A long day

I spent seven hours today teching the show. I remember we teched Shim Ch'ong in a week, but for this, it was one day. Teching means figuring out all the lighting, sound, video and other cues... making sure sound comes in at the right level, making sure everyone has cues straight, practicing transitions, that sort of thing. It's a lot like editing with real live people. Sometimes, scenes go practically in slow motion and then you repeat things over and over. It makes things automatic and then become backgrounded. Maybe the transparency of the machine style aesthetic stems from backgrounded derived through perfect repetition.

It was fun watching our director at work. It reminded me of Sam Raimi's comment about directing Spiderman. He said that one of the hardest parts was keeping track of everything—a shot here and a shot there and how they would all fit together. A lot of what the director does is keep track of what's happening and whether it makes sense. Much of it is just maintaining logical connections between events—for example, does a character know such and such already, or where do the characters go next?

When I first got there we made the last minute decision to put the audio cues in Qlab: it makes the show-runner's job much easier. The problem: I know practically nothing about Qlab. It was sort of fun having the pressure to make the system work. No one outside of the booth is going to care about your technical problems—they just want things to perform. A performance mentality permeates everything at a theater. The show must go on and such.

As a designer, I realize that I have to attend at least two things: the designer's run-through and teching the show. I also learned that going cue-to-cue means literally that. Somehow I thought it meant going from beginning to end. It actually means you jump from one cue to the next (a lighting cue to a sound cue, for example). God, I just don't know anything. I do know that designers number or letter their cues. Normally your cues might go A, B, C, D... or 10, 20, 30, 40.... Then if you have to change things you add numbers as needed—A1, or A2, for example. But since I did my cues on the computer I just named them. It seems like it's easier to run the show when you see "Hi there Bubba" instead of cue A. But on a bigger show when you have the stage manager calling the cues I guess they need to be numbered.

I also realized that I should put a few more things in my bag next time. I was alert enough to bring audio connections and my script. The script is everything. Duh. I should also bring a flashlight. Theaters are dark and it's hard to see projector controls on the ceiling. Duh. Also, pray. The God of children, beasts and the ignorant looked upon with me with favor. There was an unsecured wireless connection at the theater so it was easy to install my tablet driver and Qlab onto the show computer. I could have done the install without it I think, but it made it much much faster and easier.