Last Laugh

Day three and today is slightly different. Rather than a club night, what with it being a Sunday we have a comedy event instead. This one also finishes a lot earlier - 11pm so I will have a chance to catch up on some sleep before the final event in my calendar tomorrow. I am in charge of the lights which would have been great if it weren't for two things. 1) I have never been to a Last Laugh event before and thus have no idea what the setup will be. 2) My job actually involved putting up two Fresnel lights and gelling two of the install PAR cans red for 'atmostophere'. Once these had been focused and dimmed to an acceptable level, that was pretty much my job done for the night other than taking them down at the end.

In the meantime, I decided to try setting up my laptop with the drivers and programming to control the lights in the venue. I was expecting this to be somewhat of a plug and play exercise given that the DMX adapter is USB based, I assumed that it would have the drivers on it. I was mistaken and had to trawl the manufacturers website to find them. I managed to get it working eventually and playing with Freestyler which has the ability to be customised with backgrounds and custom buttons to run the show from. It is designed to be used by a touch-screen but as I don't have one of those, I had to make to with a mouse and a second normal monitor. I seem to rather enjoy just playing around with it and have found myself losing several hours to playing around with the settings trying to make it as usable as possible.

So an easy if not slightly dull (from a technical point of view) event although it gave me time to enjoy the comedy which was actually pretty good. It was made even more funny because I knew several members of the audience who were being ripped to shreds by the evening compère for the evening, Matt Reed. I even got a shout out from him at the end - even if he did think I was in charge of the sound, I'll take it!