Hal Eagar : #14 How do you hand off a show?
DPI:
How do you hand off a show? What is that training process? How do you work with that? Do you also take on one of those? Or share work with a designer in another area? Or work as a team? Or do you run your own shows?
Well really the operator has to be there for the final tech, and learn to feel the show in some way. I find that video is usually not called by the stage manager, at least not the way it's done in shows I work on. I suppose it's possible, but we're talking about many hundreds of cues, so the video operator needs to be as autonomous as possible.
Maybe that's asking too much but that's how it feels to me. Unfortunately I think I usually just end up dumping way too much information at the operator at once. I'm not sure there is any other way to do it, at least not on a theatre schedule.
Generally they will watch me working for a day, and I'll try and tell them what I am doing. And in the process I often think of several more things that I could be automating. Then they get dropped in the hot seat and figure things out, while I hang around over their shoulder filling in. And this hopefully gives me time to automate those last few things, and to write up the debugging sheet etc...
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I'll dissagree with myself a bit.
Reading what I wrote previously I'll modify what I said. Many of the show I work on are video heavy, and have hundreds of video clips or cues. Some of them are video heavy and have only a couple of dozen cues, or even just 2-3 cues.
For those more simple shows someone like the stage manager runs them themselves. Or in a rare circumstances (say at a school where run crew is not paid, and therefor plentiful) there will be someone to run the dozen cues and they will be called by the stage manager.
In those circumstances because the show is less complex I will have more time to try and bullet proof the system so that it really is just hitting "go". Though the level to which the system is dependable is often more a matter of the equipment used. The software can be solid, but if the cables are old and worn, or the computers old, the likelihood of a hard to find problems will occur anyway it very high.
But if I have the luxury of renting new (with a fresh install) computers, and a spare for backup. The likelihood that that backup will actually be needed is far far less. Oh well, we work with the limits we have.
Hal Eagar
DPI Director