BillingsGazette: "As time expires, quarterback Ronnie Simpson finds an open receiver in the end zone.
About 1,700 Wyoming Cavalry fans stop cheering. The game, which moments ago appeared all but over, heads into overtime.
The Wenatchee Valley Venom have temporarily snatched victory away from the home team. They’ve also stolen precious time from a crew of workers waiting to transform the Casper Events Center from a football field into a bull riding arena."
4 comments:
Sometimes I think we forget about the other places that undergo all sorts of weird transformations that fall under the entertainment realm. I don't know about the rest of us, but I know foot ball arenas often fall off my radar. I guess it depends where you are, but many of them see a much more active change over and duty cycle than most theaters do. Sports game one day, concert the next, change right back over to the sporting field so that practice can happen the next day. Its sort of relentless. Being the crew chief or part of the production staff for something like this might be exciting -- I don't think I could take years and years of crewing it though.
This is the ultimate in project management- Its not the theaters and the shops- its those flexible spaces that can be six things in one week. The amount of planning and organization that it takes to pull off those transformations is what production managers, or those with similar duties, work on all over the country. It is indeed a hard life- with a lot of late nights, but it is the essential prep work that goes into a venue before the touring show appears, or before the audience shows up.
I like these stories that give us the detail of a place with a whole different set of production concerns. It seems that the bigger the venue, the faster the turnarounds have to be. Stadiums also come with a whole interesting set of considerations. I remember visiting a show at a baseball stadium, where they made a big deal of keeping people from walking on the grass - only on plastic tiles that had been laid down.
These are the sorts of crew work that I think all theatre students need to experience. Of course we have time crunches and need to fill the gaps with more people and Saturday calls, but when you have five hours to do the job, no excuses, the stakes are much higher. There's a saying from somewhere that I've forgotten that says to find the true measure of man, put him under the most torturous of measures.
For me, who's constantly high strung and trying to get everything done on time, limiting my "get it done" time to five hours to completely reface an entire stadium would be the perfect test of my character. And I'd love to see how my peers handle such a task as well.
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