Freshers Week

There was very little chance of me being bored this week with the plethora of events happening. Saturday night was the official start to the week with Pop Tarts and as this event is almost guaranteed to have a fire alarm go off at some point, I decided to avoid being stage manager and went for the cowardly general crew option. As it turned out, there was nothing to worry about. Everything went to plan and there were no major occurrences - typical.

Sunday was a special event - Playa del Sol featuring Jaguar Skills. I was down for AV for this event (a first for me) and for the most part, it went really well. It's not often people tell you that you are doing a good job but I had a camera feed pointing to the decks and a DVD and couple of slides for the pre and post DJs. I was using Arkaos Grand VJ and it is really intuitive and easy to use and in comparison with the other software on the system (another version of Arkaos and Resolume) it seems just as powerful. I had some trouble getting the output in colour to the projectors due to an issue with the scaler (which converts sources to VGA required by the matrix which can route the inputs and outputs). Thankfully, most of the comments were that the black and white looked really good and most thought it was a deliberate artistic thing so I think I got away with it - not bad for my first time!

The final leg of this 3 day stint was general crewing (again) at Population. This time it was deliberate as I was meeting my housemates on their night out. It was a really good night in the end and much better than I was expecting really. The DJ was playing some really good tunes and we all decided that it was one of the best nights out we'd had in a long time.

As I am not really a fan of the Tuesday Club (which most find very odd as it is a highly respected night around the world for it's genre) I decided to make Tuesday my day off. Wednesday was my debut as stage manager at Roar and I found out on the night that it wasn't going to be as easy as I'd hoped. There was an event running in the Fusion until 10pm which meant that we had just 30 minutes to make the changeover before doors. Early on in the night, I managed to snap one of the mounting points for the projector screens with surprisingly little force when I was opening the shutters. They get bashed around quite a lot but the ease at which they came off was quite shocking given that they could have hit someone on the head.

On top of this, we were one general crew short and had one very inexperienced junior as the second which meant that I had to re-do almost everything he did and things that should have taken at most 20 minutes took upwards of an hour. To make matters worse, the event in the Fusion overran by 20-25 minutes meaning we had less than ten minutes to changeover - a physical impossibility, even with the extra crew from that event lending a hand. We opened a little bit late but not so much as to cause any real loss. People don't generally turn up until at least 30 minutes after doors anyway so all was okay.

Thursday saw the debut of the new club night Live Wire. I had already got my lighting rig built from last night thanks to some negotiation with the lampy so all I really had to do was programme the desk. It was a great night overall and the bands were really good. We had new gobos for the lights with the Live Wire logo on them so I had to fit four of those before the event. I had never done this before and the practical side of it is very different from the theory which was explained to us very simply as "make sure you put it in the right way". Thankfully, help was on hand and they all worked beautifully in the end. I was a bit disappointed with the lack of smoke which meant that the lights couldn't be seen particularly well and after the bands had finished, they closed the curtains cutting out 90% of the lights and I was supposed to somehow light a disco with the 6 moving heads and 6 parcans on the dancefloor. If someone had told me about this earlier I could have done something about it but as usual, there was a lack of communication and I had to make do. I really don't like it when people expect me to be able to do things at the last minute as I instinctively panic rather than thinking clearly. If they had told me beforehand then I would have had time to set things up but expecting me to respond in a split second is very difficult with the limited experience I've had. On the plus side, I got a free Live Wire hoodie and everyone thought the ight went really well. Here's hoping that next week is a sell out too!

Onto Friday and my last working event of the week. Lack of sleep is catching up on me but I am on lasers tonight which doesn't normally require too much effort. This event is Freshers Mania however and is a big budget event with hired in lights and two lasers. The lighting rig was epic and very blinder heavy forcing you to avert your eyes for some parts if you didn't want to be left seeing spots. The lasers required a little more concentration than usual to synchronise the two heads but with the hired in DF-50 hazer which filled the room with smoke with amazing efficiency, they looked awesome when they worked together and produced some amazing effects. Sadly they cost round £2500 and are a little out of our price range at the moment so we will have to stick with the rubbish Neutron Stars for the time being. I really enjoy events when they look good and it gives you great pleasure when things go right. Chicane were headlining after they replaced Mr Hudson at the last minute and despite my scepticism, they were really good live. I'd only heard poppiholla before and as far as I was concerned, anyone who attempted to mess with this amazing Sigur Ros track was to be severally harmed.

My two favourite events of the week were Playa del Sol and Freshers Mania because they all looked so good. I wish space could look like this every week but sadly the heroes of the night: the MAC 700s, the DF-50 and the extra laser were all hired in and have to go back. The amount of light that the MAC 700s give off is simply incredible and they were drowning out the 500s and 600s we had next to them. Again however, the asking price for a MAC 700 profile seems to be around the £11000 mark compared to about £2500 for a MAC 250 Entour which is what we usually use. If any pictures turn up I will post them here for you all to see just how amazing it was so stay tuned!