The Rut and the Roots

We've finally settled into our schedule for the rest of summer. We run the show four times a day, with a break after two. Then we hustle to set up the parade stage, do parade preshow and parade, then we go back and sweep up confetti and go home. Except the parade still gets cancelled about one out of three times due to rain. Why is the parade cancelled because of rain? I think safety. One night we did it and it started raining during the middle of the route and ol' Ursie (the Opening Float) popped off the tracks. Twice. I think I wrote about that already.

Other than that, things are pretty smooth. Mostly. We do have some ongoing problems:

1. The traveler still likes to get caught on things. The solution? We need a bigger flyspace.

2. The dimmer box for the circus lights has started enjoying getting caught on the confetti shaker. Flyspace again.

3. Sometimes the cybers decide to go nuts during a show and I have to switch them off at the breakers. I have no idea why.

4. Other random things. Like yesterday we had a power surge right before a show and all the MACs flash overheated. We held for two minutes and they started to cool down right as we were starting.

5. And finally, the air conditioning. Decided not to work. Yesterday. And maybe today, I don't know yet. That building is designed for air conditioning, and it just gets hotter and hotter without it. Which is bad, especially for dancers that do four shows a day. Crossing my fingers on this one.

Starting ShowStoppin' and Other Stuff

A lot of things have happened! ShowStoppin' opened, for one. This means we've almost settled into the schedule we'll follow for the rest of summer... almost. All that's missing is doing the parade daily, which we'll start next week. Speaking of the parade, I think I know why we don't do it during the rain - when the tracks are wet, the floats like to pop off them. Thankfully, these floats have full steering control, so the ever-watchful guide simply steers you back onto the tracks.

Anyway, the ShowStoppin' schedule for me is as follows: arrive and start work at 2:30, do work notes such as straightening the traffic lights or trying to get the traveler to work right, and make sure the stage is clear of confetti from the previous day by the time the house opens at 3:10. The first show starts at 3:30. In the first blackout after the announcement, I fly out the ShowStoppin' sign. Then I sit through several songs until Telephone, when my cohort joins me. In the blackout before Telephone, we fly in the long truss (on two separate lines) with an LED bar and a telephone cord/mylar curtain drop on it. Over the course of the song, we tilt it one direction, then to horizontal, then the other direction, then back to horizontal. Then I give it a good yank to get it started flying out in the next blackout and I run to the traveler to try to close it before the lights come up. If I'm lucky the traveler closes nicely. If I'm not, it flips over a railing or gets caught on a support joint or something. Then during the next song I cheat in the traffic lights as far as possible without them being seen by the audience. In the blackout before Green Light I fly the downstage triangular truss set out a couple feet (this is a double purchase system, by the way - all of this is done from a loft). I also start flying the traffic lights in during the blackout. When the lights come up I slow down so the traffic lights enter slowly and stop when the music picks up. After Green Light I fly the traffic lights out. Then during Anyways we have a truss cue where I bring in the downstage truss set slowly and my cohort (who is sometimes Carrie and sometimes not) brings in the upstage truss set slowly and we go different distances and start and stop at the same time. Then I climb out of the loft during Are You Gonna Be My Girl and fly in the circus lights before Circus. If needed, I then help with a quick change. Finally I unhook the confetti shaker and make a huge confetti mess for a couple minutes. Then I fly out the circus lights, the show is over, and we wait for the house to clear. At that point we have about fifteen minutes until the house opens for the next show, and the stage is covered in confetti, which brings me to the most challenging part of my job: making sure the confetti on the stage ends up back in the confetti shaker before the house opens again. Pretty much all the techs spend all fifteen minutes on this task and we still cut it close.

We do two shows and then go on break, then two more shows and we're done. Next week it'll be parade right after our fourth show. While I'm excited for that, they will be tiring days, especially for the performers.

More news! Tonight was the first employee "ride night," where all the employees are invited to go and ride select rides and play some of the games after the park is closed. A bunch of us techs went and had a great time. I rode the Superman four times in half an hour, and three of those times were right in a row. I also rode the Batman four times and the East River Crawler once. I felt pretty happy and sick. Carrie tried hard to win a giant stuffed dog on the game where you have to bank the whiffle ball into the box. She used up all her tickets so I gave her mine, and on her sixth and final try she won! Hopefully Sally enjoys her new dog.

Going back to Iowa to see Torch Song (and some certain people) this weekend!

Opening Eve

We open tomorrow. Well, later today. I'm excited. Four shows and a parade, assuming weather holds out. Had some good runs today/yesterday, so I'm not too worried about. It's to the point where I can dance along with the music while I do my job, so I think I'm pretty much set. Gotta stay on my guard, though - there's still a lot of things that can go wrong, especially with the big truss.

In other news, I climbed to the top of the A-frame's extension today to change a light bulb, only to find out that the bulb I had was bad. I also remade the safety cables for the traffic lights. Shinin' a spotlight, yo (on safety). Big truss now has a mylar curtain along with a telephone cord drop. So now every time we sweep up confetti we have to pick out mylar strands. And we sweep up confetti a LOT.

I foresee a run in the morning. This is good. Planning to go back to Iowa for Torch Song at Stagewest next weekend!

Excuse me? Is your show running?

We've started doing rehearsal runs of ShowStoppin'. Us backstage techies are at the critical point of something going wrong during a run, okay, we'll fix it for next time, then something else going wrong. Basically we're learning the show by making all possible mistakes. Hopefully we'll turn the corner today and start doing "perfect" runs.

Challenges! There's a big ol' truss that extends the length of the stage. This truss is hung on two line sets. During "Telephone," we bring the truss in, then rotate it up and down. It's pretty cool to watch because there's an LED bar that goes all the way across the truss too. Until yesterday, it was just a truss. Then they started hanging our "telephone cord" drop on it. That created a couple issues, the first being that there's not enough fly space for a truss that's hanging low so you can bring it all the way in without seeing a batten AND a drop hanging off of said truss. The second issue is that in an attempt to fix this problem, all we knew and had practiced about flying the truss changed. However, I expect that we will work out the details of that problem today and all will be fine.

Our other challenge of the day was the traffic lights. During the second-to-last run (we did four over the course of the day) one of the lights hit something wrong on the way in and twisted ninety degrees. We collectively forgot to fix it before the next run, and the next time they were flown in, the light hit the bumper wrong and stood on it. Turns out the traffic lights are hung on stiff lines - painted conduit, I think - and one standing on a bumper while the rest come in is a bad thing. The collar twisted and broke. Fortunately, there's a safety on all the lights up there, and that's exactly why. Nothing fell and no one was hurt. The light needs some serious repair, though.

We open on Saturday! I'm not working so I think I'm going to go watch it.

REE! REE! REE! REE!

Warning: A rather ordinary post.

The power browned out when I was in the shower today. All I could think was "Psycho!" Finished Seven Samurai, finally. It was long. So many people say it's a great, maybe the greatest, foreign film. I say, umm, it's really too different from what I'm used to for me to judge. I liked it, though. I love the way the samurai run. I wonder if that's a cultural thing, or an actual samurai thing.

In other news, the WoW addon I've been working on is nearly finished. I'm still adding the most complex piece of functionality, but hopefully that'll be done soon now that my internet has decided to work again. I'm pretty happy with it, might even upload it to curse.

Edit: I just enabled AdSense. This should be interesting.

I Get PAID For This?

Welcome to Six Flags!

So in case you didn't know, "Welcome to Six Flags!" is the customary greeting employees use with guests of the park. The customary goodbye is "Have a Six Flags Day!" This will probably be the last post I open and close with those words because this is the last megapost. That's right, after this one, I start posting on what's currently happening, as opposed to what happened a month ago.

This post is about my job. As previously stated, I'm a backstage technician at Grand Music Hall. But because the new parade opened earlier this year, before ShowStoppin', we've been spending more time on parade activities than ShowStoppin' duties. The first thing I did on the job was to help hang strobe ropes (Did you know strobes come in rope form? I didn't.) in trees in Hometown Square, where the parade pre-show takes place. I learned two important things that night:

1) The first major difference between working for Six Flags and working for ISU Theatre is that no matter how similar the tasks may be, Six Flags is not a theatre. This affects all sorts of things in all sorts of ways. For instance, I have to wear a safety harness when I climb a tree. Actually, I have to wear a safety harness when I climb a ladder. That might sound annoying, but in reality it just makes me feel like an astronaut.

2) Zip ties are really useful.

Since then I've climbed all sorts of things, like buildings, trusses (especially glad for the safety harness on that one), tall ladders, and really tall ladders. I've learned to operate the lift we use to do things on the on-stage electrics. And I've ridden a lot of rollercoasters. This is a good summer for me and heights.

Going back to the on-stage electrics, here's an interesting point: they don't move. They're deadlocked in place. You can't fly them in. How does that compare to my past experiences? At Fisher, we don't even have electrics. If you want to hang an instrument above the stage, you have to run a cable to it. At the George Daily Auditorium, where I did my high school theatre and worked theatre camp, there were, I think, three flyable electrics. All in all, I think the GDA's system was the nicest. You could bring the lines in to hang your instruments, but you didn't have to bother with running cables. I guess the single advantage to running cables is that you can have the electrics be on any line you want for any given show. And I suppose the system at GMH here isn't all bad. Once the instruments are up, they stay there for a long time, and movable electrics are extra variables, especially around untrained technicians (we're not dumb, but many of us are young).

Anyway, that was a nice tangent.

Fun fact: ShowStoppin' is a couple years old. That means the set was already built. And by the time I got there, it was already set up. There's a big false proscenium, a tall platform with an upstage entrance and two staircases, and a runway with grating and lights from below. And since it's a semi-permanent set, it's all pretty solid, with lots of steel and plastic and whatnot. There's traffic lights for one song and a big ShowStoppin' light-up sign. We've got a couple spot operators in the back of the house that do some pretty complex maneuvers, and all the performers wear wireless microphones.

And then there's the lights. Another difference between ISU and Six Flags is that Six Flags is a pretty big corporation with a pretty big budget. We've got moving lights, LEDs, circus lights, traffic lights, cybers, strobes... not to mention foggers and hazers. All in all, there's some pretty cool special effects running around, both in GMH for ShowStoppin' and outside for the parade and parade pre-show. The point of Six Flags shows is not to make you think. It's to excite and entertain you, and we've got the equipment to do that. Here's a list of instruments I've worked with that I've never touched before:

Martin MAC 250 Krypton moving lights (I'm unsure about the order of descriptors there. Also, I got to see the insides of a couple of these because they got a bit wet and we needed to dry them.)

LED Shadow boards (We use them for blacklight effects.)

Atomic somethingsomethings (Strobers, if I recall... I didn't do much but address them.)

Some crazy-bright LED heads that can light up the whole parade stage as bright as day from on top of a nearby building.

A couple of Super Trouper spots that don't diminish in power if pointed at a rollercoaster on the other side of the park.

And here's a list of some phrases I've picked up:

Intelligent lights - I think this pretty much sums up instruments that use DMX instead of dimmers.

Cybers - Lighting instruments that use a rotatable mirror to create moving light effects.

EL wire - Electroluminescent wire. The key to the Glow in the Park Parade.

Shroud - A box used to house lighting equipment.

And some skills I've learned or improved on:

Making data cable

Working with EL wire

Soldering in general

Doing fly cues

Driving a parade float

Eek. This post looks plenty long for now. I might have to have another one specifically about the parade and one about my ShowStoppin' duties too. For now, I need to stop typing.

Have a Six Flags Day!

A Tale of Two Roommates

Welcome to Six Flags!

I expect this to be a shorter sort of post. I've had two roommates since I've been here. Fortunately they've both been pretty easy to get along with. The first was an intern with Park Operations. We worked almost completely opposite schedules - I usually got home and he would already be sleeping, and I'd wake up and he was already gone. Well, he figured out he knew the guy next door from last year, so he decided to do a roommate swap.

Several weeks later I've finally got a new roommate. He's Chinese with perfect English, which is cool given my bad hearing, and he's an intern in games. As I type this we're watching 2012 on the DVD player. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Have a Six Flags Day!

A Park, a Parade and a Paycheck

Welcome to Six Flags!

Want to hear more about it? You do? Great! Six Flags (in case you haven't heard of it) is a large theme/amusement park chain with I think about a dozen parks around the US of A and one in Mexico City. Our particular specimen, Six Flags Great America and Hurricane Harbor, is in Gurnee, IL, which we all lovingly refer to as "Chicago." The founding idea of Six Flags is sort of to have a big, professional, well-run theme park in a location and at a price that is more accessible than some other company's big, professional, well-run theme park. It's pretty great. I get in for free.

Six Flags has two themes, Looney Tunes and DC Comics. It's the only place where Bugs Bunny follows Batman in the parade. There's also Scooby Doo and The Wiggles. But Six Flags also balances those themes with awesome roller coasters like the Batman, the Superman and the Raging Bull. And there are plenty of rides for the young 'uns too, plus a big ol' waterpark called Hurricane Harbor (free with admission!).

Where do I come in? Six Flags Great America has several shows (free with admission!) that are run by the Entertainment department, which also takes care of the characters wandering the park. The show I am working is the largest one, called ShowStoppin' (unsure about capitalization on that), and takes place at Grand Music Hall. ShowStoppin' is a song and dance revue-type show that features modern pop, rock, R&B and country music. And I'm going to be flying stuff in and out and helping with costume changes and whatnot. Clearly I'm not sure about my exact duties yet, because ShowStoppin' hasn't opened yet.

That's because the Glow in the Park Parade opened last weekend instead! What's a Glow in the Park Parade, you ask? Well, here's ours. Somebody put it up on YouTube the day after it opened because it's that cool. I gotta run now, more on the parade later! Suffice it to say that other parks have had the Glow in the Park Parade in past years, and it's new for Great America this year, so there's been a lot of work put into it to get it going.

EDIT: Have a Six Flags Day!

A Hotel Off of Northpoint, or In Which I Discuss Arrival and Settling In

Welcome to Six Flags!

This is my blog about my "internship" this summer at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, IL. I used quotes there because I'm pretty sure Six Flags doesn't consider me an intern, but anyway. My position: backstage technician. My show: ShowStoppin' 2010. My alternate duty: driver in the Glow in the Park Parade. My float: the opening float, aka Ursie. More on that later.

By the way, I expect to do a lot of comparison between my experiences here and those at ISU, so my apologies in advance for some gross analogies.

I arrived here on May 10th, so clearly I haven't written anything for a good long while. That's okay. I remember it all like it was yesterday... (cue wavy memory world transition). First, let's cover housing. I am in this year's 6FGA employee housing, which is a Crossland Economy Studios in Waukegan. I've got a special rate, so it's not too expensive, and we get maid service, so it's not too rough. The internets aren't so great (I tried to watch a Netflix stream once and it took four hours to watch a 70 minute Batman cartoon), and the cupboard space is limited. There's a small kitchenette with two burners and a mini-fridge. Otherwise it's basically a motel room from anywhere. I've got a roommate; more on that later.

My processing wasn't until later on May 11th, so I checked out the area. The motel is in a business park in Waukegan, which is a suburb about an hour north of downtown Chicago. It has a pretty cool marina and beach on Lake Michigan as well as a thriving Hispanic district that I hope to visit for food some time. Waukegan runs straight into Gurnee, where the park is. The "village" of Gurnee also contains a mall the size of Brownville, Nebraska, and more Pancheros's than the state of Iowa.

Overall I can't complain. I don't mind my housing establishment, and the area and people are nice. There's a Super WalMart about two minutes away, and work is about twelve minutes away. What more could one need?

Have a Six Flags Day!