Problem Solving

During the planning process, I anticipated a number of problems to arise. However, I didn't encounter as many problems as I thought I would.

One problem that I had to deal with was the fact that one of the actors added several cues around 1 hour before the matinee performance and the second group wanted to do a run-through so I had to add the cues and update my cue sheet in a very short space of time. Thankfully, the cues that the actor wanted were fairly simple so I was able to program them quickly which is mostly how I managed to solve the problem. I updated my cue sheet as we went along so I managed to resolve two issues at the same time.

Another problem that I came across was during the technical rehearsal of A Bronx Tale. The actor wanted three different projections to change throughout the piece. The problem was that there were a number of sound cues in between each change of projection so I had to find a way of quitting each audio cue without getting rid of the projection. My initial thought was to freeze the projector and unfreeze it when necessary but I didn't go with this idea as it presented too much risk of something going wrong. I felt as though it didn't allow for each change to be as smooth as it could be. In the end, I decided to trim the audio cues to the length that they needed to be at so that I didn't have to 'quit' any of the audio cues. Fortunately, quite a few of the audio cues were really short as they were voiceovers.

I also faced a problem during Zoo Story as they wanted audience music and a projection so, again, I had to figure out a way of stopping the audience music without getting rid of the projection. As there was only one projection, I managed to solve the issue easily by freezing the projector so that whatever I did on Q-Lab didn't interfere with the projection. To achieve this, I had to get help from various people. Two members of staff had to come and look at the issue and they weren't sure as to how to solve the problem. Eventually, my classmate managed to find a solution which was quite relieving.

The biggest problem that I faced was that one of the actors didn't show up and that messed up the entire production schedule for me and the other actors because we all planned our time around each other. Each group was allocated their own day to tech their show so the fact that one of the actors didn't show up meant that an entire day would be wasted. However, in order to make use of our time, one of the actors and I decided to tech for his show a few days early which allowed us to gain time. By going through the technical rehearsal a few days early, we were able to use the actor's 'technical day' to implement a few changes that the actor wanted to make such as adding or removing a few lighting cues or tweaking the cues.