# Our one acts



## falcon (Dec 15, 2004)

We just had our annual nights of One Act Plays this year and our stage manager was new to the job. Unfortunately our TD made me in charge of all the technical aspects so we had to put an amateur in charge. She never knew where any sets went, she didn't know how to run anything and the crew was random people from our stagecraft class. Now, our stagecraft class can't be trusted and can't handle more than one job at a time, so the SM sits down with me one day before the plays and give her a rundown on everything she needs to do. I also left her with plans of where sets go. On opening night our TD couldn't be there so she had to run the show, which turned out I had to help her through it over two way radios (funny story about our clearcom system exploding, but thats another thing). The first play seemed to go fine since everything was preset, but when we got to our first change over, she came on the radio asking "how do I get the crew to change sets?" I just started laughing in the booth. So I ended up leaving the booth and getting the crew to do their job using force. The director didn't like the force, but it had to be done. So they got the set on, completely in the wrong place. After a few minutes of trying to get the crew to set it properly, my tech team and I had to reset the stage and get everything moving. We had a twenty minute intermission instead of a five minute intermission. It was horrible.

On another note, One of the last plays on, the actors missed a whole bunch of blocking that put 4 lighitng cues into the script and since I was running a stack on a Leprechaun lighting board, it made it look like I screwed up and everyone is blaming me for it. It ruins my track record of 5 years doing tech without one screw up.


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## rgsw (Dec 15, 2004)

i dunno bout any1 else but i wud like to hear to the clearcom story!


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## avkid (Dec 15, 2004)

explosion=interesting story,Yes please!


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## ccfan213 (Dec 15, 2004)

your recordisnt really tarnished if the actors screwed up not you, only your reputation. anyway, lets hear bout those clearcoms


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## Sombra2 (Dec 15, 2004)

lets hear the story you can't keep us in the dark. I love stories where something brakes and you need to fix it.


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## SuperCow (Dec 15, 2004)

I just like stories where somthing breaks!


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## falcon (Dec 16, 2004)

well, by popular demand here is the clearcom story.

Two years ago we put on the music The Sound of Music. Our TD set up the very old clearcom system for our SM and Lighting tech. He plugged it into the same circuit that our sound equiptment was on as well as our lighting equiptment. We have everything on this one 100 amp breaker. Anyway, our lighting tech was new to the system and to lighting as well. We only had the two headsets plugged in since thats all what we had working at the time. Our sound tech never even got one. Anyway, the first few nights of the show went perfectly, except for a few rips in the midstage traveller, (damn idiots). On the second to last night about half way through the second act, the stage crew hears this loud POP and a second later everything went black and there was no sound at all. Our entire tech system went dead even the clearcom. So frantically, I run to the breaker boxes to see what went, all the breakers were flipped. Thats the house lights, dimmers, outlets, everything in the theatre. So we start to flip the breakers back on one by one. When we finally got them all flipped our lighting tech comes running telling us that the tower was smoking. We traced the source back to improperly wired light. We also discovered that our LD patched too many lights into the dimmers. Anyway, back to the clearcom, after we flipped everything back and unplugged what we needed to unplug, the clearcom was smoking a little bit. Very strange, first time our TD has ever seen this happen. So we ran the rest of the shows without the clearcom. The next stagecraft class, we opened up the clearcom and everything was blackened inside, no clue way, but it might have had something to do with the arcing in the breakers.

We put in a request for a new system from the school board, but i think we might have to end up renting one for our spring production this year, we have been waiting two years for a new one.


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## falcon (Dec 16, 2004)

Speaking about house lighting going down, last year we finally got our upgrade on our lighting system. This was suppose to be done four years ago, but the guy who was going to do it showed up two days before our production of Guys and Dolls and wanted us to remove all lights in our gallery, we turned him away the minute he said that. So we finally got him back last year and he turned our old 20 dimmer analog system into a 24 dimmer digital system. This was started a month before the show. He said everything will take 2 days, tops. So we let him work, he shut off our house lights so front of stage was completely black and we had no sound or lighting equiptment for the time. He finally finished 2 weeks later. In that two weeks, we had to work on the sets by 3 works lights that only light a 5 square foot area and the acting classes had to use the same lighting. It was horrible. Our drama teacher was complaining every day.


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## ccfan213 (Dec 16, 2004)

why woulnd you buy or borrow a couple of portable flood lights, home depot sells them cheap and im sure the custodians must have some too.


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## falcon (Dec 16, 2004)

he said he will only be a couple of days and he wouldn't cause any difficulty to our acting classes so we thought he wasn't going to do anything to house lights. As for floodlights, we didn't want to spend any more than what we had to and the janitors didn't have any. But the work lights we had were sufficient enough to let us work, it just meant that we couldn't write our crossgrade in the theatre like usual


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