Monday, August 28, 2006

La prise de la Bastille

The onion remains trapped in Attached-to-the-wall-prison! Prepare yourselves! Today you are liberators!

Okay, well, that may have been a bit theatrical. Too bad. Deal with it.

Onion Prison
This is a picture of an onion. The onion is in a wire basket. The wire basket is attached to the wall. My LED flashlight shines brightly. Word.

Pianissimo

A weekend - er, Saturday afternoon - at Kate's parents in Redding had me taking pictures for no reason whatsoever. I had my new flashlight with me, so I started messing around with some off-camera lighting.

A zebra trots along the plains
Well, I don't think it comes as a surprise that this is a photo of some piano keys. The nice thing about this shot - and indeed most of the shots from this weekend - is that they required almost no post-production.

The hard shadows cast by the LED flashlight are quite a spectacle. I'll post some more.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Another one bites the dust

CATS closed on Saturday night. We struck Saturday night. I slept most of Sunday. CATS has been a pain in my ass for 10 weeks. Don't get me wrong, there is certainly the part of my that is sad to see it go - but all in all I wasn't really happy with my contribution to the production.
I probably would have been much happier if I'd had a full week to write the cues and if we'd had the pit for the full week as well. Instead I ended up with a show which only had half the cues I wanted it to - and the signal problems that I ran caused some wildly unreliable behavior from the hazers.
From a technical perspective we had two weak performances. Opening night and the first matinee were pretty bad. Opening night the fire marshall killed our Mojo - wreaking havoc on the crew's energy. The first matinee we have no excuse for, we were just off. Otherwise the show ran very tight - the cues looked great and the performances ran rather smoothly.

The set. In Red.
I spent some of the downtime before the matinee taking some final photos of the set
(under lights) for my own documentation. Here we have a partially lit cyc and warmly lit set. oooooh.

I don't like being glad to see a show close - I prefer the wistful melancholy that accompanies the closing of a show I'm truly proud of. Never the less - another one bites the dust.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Ghostie! The friendliest ghost-light.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Humble yourself in awe of my latest creation. I hereby bring to the end the months of anticipation and longing you have, no doubt, experienced. I present to you, in all of its glory and majesty, a creation of divine inspiration - I give you: The new ghost-light.

The new ghost light
Ooooohhhh.....

Ghosty was once a humble sheet of plexi-glass - discarded in a pile of 1/4" ply. I sanded down the plexi to give it the translucent look it has now - then I cut out a body and arms. I secured the arms to the body with machine screws (yes - he's posable), and then further fastened the whole thing to the ghost light. After a little while I scaled him back from a 60W lamp to the 15W lamp you see before you.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Dave, how could you have come up with such a wonderful, design? It's so full of whimsy I'm practically bursting."

The answer, my friend, is to be found in this simple equation:
downtime-between-shows + angsty-fidgetyness + pure-genious = Ghostie!

Monday, August 14, 2006

Chester Perches

Ok, this isn't the usual sort of picture you're used to seeing on my blog. Blame it on the whimsical mood I'm in. Its Chester!

Perched on the Fridge
During the recent heatwave we, to conserve energy, went around closing the blinds to keep the sun out. An unintended consequence was that Chester no longer had a way to look outside during those slow and boring days with nobody around. To amuse himself Chester went in search of a new view. The solution he came up with: Sit on top of the kitchen cabinets and look down out the kitchen window. Genius! In this picture Chester is half-way to the summit.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

So that's what's going on

Oh yeah... photography. We are now in our third day of tech for Cats. It has been a rough week to say the least. Our plan was to do a cue-to-cue of Act I on Friday, a cue-to-cue of Act II on Saturday and start doing runs on Monday. This hasn't happened. Act I took longer than expected. Then Act II took longer than expected. We ended up cuing the second half of Act II on Monday. Then, after about an hour, a board-crash led me to inspect the cues we'd already written - that's when we found out how many cues hadn't been recorded. I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%.

To make the situation all the more rosier, Megan is calling the show out of a vocal score rather than the conductors score - this choice was made because it simplifies all the musical cuts. What it doesn't do is give her a way to follow along during all the rests. So we'll find ourselves with two bump cues somewhere in four bars of rests. Dang.

Sponsor Plug
On the upside, the set - that piece of the show that I thought would never get done - is practically done. All that's left to do is mount one more step unit, precariously, on the side of a masonry scaffold.

In this picture we give a little thumbs-up to a long time Players supporter. Nice painting team!