the load out.