Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Another trip back to the Dunner.

Bill decides to take Leanne’s car to the rehearsal, with Leanne in it, as gas is still costing a lot of scratch. The plan is to bring the Par cans as well as our extension cords and dimmers to create our own little, budget dimmer board. It’ll be a dimmer board when we set them all beside each other and get the markings for the light levels. Trust me, it will.

So we take two cars and load the equipment into my ride and Bills. Bill needs to stop off in Grimsby to drop his dog off at his moms pad, and Alicia and I need to swing by her place so she can grab a piece of equipment that was put into the prop basket. We’ll meet up with Bill in the G-Town and tailgate him to the Dunner.

Bill has these clamp things (I don’t remember what he calls them) which allows you to clamp shit down, like lights, real good onto any surface that has a lip. We need these things to clamp down our Pars onto the I beams running across the ceiling.

We’re about three quarters of the way to Grimsby when Alicia gets a call from Bill telling her that the clamps are back at my place. We turn around and head back. Now I’m convinced that I always have to leave my joint twice before I get anywhere.

Back at my place, I look in the cases where Bill says the clamps are. No dice. I check the light stand bag. No dice. Alicia gets Bill on the phone and tells him the clamps are not where he said they were. As I’m looking through his light kit, he tells her to tell me to check it. I tell her to tell him I am checking it. He tells her to tell me to check the bottom. The damn thing is about two feet long and a foot wide by maybe a foot tall. As soon as you open the bag you’re checking out the bottom. I tell her to tell him the bag is the bottom.

I offer to drive over to Bills pad and check his truck, but Bill says no, because what’s the point? Even if I do find them, I won’t be able to get into Bills truck to get them. I tell him I can, but he might not be happy with my methods. He tells me just to come back to Grimsby.

He phones while we’re en route to tell us he’s found three of the four.

We meet up in the Grim (yeah, I’m trying a bunch of nicknames for this place too) and tailgate it to the Dunner.

Once in the theatre we meet up with Brad, who seems a little stressed. Can’t say I blame the guy. If I was in charge of this show, I’d be a little stressed too. I’m just in charge of filming the thing, creating a lighting setup, editing and putting together a DVD. I don’t know the music, haven’t heard the music, and don’t know when any instruments are supposed to come in or go out. We still don’t have enough crew or cameras to really do the event. Come to think of it, I might be a little stressed too.

We bring in the gear and I start walking around the joint, looking for the best places to put the cameras. My original plan was to put the cameras on stage, but since it’s a nine piece band, that game’s off the field. I’m still going to put one up there, provided we can get it.

All the chairs are in now and setup, so I’m trying to find two other positions that won’t take chairs away, and will still allow people to see. I think with the two spots I picked we only had to remove five or six chairs. That’s not too bad.

Now we go over and talk to Carl the sound guy. He’s got his PA system going, and since this building was built right after Jesus was born in the Manger, the electricity might not be the most up to date. We’re told that if we draw power with our lights from anywhere in the theatre section, he won’t have enough juice left over to power his PA.

His alternative solution is to run our extension cords into the kitchen. Needless to say, this idea doesn’t appeal to me.

Again, the idea comes up that it would be pretty awesome if we could do what we wanted to the lighting grid they already have in there. We’re told that we can’t add or remove or unplug or….. yeah, just a whole bunch of stuff we can’t do. We can pan them and change the filters though.

We ask Carl if he could talk to Nancy about us doing something about the grid, and perhaps fixing the clusterfuck of fun they already have in there. When you work on one switch, three lights will come up in a completely random order. Another switch might bring up two more, and another switch will bring up nothing.

She was pretty adamant about us not touching anything the last time we were up here. Carl explains it to her in better words than us to her what we want to do and she gives us the go ahead. I think the key word was “re-designate.” It’s my new favorite word.

Now we have a lot of work to do, so we get to it quick. Bill quickly jumps up on the ladder and starts unplugging every light while Alicia runs the dimmer board. Once things are a little figured out of what does what, Bill starts aiming the lights how I want them.

After a few hours, we decide it’s time to eat something, so we head out to this small, cool retro diner and grab some grub. This is a pretty cool place, not only because I got a banana split and lots of bacon, but because inside this establishment, I swear, is the mafia Don of Dunnville.

If you’re wondering, the Don of Dunnville orders a sundae.

We get back to the hall and start fine tuning the lighting as the string ensemble starts to rehearse. As it is now, we only have one of our Par cans up, and that’s to spotlight Brad. We have the dimmer running all the way across the ceiling to the booth that Alicia will sit in to operate the lights for the show.

With us turning the lights on and off, and trying to find good spots for the various lights, the string section apparently can’t see. They’re all reading music, and it makes it hard to play the music that you’re reading when you’re sitting in the dark.

Because I just recently saw Shine a Light, the Rolling Stone concert film by Martin Scorsese, I joke in my head how The Rolling Stones memorized all their songs, what’s these guys problem? Of course, I’m only joking. I can barely read a Dr. Seuss book, let alone music, and I can’t do either one in the dark.

We chill out for a bit while the band rehearses and I tape it for reference. When I’ll get to this reference, I have no idea because we’re shooting all day tomorrow, and the day after that is the concert. Oh well, maybe I’ll get time.

Once the string section is done, we start tidying up and packing some stuff back up. We know we’ll have to get here earlier on Sunday to fine tune the lighting, and Brad lets us know that he’ll be here at one and the whole band will be going through a complete rehearsal of the show.

We tell him we’ll be here at one. Somehow I doubt it though. I don’t know why our mouths write checks our asses can’t cash. One of these days we’ll be on time. One of these days.

On the way back home, I run over a bunch of frogs that are jumping in front of my car. I feel bad for it, but I would feel a lot worse if the stupid amphibians weren’t jumping at the only two cars on the road.

Tomorrow is a fairly long day and we wrap Nigel, Lyndsey, and The Barber. It’s weird knowing that this project is coming to an end real soon. It still hasn’t hit me that after tomorrow that we have one more shoot day.