Posts tagged year
Ravensbourne 2012
Ravensbourne 2012 is the end of year show run solely by students to show case students work to their respective industries. As for 3D Storytelling my role is as head of rigging and logistics. This has involved working a lot closer to the directors of the event rather than working within the engineering group.
The main task that I have faced with Ravensbourne 2012 has been lighting for the 4th floor. Originally fashion wanted to put there show on level 7 but this would have made lighting it physically impossible due to the height of the ceiling and logistically it wouldn’t be possible to have the number of people that they wanted in that space. Russell and myself talked them round to holding the show on the 4th floor which is a much better space to work in but still has many challenges first of which was designing a light weight structure that was strong enough to take more lights than we had last year. Due to the weight restrictions on the floor I had to put an extra 4 ground supports in to spread the load over the floor. Overall the maximum load that I can put onto the floor is 4 tons but I can’t have more than 500KG at any one point. This has definitely been my biggest engineering challenge this year, if we had been allowed to fly the structure off the RSJ’s on the ceiling above the 4th floor I would have never faced this issue and the space would look a lot cleaner than its going to, but we all have to make compromises.
Working so closely with the management team has posed its own issues as Russell and myself have been rather segregated from the engineering team and been in the level 1 office most of the time, this is something that we had to do however as the event would not run without us. The hours that we have put into this has been tremendous, planning almost everything and trying to fix all of the logistical/engineering problems and picking up the slack when needed. I have also had a couple of run in’s with the management team on some of their decisions, the main one being over stage electric. After 3D Storytelling I did some deals with stage electrics for Ravesbourne 2012 with the managing director of Ravensbourne 2012 but the rest of the management team did not agree and felt that we could get a better deal elsewhere. This was not true as the kit they were asking for from other companies was not what I had specified for the rig. Eventually a very last minute decision was made to go with my original plan, as it was the best deal on the table.
3D Storytelling Conference 2012 – Lighting
The 3D Storytelling conference is over for another year and has once again been an enjoyable yet stressful experience. This years conference I (Tom) was in charge of the event’s lighting, which entailed transforming buildings bland look and creating a cinema / main lecture space, which is subtitle for 3D screenings as well as live broadcasted keynotes.
The event itself was on the 22nd and 23rd of march and consisted of a few main spaces. These main spaces were the Primary Lecture Space, this also doubled as a realD Cinema, an Exhibition Space on Level 4, a Secondary Lecture room in 212/213 and a 3D Games room in 209/10.
Way-finding for the event was assisted by colour coding the individual floors, with the same or similar colours being used on the banners and event guides. This involved gel’ing nearly 300 separate lamps ranging from standard florescent tubes to small circle spots, this itself took nearly 2 day’s on and off between 4 people. But the effect achieved, certainly enhanced the buildings character as well as completed the objective to make way-finding as easy as possible.
Along with colour coding each floor I decided to stick with the theme of colour and light the Ground Floor and Level 4 atrium walls, this was achieved with some success, through the use of 4 Studio Due, City Colours per floor. During the day these were fairly effective at colouring the walls with certain colours working a lot better than others, mainly due to the sun and the great big white tent across the road, called The O2, both helping to wash out the efforts of the City Colours. The ground floor atrium’s city colours were also used during the after event networking and this is where they really performed and brought the building to life.
I also used two Clay Paky Alpha Spot 1200HPE’s per floor to provide a break up to the solid wall of colour. This could have been very effective with a little bit more programming and timing between all fixtures. The lack of time partially came from the 1/2 day it took to get the Clay Paky’s up and running, due to a simple fault/menu which prohibited the lamp from fully striking, once this was solved they individually outperformed 2 or more of the City Colours, and were very easy fixtures to use and program.
The Alpha Spots and City Colours, were two new fixtures for me and this event was the first time I had used either of them. We had some initial trouble positioning the City colours due to there planned location (Level 4 Balcony) being designated a fire lane and a new location being sought rapidly to cover the same wall. The new compromised location’s were on Level 1 and Mezz in 3 spread out locations. This caused a few focus issues, but the final results was better than originally planned with the new positions uplighting the wall, creating a far better look from the ground floor, which originally would have been quite shadowy with all the deep circle windows.
The Walker Space, which was the main Lecture space and realD Cinema, used a completely generic rig consisting of pars, pups, and source 4’s. The main goal was to provide a dark theatre like space that kept in theme with the ground floor of the building. The walls were washed pink and originally had a slightly darker pink break-up on top. Due to complaints of inadequate light from the hospitality team the breakups were refocused from the walls onto the seating and the gel was removed, this provided some speckled white light in the room between lectures.
Overall I’m fairly happy with the outcome of this project however there is a lot I would change such as:
- More audience lighting in the Walker Space
- 1k’s or Strand Coda Floods for the wall wash
- Checking Gel’s before purchase, from swatch and not relying on the Lee Filter’s Website
- Possibly Top Hat’s on the Source 4’s to stop glare for the presenters
- Black Wrap or Source 4’s as backlight to remove the spill onto the realD screen
- Lighting columns or spot locations by day and whole walls by night
- Having more time to program and adjust programming
3D Storytelling 2012
3D Storytelling is one of the biggest events of the year at Ravensbourne. The event is totally different from any other that is run within Ravensbourne as it is headed up by the events team and is run by a select group of students. This year Russell Fleming and Myself took on all of the events logistics and rigging with Tom Glover creating the lighting design. The event features around the fact that there is a RealD Projector in the walker space that allows speakers from different companies to show off there work to the rest of the 3D television and film industry. This gives the students a platform to network with people form within industry as nearly 1000 delegates turn up across the 2 day event.
My role for 3D storytelling was as head of rigging and logistics, Russell was head of event technology and logistics, both of us have these roles for Ravensbourne 2012. The main rigging requirements for this event were to light the walker space for the keynote speeches, light the building to give it a different look and feel and put power distribution on the 4th floor for the exhibition.
To start with I worked out the power requirements for the exhibition going off a floor plan with 22 stalls on it. This time I decided to use the 125 Amp 3Phase on level 5 and split it down to 2 63 Amp 3Phase’s as we had some high power lights for the architectural lighting. The distro’s that we went with were 125A 3P to 2 x 63A 3P and 2 x 63A 3P to 18 x 16A. This meant that I had more than enough outputs for all of the lighting requirements and if all of the stalls were used. We also made the decision to cut the 4 way extensions down to 2 as it was felt that they only need 2 sockets per stall.
For the lighting side of the rigging Tom had asked for 4 city colour washes to go on level 7 and 4 to go on level 4 along with 2 Clay Paky 1200 spots to go at each location. The Clay Paky’s on level 7 had to be hung to get good coverage on the wall. Originally I wanted to hang them off a truss rigged to the RSJ’s above level 9 but as we did not have a load testing certificate to say what load they could take health and safety did not like the idea. I then decided to put them on 2 wind up stands on the 7th floor. The lighting for the main atrium was originally going to go on the 4th floor but was deemed to be in the fire lane and had to be moved when once it had been put in place. We had to move it to the 1st floor/Mezz which actually created some nicer angles and gave a really nice look on the final night when the networking was taking place in the welcome space. All of these lights were sitting on 3ft high deck so that the metal grill under the railing did not get in the way.
In the walker space we felt that we had to do something different from what had been done before in that space. We ended up dead hanging a scaff bar and putting par cans up for a wash of colour along with source 4’s with gobo break ups in them, for once no movers were used. This all ran of the house dimmer pack saving a lot of money and time.
The biggest challenge that Russell and myself had in the planning stage of this event was where to put a Telegenic OB truck. This is a major problem as the outside of Ravensbourne is not designed to have a truck of this size sitting there for over 2 days. This caused major problems right up until the last minute as every location that we chose there was something causing a problem. In the end we got parked it down the side of Rave. I feel proud at the amount of contacts that Russell and myself made out of this event, some of which involved people that generally students don’t even know about. I also made sure that I did not make the same mistakes that I made at penrose market. The logistics generally ran very smoothly with no major problems. This is due to the time and care that Russell and myself put in and the communication with the management of the event. I have to give a big thank you to the second rigging team as they managed to gel over 250 florescent lights around Rave to change the colour of the building.
Rave Live 2012 – Tom Glover
Welcome to my sub-blog about Rave Live 2012, or what ever it will finally be called this year. Today we started the project and looked into what is required for us to be sucessfull in the unit as well as the LIVE broadcast in mid-june 2012.
Today we found out we will actually be working towards two events, one test event in November 2011 and the other main event in June 2012. We also decided on our roles for the events, I 1/2 decided and was 1/2 allocated the Head of Interactive Media, which mainly entails creating IP Steams, Social Media and other cool interactive items.
IP Streams
My first big challenge is going to be getting my head around IP Streams and hows they integrate with HTML and the rest of the Broadcast Transmission Chain.
Today I started playing around with Quicktime Broadcaster for Mac OS X and my inbuilt iSight Webcam as the live video source. Thing started off smoothly, until my mac crashed. I did manage to get a low quality stream to Quicktime to my Windows PC but this was very limited in performance Maxing out at 15frames per second and for only short bursts (10-15 Seconds before crashing the Mac), which made it pretty useless.
Initial Todo List for the November Event
- Look into other Encoders and Streaming Servers
- Look into what is already available at Rave to Stream
- Look into how to link into the Rave Transmission Chain
- Create a Dynamic Website with Customised Content, by the Exhibitors
- Link Social Media into the Website
- Combine the Stream and the Website
- Possibly add mobile compatible Website/Stream.
Stickaid 2011
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Stickaid2011
This weekend has been a very long yet fun weekend working on Stickaid 2011 with SilverLine Media, at Ravensbourne University, North Greenwich. Stickaid is a 24 hour broadcast streamed live onto Stickam.com and Youtube.com and this year it came from Ravensbourne, with the help of SilverLine providing the stream and many Ravensbourne students filling rolls from Camera Operators to Sound Supervisors to Editing and many more. The students that helped out over the weekend came from all year groups with some only 3 day’s into there courses.
Scott and Russell from Fluxity were originally brought in on Thursday and Friday to rig the events lighting and power. This job turned out to be over complicated due to some poor planning and communication from all parties involved. The rig should have taken only 8-10hours to complete but had to be completely re-worked to overcome the lack of correct power and distribution.
At 5pm on Friday afternoon Tom also joined the frustrated rigging team to assist in finalising some decisions and to get the rig moving again. The rig was finally completed at approximately 11.45pm on the Friday, with only a quick focus and program to be completed in the two hours before the 12Midday Broadcast start. Programming was completed during the first couple of hours of broadcast by Charlie Fox and Scott.
Fluxity Lighting was kept on call during the event for power and other related problems, and we are very pleased to report that we didn’t receive a single call, and the system was stable and survived the full 24hours.
Scott, Tom and Russell turned up at about 11am on Sunday for the De-rig that was due to begin at about 12.15pm. Between the three of us we had all of the lighting power and staging out of the rig and Ravensbourne back to how it was, in just under 6 hours, in a very relaxed yet steady de-rig.
All in all a long weekend in which we helped raise over £17000 for Unicef. It’s not too late to Donate still, just click on the logo above.
Here’s what Elliot from SilverLine Media had to say about working with Fluxity, over this last weekend:
Scott, Russell and in the end Tom, helped us Thursday, Friday and when I honestly thought that we weren’t going to have the lights going or anything, 2 hrs before TX they made it all happen. Thank you so much guys, especially for dealing so well with my screw ups and then the de-rig on Sunday!