Road; Get In and Fit Up

5th March 2012

The get in and fit up for Road was a long, stressful day. We started at university loading up the van with EVERYTHING - like a giant game of tetris trying to make it fit. 

Once we were down at the venue and we had finished unloading the van the challenge of hoisting the fixing the road segments had begin. On the floor we bolted the segments together and stitched a cross-brace to them, to keep them secure. The pin spots were put into place and wired up on the floor as once the pieces were flown they wouldn't be accessible. 

Once we had marked their position in, they were attached to fly bars and flown to the correct height. 

Cross Bracing and attaching to the bars

We flew all three pieces, which was vaguely successful yet extremely daunting. The problems I was facing was extreme sexism from both John and the Lighthouse crew - for example they would ask a question and ignore me when I answered it, needing to hear it from a man. this was infuriating because I knew the set dimensions inside and out and being ignored on account of my gender was not cricket. I had taken to sitting in the auditorium and barking out "up a bit - down a bit" and making my presence known. 

After enough barking they started to realise that I was the most sensible person to talk to as the designer's most common answer was "I don't know.". 

Flying Scenery

Once all the pieces were flown the challenge of inserting the scaffold tube (6m long sections) had begun. This required cooperation from us on the floor, the technical crew controlling the flies, the lighting crew (the lighting bars had to be rigged before flying otherwise they couldn't be flow down).

We started with the curved segment upstage as it was more or less in the right position, but the problem was the pre-drilled apertures weren't the right size because of the angle of the legs. Once they had be widened we could insert the legs 9these ones were only 4m) and position them to the floor. Positioning them on the floor was a Design decision that the designer should have led, but didn't really.

It was a challenge inserting these scaff legs because it involved a team of us holding them, inserting them into the holes (with a jiggle from the flies) and then repositioning the pieces so they still looked right.

Once they were all done a member of the in-house crew braced the scaff legs off against the fly bars to hold them steady. 

The set was in position and looked great, looked exactly like the model box.