Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Production Week:Thursday



THURSDAY 28th March 11am-12pm:

Thankfully we had a later start on the Thursday because of having a show the previous night, the previous show went smoothly will some problems but I have evaluated all of the roles  for that performance. The first thing that happened was that we had been feedback from the Director and Musical Director, their overall feedback was amazing and they were really pleased with the performance. As the wireless Microphone mixer I know that I had to step up and make the next show even more smoother when it came to mixing them. There we adjustments that needed to be made to some aspects of the sound but we were going to do this before the next show.

After this the Band did there warm up along with the cast vocal warm up, and then the band went over a couple of numbers with the cast. Then I requested for if we could go over a couple of the harder musical numbers that I messed up a little on the previous show. I just wanted to have a go at them and work out where I was going wrong so I could improve them on the night and give the audience a better musical number to listen to. After all of this was over and done we started the usual pre-sets of everything and the cast got their wireless microphones.
The only change sound wise to this 2nd performance was that I was going to be do the extra announcement about the strong language used during the show. Other than that everything went ahead as normal.

Evaluation:
My evaluation of the performance would have to be that I felt it went a lot smoother, but there were still parts that needed to be improved, at parts during this show we were fighting equipment that was at points playing up, especially when it came to the wireless microphone on the characters of Julia and Robbie. We experience times where we lost the microphones and then also points where we had to cut off the microphone to stop feedback from happening. The sound crew role of dealing with the wireless microphones during the performance was done really well, but at points when we needed to get information about why a microphone wasn’t working we weren’t able to get hold of the person dealing with it, and the problem wasn’t solved as fast. We also started to experience terrible noises coming from the bass guitar, in the end we had to have it one mute or only on a fraction. One of the worst parts that we had been experiencing for a while was the wireless guitar microphone, it seemed as though it was picking up a radio frequency because every time we turned it on we would hear a radio start playing. In the end we couldn’t actually find a solution to this and still have no idea why that noise was there.  Although I think as a stressed out crew we managed to get through the situations and pull out some excellently sounding musical numbers. The band also were sounding 40% better than the previous show and was on track to sounding the best it has since the start. My mixing of wireless mic’s was still off in places but I was finding ways to deal with this and was trying to turn bad songs into better sounding ones as much as possible. As a sound crew we worked well with eachother, even if we at points snapped at small things but that was entirely down to stress levels being through the roof.

During the break, we talked about how the last show went and what we needed to do to get the best sounding show yet. One thing we worked out that could be the key was the levels for the band, the plan was to keep the band at a low level at the start of the show and gradually bring them up during certain numbers and towards the final numbers. This show then lead to a better sounding performance. We attempt to try and fix Robbie’s guitar microphone but we couldn’t find a solution so where going to have to work around it. My plan was just going to have to give it volume when he is playing and bring it totally off when he isn’t, so I was going to have to pay a large amount of attention to that part as well as the other mic’s.

With the last show approaching once again we had to make sure all the presets were done and we then implemented our plan to bring the band right down. One thing we found out just before the start was that we had 2 spare batteries, so if a wireless microphone died or needed new batteries it wasn’t going to happen. But to our advantages/thankfulness all the microphones had plenty of battery life to get them through the show.

Evaluation:
The final show was the best show no questions asked, I really stepped up the mixing of the wireless mic’s and cut the amount of mistakes down to only a couple through-out. As a sound crew we worked really well with eachother and experience no wireless mic problems during the show which was s huge bonus. And best on all when we did change the way we were going to be mixing the band it worked to our advantage and everything just slotted into place. Fine there were still really small things that weren’t brilliant, but if we had a couple more show we would have been able to make this show sound amazing.

Even though we came into this really hating the fact they had chosen such a hard show to do with the Live Band, wireless mic’s and the venue not helping us with certain aspects, we came out of it pleased with what we had achieved, as a sound crew we worked amazingly well together and by the last show me and will were a unit helping eachother out through-out the performance.

Unfortunately even through it took us a day to set-up, 4 days to get right, everything had to be totally de-rigged during the get out, during this everyone came together including the cast to get everything taken down/apart and then taken back over to the college. Impact Productions came back for their equipment and we helped them gather up all of their cabling, the 2 speakers and amp and then we gathered up all of our equipment and made sure that everything was taken back over to the college. 

No comments:

Post a Comment