Gig is a straightforward event for Infinity to show their '08 prototypes at a trendy club. Whatever, do these all the time right? Holy crap. These events may be out of order. But it doesn't matter, it was FUBAR no matter how you look at it.
So we unload the truck fairly quickly, then just as quickly I realize there is NOTHING I can get started on. Power is coming from a generator which hasn't arrived yet. I'm lighting some cars that haven't arrived yet. Oh wait, I can build my truss....oops, they forgot corner blocks. After a couple hours of stalling and finding little stupid things to keep busy, we start getting some stuff. I got into about 37 (your girlfriend sucked 37 dicks?) arguments with the guy that wasn't in charge who was pretending to be in charge. I really wish he would stop telling me how to be an electrician. He wanted me to put our distro right next to the generator, and run all of this very heavy, very awkward, VERY hard to coil again socapex to the lights. I said screw that, I'll run a small bundle of feeder a hundred feet, then do lighter power cable to the lights. After lots of arguing, I went over his head and got me some feeder.
Generator arrives. Walk up to it with feeder. No cams. They said there would be cams. (Cams are what you plug feeder cable into to power a distro) "Oh well, you can just tie in right?" Great. Fine, my rate just went up for doing a tie in. :-) Not fine :-( See, when you tie in, you have bare copper on the end of a cable that you shove through a hole then tighten a bolt over. There are 5 of them. all of the holes should be vertical. One is horizontal. And it's in the middle. Half way through all this it starts raining. Great. Here's the end result.
HEY, they found two corner blocks. GREAT We can build one of the truss pieces. We decide to start with the step and repeat (the thing that people stand in front of to take photos). So we'll be able to get that up, get the lights focused. YAY. It looked like this. You can see best by looking at the ladder that the ground isn't even close to being level. Then notice the 400 pounds of sand on each side of the thing.
So the plan is we have these four cars to be lit from some truss as well as 4 light trees. Just as I'm at a point that I can start building trees, the police come, and start writing tickets for the cars.
Well this isn't right, cause they have permits for this event right?....WRONG! No permits for anything on the sidewalk or street which means we stop working. Ok, so 4 light trees gets cut to 2, we'll just push them against the building. We do that. "Oh, didn't you know that this door will be the entrance for tonight?" 2 trees is cut to 1. "Oh, and this door is the entrance to the club next door." No trees. As we're all discussing this permit thing, we hear some bad noises, then people yelling. Chris, the rigger was upstairs with the client hanging banners out the window. They both leaned out to talk to someone outside, and BAM, the window slams down on their heads. So hard that if there had only been one person there, we may have seen someone die, or at least be paralyzed. So now we have a rigger with a huge bump on his head, and a client with a gash and huge bump on her head/neck. Now all of this was apparently way too much for the other rigger to handle, which resulted in this...
Yeah, that's the feeder I mentioned before, with a pile of vomit on it. At this point I'm half in shock from all the stupidity, half in shock from the window thing (but at least I didn't puke), and generally not in a good mood. About anything will set me off. I notice that this creepy little Mexican man had walked by about 9 times within the last hour. He walks by again. Because of my not good mood, I decide to yell "Do you have a reason for walking around the block and gawking at us?!" And he says "Yes, women with tools on their belts are sexy." Great. Yeah. This happens A LOT. After we chased the creepy guy away, he notices this guy in a skirt standing in front of an art gallery. The guy in the skirt then procedes to whine and cry about how all these people keep looking at him. Well, don't wear a skirt and tights. This was the point where I started asking for whiskey and the crew chief started asking for a 2 gram line.
We finally got the next delivery with the remaining missing pieces, so they start to build the next truss piece. Same as the first, 10 foot uprights with a 10 foot cross piece to go over one of the cars. It will have all these banners on it and a couple of lights. Where the cross piece is going be there is one of those outdoor gas heaters hanging from an alcove, so we can't just build on the ground and stand it up. We build the two towers, and fight the cross piece behind the heater, almost severing the gas line and hurting a few people. After 20 minutes of fighting it and getting it up there, they cut all the crap that was supposed to be hung from it. So we almost burned the place down and nearly injured 5 people for this:
Yep, ONE light. To make it not so silly, and to compensate for the trees we lost, I threw a few more on it. Here's some of the end result. That car is pretty damn cool. There are 6 cameras on it and a screen on the dash that gives you an overhead view of the car with the views from the cameras blended together. I can't see a practical use for that, but when it comes to centering a car on a carpet for an event such as this, it's pretty helpful. By the end of it all, we had completely bypassed our Plan B, and made it all the way to Plan R. From passerbys I was offered cocaine 7 times, meth 3 times, weed 6 times, and 1 offer for a Puma watch.
The out was a whole different mess. When we got back for it, the event was no where close to being over. I wish I had a photo of what I'm about to describe. They told us to wait on the 3rd floor. We go up there, and it's practically a closet. So there are 8 of us sitting on top of piles of furniture next to a door to the roof that does not close. Did I mention that our dead case storage was on the roof? Not on a balcony outside, ON THE ROOF. The out sucked, a lot. And now it's time to go to another out. That will suck. A lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment