Perfect storms

What unforseen problem isn't a perfect storm of events?

After the technical problems last night I today experienced emotions I had never felt before. On the one hand I was disappointed because I felt like I let a lot of people down. It was like being on a football team and making a big fumble. There was also a sense of dread and feeling like I wanted everything to just go away. On the other hand, the rational part of me saw this event in terms of intersecting interests and goals. It was like one of those "making the decision to go to war in Vietnam/Iraq" stories: a collision of interests, experience levels and personalities causes decisions to be made that have unforseen consequences.

For example, I signed on naively thinking I was doing some straightforward projections. But then I find out I have 50 cues. So following the advice of one of the designers, we decide to use Qlab. Then because we want to make it easier on the show runner, we also put the sound cues in Qlab. So now things are getting complicated. I'm unable to change the software I use when Qlab proves flaky for projections because then we'd have to use a CD player for the sound. And that would require having another person in the booth. And in the end, I'm not just designing projections, I'm also responsible for technically managing both audio and video in a system that I've never used before. I also ended up making judgments that were reasonable, but proved to be wrong. After further compression, I got the problematic video section down to 7 MB. That's almost absurdly small. The computer we're using has almost 250 MB of video RAM + 1 GB of system RAM. Theoretically it should all work easily. Of course, things never work theoretically so we did test the system. But despite having worked four times the day before, the system failed.

I think that's why the entire experience was extremely disappointing and discouraging but not crushing. Artistically, everything I did turned out well. I got my cues right, done on time and down to a reasonable size. The problem was a technical one tempered by inexperience. It occurred because I allowed myself to get sucked into functioning as a technical director/manager in spite of myself—a position I would never knowingly put myself in. Bringing in the computer upset the normal ecology of the group. I knew that I was supposed to manage my part of the show. But because of my inexperience, I didn't know how to manage my interaction with others. Knowing what I do now, I would have run only video on the computer until we were sure the system was stable. That would have given us more options for changing software if required. I now understand why segments in the industry function as they do. You are being judged by one thing so it has to work. It makes sense that if you're a DP you'd be very worried if you had to depend on someone in post to define your project's "look." It also makes sense why certain attitudes can be necessary. As Tina Fey says, "bitches get things done." I think in this case, we were given a show that was technically more difficult than we thought. We needed someone to manage the entire backstage system, someone who could say "if this doesn't work, we need to bring in one other person to run audio"—someone experienced enough to understand that we were dealing with economic and management concerns as well as technical and artistic ones.