We’ve put hours of planning and prep into a service, everything is working exactly as it could, then BAM!
Some critical piece of equipment fails.
And it was probably something that had been working super reliably for weeks and months and years.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Communicating Well When Troubleshooting Tech - Church Production Magazine
We’ve put hours of planning and prep into a service, everything is working exactly as it could, then BAM!
Some critical piece of equipment fails.
And it was probably something that had been working super reliably for weeks and months and years.
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5 comments:
A lot of these tips transfer really well into our program. Sometimes someone who doesn’t necessarily know everything about a console, specifically freshmen run crew, are the ones running the system and need to help troubleshoot. Keeping cool, identifying the end-user issue, and communicating with directors and actors is incredibly important to mediating such a situation. I think that the first tip is particularly important. It is common to focus on the wrong thing when trying to quickly identify and solve an issue, but it makes a lot of sense that starting with the actual symptoms before jumping to a solution would be the best course of action. Of course, after finding the solution quickly, it would be best to go in depth about what happened and discover what the real problem was. I feel like sometimes once the problem is “fixed” we move on and hope it stays fixed but there will always have to be someone who deals with the real problem and it is better to deal with it outside of the time sensitivity of a show.
This is an interesting challenge that all of us have had to deal with. Something dies in your community theater or church and there are a handful of helpful people with various levels of knowledge all working together. This issue is one I’ve had to deal with a lot in my church growing up. My church attempted to purchase a turnkey system that was supposed to be simple enough that anyone could use it, but of course it wasn’t that simple. Because of how complex it can get, most of the volunteers shied away from it, leaving my mother and 12 year old brother caring for it out of necessity. Being a technical person, anything that goes wrong usually results in an email or phone call to me and I’ll try to troubleshoot it from 250 miles. The biggest hindrance seems to be the communication barrier. My mom will explain the functionality she’s trying to achieve and then I’ll attempt to concisely explain what needs to be done to achieve that. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same baseline understanding. Saying “all you need is a male to male XLR adapter” would make perfect sense to someone who uses this type of stuff regularly, but results in me first having to explain which cable XLR is, then which side is male (very confusing for XLR), and then where in the system it goes. This leads to lots of general confusion with no clear solution.
This article, although the theatre world is not the main subject of this article, is very significant for theatre technicians. All of the content in this article directly relates to solving any problem that arises in the production process particularly during tech week or a performance. If something goes wrong such as a light suddenly stops working during tech week while running a dimmer check, there are likely a handful of people all asking what’s wrong, assuming what’s wrong, but only one or two who are probably going to try and fix the problem. In my high school experience, there was something that went wrong every single night of tech week. After four years of trouble shooting the same problems show after show, I started to learn what the common problems were and how to short term and long term solve them. I left high school with having this information all written down on a document that was located on our school’s art server so anyone in the future could use the document. I really like the top three things to keep in mind aspect of this article.
I'm surprised that an article geared towards production in a church is so applicable to our work in theatre. But when considering the basic aspects of production, they're the same across many mediums of performance. I like the point about avoiding visible troubleshooting when an issue arises. A major part of any technical error is the chaos and controversy that arises from it. Keeping members of the team and members of the audience at ease can limit the drama of technical difficulties. This article was also suprising to me because my experience with attending services at a conservative synagogue involved very minimal technology. On the sabbath, we weren't supposed to touch technology because it was considered a sacred day. But I can imagine that during any religious service that does choose to utilize it, hearing feedback or experiencing other glitches could impact a spiritual experience. Just like in a play or a musical, errors can pull us out of the moment.
I'm not often really grabbed by articles on the blog. Sometimes topics are interesting, or funny, or otherwise worthwhile, but this one above average. It's a simple concept, but crisis management is something that a lot of us struggle with at CMU, if for no other reason that we've never had this lecture, never read this article. In our technical classes we're taught to understand a problem, and in management classes we're taught to stay calm, and, to an extent, to triage problems and to try to judge when to cut our losses, but that perspective isn't really, at least so far in my experience, brought into the discussion of technical problem solving. While in a theatrical setting, as opposed to a church setting, these decisions fall more often to the stage manager, it's still an incredibly useful skill for technicians and designers to have. Remembering the end-user should always be the goal, and this is useful to keep in mind as both a manager and as a person primarily responsible for a technical system. In addition, the emphasis placed on maintaining communicaiton throughout that process is something that should be emphasized more heavily.
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