All in a Days Work
Let’s see what we did today at the big time corporate marketing gig…
We locked the D1 up just before final rehearsal. That’s OK, it only happened during the Chairman and CEO rehearsal of entire meeting. Remove laptop, reboot surface, reboot engine, all is well. Head dude was ruffled, but we blamed Windows and he seemed to be OK. Seems he’s familiar with Windows causing problems. After a load in/ tech day, a rehearsal/ tech day and tech/rehearsals for a third day today, we get problems at about the time the rest of the shows on The Strip fire up. We had 15 hours or so using these 22 frequencies and now during the rehearsals with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th in command, the radio rig doesn’t want to cooperate. Sonofabitch…
Rewind to yesterday, or even load in day a couple days ago. At load in, the in house hotel rigger gave me grief for feeding out my own hoists and trying to connect my bumpers and run my hoists. Like I’ve done for the times I’ve hung PA in the almost 27 years I’ve been doing this. Or for more perspective, he was 5 when I hung my first PA. And I’m a lot fucking quicker than he is. House AV rule, we can’t run our own hoists or attach our shit to our own grids. The local hands are from a local (well, national) labor company and are quite good> The sparky and riggers are from the hotel AV company who to me seem two steps removed from high school AV washouts. Kinda set the tone for the week. Our guys are all Varsity. Video, lighting, A1, production, content creation. In fact, I’m the newbie here and they have taken a shine to me. Yesterday, we start to run parts of the show, a Fortune 50 CEO guesting for this Fortune 100 company giving a presentation about marketing. About 3 mins into the first roll (we have a 16 box M2D rig in a 30 meter square ballroom, yeah, we thump, because we are paid to) some AV lackey comes over and says we are disturbing the management meeting of the resort chain which has rented our clients the space. The venue aren’t newbies. It’s the 2nd largest resort owner in the state. Our production manager’s response is priceless. “Sounds like you need a better airwall buffering system” he tells house AV guy. Except for that room our client is renting that entire wing of the convention center (during one of the most in demand times in Vegas) and several hundred rooms. Plus catering.
All that for this. Earlier today, we shit the bed with the radio rack. This morning, I noticed they were reconfiguring the room next door and went over to find the house AV guy and coordinate frequencies. The deal was, they had a hotel list and we couldn’t use those, but they wouldn’t coordinate outside freqs other than the inhouse freqs. That’s not really a frequency coordinator, is it? AV boy in the next room that gave me attitude came over with a list to our room. Yeah, he was blown away. We’ve got the platnum shit. All I wanted to know was if we could get 22 clear freqs for our show. late in the afternoon, someone (or something) parked on 688 MHz and a few of our channels shit the bed. It was a big fucking deal. We had to go offline for me to find some clean air. I suppose that’s why they call it work.
The gig went without a hitch. We worked through dinner and got it up and running.
All in a day’s work…
April 26th, 2006 at 9:13 am
“House AV rule, we can’t run our own hoists or attach our shit to our own grids. The local hands are from a local (well, national) labor company and are quite good> The sparky and riggers are from the hotel AV company who to me seem two steps removed from high school AV washouts.”
Are you at the Venetian?
That seems to be the deal there, you need a show TD that really stays on top of the house riggers. They can also be dead slow. Fortunately I can usually find something else for my guys to do while we wait for rigging to get around to our points. By the time we get our motors, everything is waiting below them with a shackle lookin’ for a hook. It really kills me when we want to fly the cable, and suddenly, because that job sucks, it’s OK for soundmen to be riggers. 
Mac
April 26th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
Don’t know where you are at but I was at the Venetian a while back and was impressed to have the house guy find me at load in to find out what I had for RF. He advised me what the house frequencies were and allocated particular frequencies off his master list. Worked out well for me.
As far as rigging I had the house riggers dead hang a distributed UPA rig so I did not deal with any hoists.
Juan Turro