I was only being a tech grunt for this one, and came in at the middle
of the event so I wasn't around for setup or the first run night.
Small images are linked to larger ones, as usual.
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The show venue was ballrooms A/B/C of the Cambridge Hyatt, and used a bunch
of Arisia's gear. Most of the lighting was straight-on from the back of the
room, all clamped to some really sketchy tripod stands that are probably
designed for speakers rather than ungainly batches of lights on T-bars. This
is apparently what you get from High Output when they don't hear you say "I'm
going to hang 80 pounds of lights on each one". Suitable for little DJ-grade
par56es, maybe, but not this stuff.
Not the way I would have gone about lighting what's effectively a dance show, but I wasn't the LD -- a fella named Hunter was. FOH was perched delicately atop the small set of scaffold from Arisia storage, which probably hasn't gone out in a few years but seems to still be fairly solid for this sort of thing. | |
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| Hunter found the 6x22 Altman "cannons" useful for long-shot MC spots. Well, one of them, anyway [no backup]. I think we all agreed in hindsight that the show could have really used a couple of followspots; it totally had that "cabaret" feel. | |
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| Kittehs |
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| This one really shows the rather odd shadow effect from having the whole wash from the back wall.. | ||
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| Positively the funniest act of the evening was four Frankenfurters, done to "I'm a Sweet Transvestite". Very high energy, impossible to capture not moving... | ||
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| A couple more ... and finally, a little pinkish sidelight? | |
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| Here we can see the overall look with the cyc and the beige side of the new drapes. The evening wrapped up with some awards and everyone on stage ... | |
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| ... after which there was a "rockabilly" band, for which I mixed the all of two relevant channels they sent to us -- the bass, and the lead vocal. The other two guys didn't come in with vocal harmonies very often, and I wound up pretty much running the lead guy through a compressor and using the threshold on that to set his level rather than the channel fader after which it was pretty much hands-off. Unfortunately they were playing to a mostly empty house by then. |
(Really, night three of the Expo)
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| An amusing "swiss miss" sort of act included some tantalizing use of linked sausages... | |
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| Miss Adventure aka Jenny the Juggler, a local professional who not only puts on a very smooth show, but here was doing it eight months pregnant. She had audience members toss her the soccer balls she was juggling... | ||
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... and then got some "manly guys" up on stage for a little contest, simply
to blow up a few long balloons. Well, they couldn't. She then took another
one and inflated it in one shot. Not sure if it's staged with different
types of balloons or if she's just got really good lungs...
She then sent two of the three off with their, uh, consolation prizes, a balloon shape twisted up into something familiar and an appropriate size. This, obviously, isn't her family/kids show. Using the remaining helper to spot her getting started, she finished up juggling clubs on the teeter-board. In heels. | ||
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| A smooth poi-spinning act, using ones shaped like wine bottles with a drunkenness theme to go with, ending passed out on the floor. | ||
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| One of several hoop acts | |
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| Usually done with fire; she had to substitute feather fans for this venue. | ||
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| An entertaining bed of nails act. Once he was down on it he let himself be subjected to all kinds of abuse, including a flying leap off a chair onto his belly. | ||
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| He then got up, mostly unscathed, and then went down on his front to bake the other side in a similar fashion. | |
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| Another hoop act, very smooth and flowing. | ||
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| A middle eastern theme: first, a sword dance... | ||
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| ... and then she dug carefully into a basket, pulling out a live snake for the second part. | ||
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| Yet another hoop act, with the interesting variant of embedded blinkie LEDs which did some fun strobing effects over time. | |
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| All of the night's performers back to the stage for the wrapup. |
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| The evening was hardly over, however, as Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band took the stage for their second set ... | |
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| ... and added in their own variant of circus mayhem ... | |
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| ... including a straitjacket escape, ... | |
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... and some fun tumbling and other human-tricks.
After all that was over, we tore down, which didn't take all that long. We still had enough energy to take the truck to Arisia storage and put stuff away, and I was home by about 3:30 AM. | |
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