ProSoundWeb: I started out in “show business” as a musician playing in a local band with my high school buddies. Before our first gig we held a band meeting to decide how to get all the stuff to the gig.
Between us there were three cars and a lot of gear. Luckily, back in the 1970s cars were humongous gas guzzlers that could carry an impressive payload. When it came time to pack up the gear from the basement rehearsal “studio” to load into the cars, we thought nothing of carrying everything up the steps from the basement without cases or wheels and lugging the stuff to the cars. After all, we were young lads who didn’t have bad backs (yet).
2 comments:
As a stagehand, I can almost always tell what kind of day we are going to have by the condition of the cases as they are coming off the truck. Are the road cases beat up, with faulty latches and loose casters, or are there signs of repair or recent attention? Does every case have a label? Is there a specific plan for moving the big stuff? I like the addition of the winch to the trucks, although I would never rely on a Harbor Freight winch. This article is missing an important component that is sometimes overlooked by production companies in a hurry: is there a plan for the out? The company may have the perfect pack, using 100% of the volume of their truck, but it could take two hours to get it all in there. It is one thing to take a long time to load the truck at the warehouse, but you do not want to send ten stagehands into overtime because you tried to pack everything into a single trailer.
I find this kind of thing very interesting (though maybe a little tedious when I’ve actually had to do it). All of the different interlocking schedules of maintenance, prep, transportation, and actual events are fascinating, especially when multiple locations and clients are involved. Most of my experience with these sort of logistics, however, has been at my high school (where it was pretty much up to me when we needed to load out sound equipment for events around campus or conventions), a local theatre that I worked at (where it was pretty much up to my boss), and AB tech here at CMU (where there’s enough volume that the process has to be more decentralized, but the organizational practices aren’t quite up to the standards listed here). I wonder if I might enjoy working in events more with this kind of extremely well-planned management. My biggest frustration when operations we’re big enough that no one person was directly in charge have been with myself or others not knowing where things go, due to things getting moved around, their temporary locations not being properly labeled, and the use of equipment nicknames when they are labeled, which results in a very steep learning curve for those new to the organization.
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