Geoff: 5 weeks.
Me: How long!?
Geoff: Yeah, we should start working pretty soon..."
This has been the story for most of the last two months. Let me explain: my school is putting on a performance of "Return to the Forbidden Planet", which is a rock and roll musical based on the plot of Shakespeare's The Tempest.
The cast (appropriately dressed in silver catsuits, sawn-off pink wellies and star-trek hoodies) are doomed! Dooooomed I tell thee! Their ship is on its way to The Forbidden Planet for some romantic, guitar driven high jinks, and the audience is being dragged with them.
So...
"Where do I fit in in all this?", I hear you ask! Well, I am an amateur theatre technician at my school - and this is Big. Our director, Malcom has gone, frankly, mad. He wants moving lights, smoke, visibible hazed beams, and more generics than you can shake a stick at.
For the first time (literally) ever, we were given a hire budget of around £550 for lighting alone. This is because all the pyrotechnics and sound are being organised by external companies (he obviously doesn't trust us ). Well, £550 became £600, £600 evolved to £650 but we weren't satisfied. We could have had £10,000 and still wanted more - but such is life!
Anyway, with our £650 we've ordered (to hire) one Zero 88 Fat Frog lighting control desk, a demux (converts digital signal output to analogue), 4 MAC 250+ movers and all the associated cabling.
As we need more generics (normal lights) than ever, we need more dimmer packs.
(Def: Dimmer Pack
A device exactly like a big variable resistor, effectively. However, it deals with 240V at 10A (enough to kill a horse) and can dim it to an analogue scale. Also - it does 12 lights on 6 channels.)
So - we've nicked them. Well, we nicked them from ourselves - see, we have two venues: the main hall, and performing arts. We stole the two from performing arts and plan to put them up in the lighting box with the normal 4.
However, they're not standard mains input. They take 32A - that means one ring main for four of them!
We needed two new lines to be put in to power the new pair, but unfortuantely I think the sparky's gone and wired thm to the same ring main - meaning a total possible draw of 144A on a 100A line. Not good.
Also - one of the normal dimmer packs blew up today and shot jets of fire out of the side! So - the date looms ever closer, and as normal - everything's breaking!
CC
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