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The State Journal-Register: "The load-in begins at 8 a.m. sharp. It’s a cold November morning, and more than two-dozen stagehands are working on a semi trailer packed with theatrical equipment and very little open space.
4 comments:
Charles
said...
I always find it interesting to hear of small to medium sized shows that struggle to find competent local crew for their calls. And having 20 out of 24 crew members in a professional show be high school students is certainly interesting. Perhaps the skill sets we know are not so specialized, or rather these touring shows are well optimized for a high number of neck downs. I'd like to guess the latter. Maybe I don't read many of these types of "day in the life" articles, but I feel like most of them are about the most technologically advanced shows and tours, not about the small town small shows. Certainly an interesting read.
I enjoyed this one as well: I think it's nice that a large paper would pickup this story as it covers things that most theatergoers don't notice. Saying that shoe-tying and cable coiling are the only skills necessary to be a theatrical carpenter is a little harsh, but it is important and the timelapse also showed a lot of people standing around in an unoccupied manner. Speaking of which, I've seen a lot of load in/out timelapses, but few accompanied by a thorough description. I was also interested to see that they used a combination of pre-rigged truss and the batons already flown from the grid.
I think that this article is not an interesting article for any of us, because it pretty much tells us what we already know. I kept reading it to figure out what the point was or where it was going. Then I realized with Dan's comment that its for the people(obviously) who dont do this all the time, just to show them what really goes on in that show that they just sat through, that it just doesnt happen. In that respect its quite a nice article, and does a great job at covering all the material fluidly. The time lapse is fun, and I enjoyed the joke about knowing a stagehand is dead. Overall I am glad that a newspaper article would devote time and resources to giving us a little credit
I really am not a fan of this article. As it is for people who are not familiar with what we do or what a day such as this is like, I feel that this type of article gives us a bad name. It really doesn't give carpenters much credit for what they do, not like that's new. Although I'm sure this article was meant to give people a view of what goes into what we do, I think it made more of a joke of it than anything else. Although it was an exaggeration, to say that all we need to know is how to tie your shoe and what left, right, and center are definitely is not sending out the right message.
4 comments:
I always find it interesting to hear of small to medium sized shows that struggle to find competent local crew for their calls. And having 20 out of 24 crew members in a professional show be high school students is certainly interesting. Perhaps the skill sets we know are not so specialized, or rather these touring shows are well optimized for a high number of neck downs. I'd like to guess the latter. Maybe I don't read many of these types of "day in the life" articles, but I feel like most of them are about the most technologically advanced shows and tours, not about the small town small shows. Certainly an interesting read.
I enjoyed this one as well: I think it's nice that a large paper would pickup this story as it covers things that most theatergoers don't notice. Saying that shoe-tying and cable coiling are the only skills necessary to be a theatrical carpenter is a little harsh, but it is important and the timelapse also showed a lot of people standing around in an unoccupied manner. Speaking of which, I've seen a lot of load in/out timelapses, but few accompanied by a thorough description. I was also interested to see that they used a combination of pre-rigged truss and the batons already flown from the grid.
I think that this article is not an interesting article for any of us, because it pretty much tells us what we already know. I kept reading it to figure out what the point was or where it was going. Then I realized with Dan's comment that its for the people(obviously) who dont do this all the time, just to show them what really goes on in that show that they just sat through, that it just doesnt happen. In that respect its quite a nice article, and does a great job at covering all the material fluidly. The time lapse is fun, and I enjoyed the joke about knowing a stagehand is dead. Overall I am glad that a newspaper article would devote time and resources to giving us a little credit
I really am not a fan of this article. As it is for people who are not familiar with what we do or what a day such as this is like, I feel that this type of article gives us a bad name. It really doesn't give carpenters much credit for what they do, not like that's new. Although I'm sure this article was meant to give people a view of what goes into what we do, I think it made more of a joke of it than anything else. Although it was an exaggeration, to say that all we need to know is how to tie your shoe and what left, right, and center are definitely is not sending out the right message.
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