Friday, September 13, 2013

Smoke in the Ballrooms & Theatre

500

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Smoke in the Ballrooms & Theatres

120

Stagehands - 1960s Theater Workers / Educational Documentary

Behind the scenes activities of theater stagehands. Filmed at the National Theatre, Washington DC. Shows scenes of the stagehands working on the production "My Fair Lady".

Friday, September 6, 2013

Stagehand App

StageHand is an application that allows easy dip switch and light beam calculations for stage hands or anyone with an interest in lighting equipment. We have added a bunch of tools and reference materials, like a color calculator, pin outs, watts to amps converter, and more.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Softgoods


Softgoods
Typical load on a batten is usually some form of softgoods, e.g. curtains.

Curtains: a cloth that fills the stage opening. Generally opaque, usually in dark or subdued colors, made from heavy cloth. The best are made from velour, as this fabric is best at light absorption and has the lowest reflection. Curtains are usually hung with fullness, or pleating. Pleating may be sewn in, or created by hanging a long curtain on a shorter pipe, with the fullness tied in. 50% fullness if common, meaning the curtain when stretched is half again as long as when tied on the batten.

Legs: narrow curtains used as masking at sides of stage to hide wings.

Tormentors: furthest downstage legs, the "torms". Used to reduce the size of the proscenium opening. Often hard, with a frame and hard subsurface beneath a velour covering.

Borders: short curtains used to mask the top of stage, to mask the loft.

Teaser: furthest downstage border also used to reshape proscenium opening. Torm is sometimes called the grand drape or the Valence.

Portal: a border and legs combined into a single piece with a large opening.

Velour- Best cloth for curtains, a dull finished knapped fabric, really a form of velvet. Best at light and sound absorption and blocking, but also heaviest most expensive fabric for curtains.

Duvetine- lighter, cheaper substitute, a heavy fabric with brushed rather than woven knap. Looks almost like velour and weighs less, but doesn't work as well.

Courduroy- another substitute for velour, also cheaper and lighter weight; works well if it has a thin wale. However, the wales give it a definite directionality.

CONSTRUCTION of CURTAINS:

Grommets
_______________________________________
| o o o o o o o
_ | || || || || || ||
|____________Jute_Webbing_____________ _ | || || || || || || | Fullness | | |
_____
| | | |___________Pipe or Chain Pocket_________ |________________ __________________
Curtains come in several forms and arrangements:
curtain types
Guillotine curtain: flies straight up and down. One of the most common curtain riggings.

Travelers or draw curtains: split in the middle into two panels and pulled open and shut on tracks, generally with an "endless" operating line. Usually hand operated, but may be run with a winch, especially with remote control systems.
More curtain types
Braille curtain, or Austrian drape: a curtain raised from the bottom using vertical parallel lift lines.

Tab or Tableau curtains, also known as Opera drapes: two overlapping panels pulled upward and outward on the diagonal. Main drape travelers are sometimes also rigged with opera draping built in for alternate use.

Contour or profile curtains, also known as Venetian drapes: rigged similarly to braille curtains, but can be raised in various configurations because each lift line can be individually adjusted.

FULLNESS:


Curtains, borders, legs may all be hung stretched flat, or may be hung with fullness.
Fullness is a gathering of the material of the soft goods to make it thicker and make it disappear in light even more. 

Looks more attractive and finished than when hung flat.

Fullness is expressed in percentage of fabric folded back on itself, or how much longer material is than pipe length it takes up. Therefore: a curtain half again as long as the pipe it is hung on with the excess distributed as gathers or pleats, has 50% fullness. If it is twice the length of its batten, it has 100% fullness.


Fullness can be sewn in using any desired pleating system. 
Gather
Z-fold
Box
Sewn fullness easier to put up, only need to stretch the top out and tie to batten. Also, works well with traveller system; top can be pulled flat by the carriers but the fullness will stay evenly distributed.
However, if fullness is sewn in, can't hang piece without fullness.

An alternative: use tied fullness. In this system, curtains are sewn flat but made longer than pipe. Piece is tied on with gathers.

Tied in fullness will not work well with travellers, as the carriers pull the fullness out as they extend. 

You CAN tie a sort of pinched pleat in by tieing two grommets to each carrier, but that is all, an it doesn't work as well as a sewn fullness.

Other Softgoods


Scrims: curtain made of an open weave fabric becomes transparent when lit from behind, but which appears opaque when lit from the front.

Usually woven in one piece to avoid seams. Most scrims are of sharkstooth scrim, good compromise between transparency and opacity. Where almost complete transparency is desired there is bobbinette scrim. For high opacity, there is leno filled scrim. Filled scrim is often used for:

Cycloramas or cycs: large scrims used for simulating sky. Rigged far upstage, often on curved pipes to wrap around back of the scene. Usually hung with a Bounce, a white canvas curtain just upstage of the scrim cyc. The cyc gives effect of distance and the bounce gives opacity.

Transparency: scrims "painted" with dyes to create a drop that is opaque and visible when front lit but which disappears to reveal a scene behind when back lit.

Drops, or backdrops: large pieces of canvas which are painted to be scenery. To look natural as possible, must be stretched to get rid of wrinkles. Simplest way to do this is to sew a long tube called a pipe pocket into the bottom edge of the drop and insert a water pipe for weight. Wooden battens sandwiching the drop, or chain in a chain pocket are also used.

Full drop: a solid piece of canvas, usually as large as the stage picture.

Cut drop: a drop with holes cut into it for scenic effect. Often used for foliage drops, with leaf shapes 
cut into the edge and through the drop. Cut drops are often made using netting to hold the irregular edges and shapes of the cuttings in position.

Roll drop: a method of rigging full drops in a theatre without a fly loft. The drop is tied to the batten above. The bottom is fastened to a round tube 4 to 6 inches in diameter. The ends of the tube sticks out beyond both ends of the drop by several feet. Ropes are wrapped around each end of the tube in opposite direction from the curtain wrap. When the ropes are pulled up, they upwrap from the tube and cause the drop to wrap around the tube, When the drop is let in, the ropes wrap up around the tube as the curtain unwraps. The tubes were once made of wooden strips, but today are usually plastic or aluminum tubing. Cardboard rug cores also work for smaller drops.

Tripped drops: Another method of flying out a long drop in a short fly house. Lift lines are attached to the bottom pipe (or to a pipe in a special pocket one-third of the way up the drop) and are raised to lift the bottom of the drop out of sight.

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Smoke in the Ballrooms & Theatres

125

Stage Carpentry

http://www.ia470.com/primer/scenery.htm

Scenery

Many methods used to assemble and shift scenery.

Wing and drop: an old method, wings are legs painted like drops. To change the scene, one set of wings, drop, and border are flown out and another set flown in. This system is still common in opera and ballet.
Gripping: simplest way, just close the curtain and send the grips out to pick up set pieces and carry them off. Requires a certain amount of practice to do safely, so that the large set pieces don't upend while being moved.
Flying: Scenery is sometimes rigged to fly on battens like curtains. This can be too heavy a load for a single line set; two adjacent batten may be chained together or "married", with the counterweight for the load divided between them. Add weight evenly to both arbors until the load is balanced.

Flats are assembled into scenery using a variety of methods, depending on the nature of the show.


The simplest type of flat show involves using a single set for the whole show. Flats can be attached to each other for the duration of the run. For a straight wall, flats are connected using battens. 

Battens : simply boards, 1x3 or 1x4. If the wall is not too large, lay the boards flat on the back of flats and screw battens to frame of the flats with drywall or utility screws.

For taller and/or heavier flats this is often not stiff enough.

Stiffener : To make battens stiffer, place on edge instead of flat, and hinge to flat frames. Alternate hinges on both sides of the batten so the batten doesn't fold over. Used this way,it is called a stiffener, and may be used horizontally or vertically as needed. Hinges used are backflap hinges, which have a larger surface flap than other types.

BOX SET: a set that wraps around playing area on three sides, resembles a box with one side removed. Naturally it uses corner joints.

When a corner is assembled to make a box set, the attachment used will vary with Angle. 

*From 90 degrees to about 45 degrees, screws or nails can be used. 
*If corner is flatter, screws or nails will likely split wood and not hold, and so hinges may be more successful.

The walls of a freestanding box set must be supported in some way. If there are sufficient corners, the set can hold itself up. Long flat walls must be supported some other way.
Two most common bracing devices: jacks and stage braces.
  • JACKS: triangular frames attached to back of flats, usually with hinges. May the be anchored to floor by a hinge, by screwing through into a wooden cleat fastened to the floor, or with a weight (as a stage weight or closed sandbag) placed on jack to counterbalance weight of the flat.
  • STAGE BRACES: adjustable sticks with hook at top and foot at the bottom. Hook is attached to a brace cleat on flat and foot is attached to the floor with a stage screw. Brace is then adjusted so flat is vertical.
Stage screws:




  • Traditional screw: cast iron screw with a coarse tapered thread. Pointed end is jammed into the floor and screwed in by hand. If the set is moved, the screw can be reinserted into the existing hole when the set is placed again. If this happens too many times will strip out hole and a new hole will have to be set.









  • Improved stage screw: designed to overcome this problem. Has square threads which engage inside of threaded insert. Outside of insert has knife threads to engage the wooden floor. 

    To use, pilot hole is drilled into floor and the insert is screwed into floor, usually with a brace and a special screw bit. Stage screw then screws into insert. 
    Disadvantage: improved stage screw requires more effort to install,
    BUT
    Can be used almost indefinitely without stripping out floor.





  • Leaves a hole in floor when insert is removed, but this can be repaired with dowel and glue.
    The hole from a traditional stage screw tends to close up when the screw is removed, as no wood is actually removed while installing.
    ----------------

    Scenery that shifts:

    A play using multiple box sets requires different assembly strategies so that sets can be quickly put up and taken down, yet still be secure in use.

    Traditional approach, somewhat uncommon now: specialized stage hardware used with #8 cotton sash cord to lash flats together.
    Requires lash hardware:
    • Lash eyes- these are placed on the top left hand flat as you face the back of seam. They go on this side because most people are right handed. The sash cord passes through the eye and knotted with an overhand or figure-eight knot.
    • Lash cleats- spaced alternately down the flat joint, these are designed so the rope can slide over them when you pull them tight.
    • Tie-off cleat - this is designed so the rope doesn't slide when you pull it tight.
    • Stop cleat- These are placed to prevent the flats from sliding past each other when a corner is made.
    To use, the flats are butted together, and the rope is flipped alternately around the lash cleats, then tied off over the stop cleat with a lash line tie-off knot that holds under pressure, but which can be quickly released to shift.

    Alternate approaches:

    Instead of lash hardware and rope, other methods commonly used today:
    • Loose-pin hinges: hinges with removable pins. Pin wire is used instead of the stock pin as it is smaller in diameter and places more quickly. Can be bent over slightly so it won't fall out, then straightened for removal. Quick and secure, but requires a ladder to set top hinges.
    • Roto-locks or coffin locks: also quick and secure, but also requires a ladder as well as 5/16" Allen key. Coffin locks pull joint together, but add to overall thickness of flats in storage.
    • Instead of sash cord, aircraft cable can be substituted and end secured with load binders to a ring or hook. Stronger than rope, but requires more equipment to install.
    Two-fold and three-fold: two or three flats hinged together and folded for storage. Two flats folded is a "book flat". Three flats folded is a "three-fold". Because of the thickness of the middle flat, three-fold must be either Z-folded (not usually possible) or must be assembled with a tumbler or tumbling stile.
    When book flats and three folds are opened, they can be stiffened several ways.
    • Can use standard stiffener with loose-pin hinges to be unpinned and removed.
    • Batten can be bolted with single pivot bolt, and the batten rotated into place.
    • Batten hooks can be hooked over toggles and a batten dropped into hook.

    Wagons

    Wagons: standard platforms with castors attached.
    Castors come in two forms: Swivel and Rigid.
    • Rigid castors: track in straight lines.
      To work properly, MUST be parallel.
    • Swivel castors: used when they don't track in straight lines.
    Standard platform is 4' x 8' because of plywood size, often too small to be practical, so wagons and platforms are generally assembled into larger units.
    Bolting with carriage bolts. 3/8" bolts most usual.
    Rotolocks or coffin locks: used for road shows and when bottom is not accessible for assembly:


    How to get castored wagons to go where you want them: 

    Wagons may be gripped, pushed on with push poles, slid in tracks.
    Gripping: grabbing the wagon and moving it manually. Best accomplished behind closed curtains.
    "A Vista" shifts (in sight of the audience) require somewhat trickier techniques.

    Push poles: simple and effective, attach push pole and shove platform out into view. Limited mostly by length of the pole; as a practical matter usually used to move platform out about 8 to 12 feet.

    Works best for smaller platforms.
    Larger platforms require more elaborate arrangements.

    Tracked wagons use guides to make sure the wagon goes where you want it.
    • Rails may be bolted or screwed to floor. May be battens or angle irons fastened in parallel rows. Platform slides between them.
    • Angle iron may be layed with the V up, and V-wheeled castors used to roll on them. This give less to trip on, but there is still some obstruction. Also, ONLY works with the v-wheel castors.

    Knife slots.: slots in floor with metal bars or knives on wagon that fit into them. Requires a deck with slots cut into it; often involves installing a full deck over the regular stage floor.

    May work better, but is much more expensive and more labor intensive to install.
    Turn table: specialized platforms using rigid castors arranged in arcs around fixed pivot. Several scenes can be set up on them, then rotated into view in turn.
    Turn tables require some sort of drive to operate.
    • Small turn tables may be turned manually.
    • Larger tables can be:
      • Belt driven: motorized and cranked winch.
      • Pressure wheel driven: motorized
      • Gear driven: motorized.
    One aspect of wagons is making them NOT roll in use. This can be accomplished with:
    • Locking Castors
    • Pinned in place: using
      • Various fence gate locks
      • Barrel bolts.
      • Cane bolts.
    • Wagon breaks. Work by raising wagon off the castors onto the break. 
      Must be adjusted so they don't raise the wagon too far so as not to tilt the set or lift it out of its track, yet still provide enough friction to hold.

    Moving wagons:

    Sometimes such wagons are operated by motors and winches using computer controlled automation at one extreme, and by manual operation at the other.
    Slip stages: huge wagons taking up large parts of stage, which slide in from the wings or from upstage into position. Slip stages require similarly large offstage storage spaces.
    Jackknife wagons: used where there isn't enough room for slip stages. Pivot in on one corner. Two may swing together to meet in the middle.
    Turn tables: large round wagons that turn on a pivot. Two or three settings are set on the turntable, and the table is turned to reveal each in turn.

    Doors and Windows

    Two very common scenic elements are realistic doors and windows. To be successful, they must look realistic and work every time. Unlike REAL doors and windows, stage doors and windows cannot depend on the walls they are mounted in to hold them together quite as much as real units, but neither do they have to be weather tight.

    A door unit consists of the door and its frame. The door itself if called a shutter.
    Shutters may be constructed as solid core, hollow core, or as panel doors with various numbers of panels

    Doors can also be described by form. Most doors are one-piece doors, but there are also Dutch doors, French doors, folding doors, bi-pass sliding doors, and pocket doors.
    Doors come in standard sizes. Household doors are standardized at 6'-8" high, while commercial doors are 7'-0" tall. Widths are generally in 2" increments, ranging from 24" for closet doors, to 36" for front entrance doors, and in between 30", 32", and sometimes 34" for interior doors. The standard height for doorknobs is 38" above the floor.

    No matter what the door type, all doors need frames. Frames have several parts. The jam is the inside frame that boxes the thickness of the wall, to which the hinges and lock catch are attached. The casing is the surface trim that covers the gap and joins the jam to the wall. The board across the bottom of the frame is the threshold. The thin boards that stop the door from swinging in too far are, naturally, door stops.

    Door hardware consists of the hinges and the lock. The hinges usually used on doors are butt hinges. These are taller when closed than they are high. Locks are inset into the opposite edge.

    The most common lock today is the cylinder lock. The lock mechanism is set into round holes bored into the edge of the door.

    Older doors often used mortise locks. These fit in rectangular hollows bored and chiseled into the edge of the doors. They require more work to install than cylinder locks, in that the hole is more exacting to make. They are still available for existing doors, but are rarely used in new work.

    Old passage doors, especially in more modest homes, were often too thin to use a mortise or cylinder lock. For these doors one uses a rim lock. These are installed on the surface of the door, usually on the "back" side of the door. Since the back side of a door usually is not seen by the audience, rim locks are very useful in theatre, as they can be installed on a door more quickly than any other common door lock.

    Tuesday, September 3, 2013

    Local stagehands escape Silverdome with their lives

    http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2010/06/22/news/local_news/doc4c1fd417969fc357332898.txt




    Local stagehands are calling it a miracle that no one died when the stage they were working on for a Saturday concert at the Silverdome collapsed.

    “I had to dive off the stage to not get killed,” said one stagehand, who asked not to be identified. “I dove headfirst, landed about 7 feet under on the concrete, on my face.

    “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

    The man described looking up just in time to see the truss on the roof of the stage snap.

    “I saw it coming down and I didn’t want to look back, I just dove,” he said. “I had to dive to avoid getting crushed.”

    The local stagehands were hired to help set up for the Jai Ho concert featuring A.R. Rahman, the composer of “Slumdog Millionaire.”

    Emergency responders from the Pontiac Fire Department were called to the Silverdome around 4:30 p.m. Saturday, before the show started.

    The stagehand described the moments of terror as “like being in a dream and you try to run, but you can’t.”

    Like many stagehands, he says he has always been aware that disasters like this can strike and now that it has, he’s pretty shaken up.

    Monday, September 2, 2013

    Fatal plunge by stagehand stirs questions of safety, fines


    Las Vegas stagehand Vicente Rodriguez fell to his death from a rigging plank suspended over the MGM Grand's Hollywood Theater. If the planking had been equipped with guardrails, the 20-year-old -- who was incorrectly wearing his safety harness -- might be alive today.

    The stagehand's death and the relatively small fines assessed for failing to maintain workplace safety -- imposed according to a penalty scale that has increased only once in 40 years -- are part of a national discussion about improving safety in the entertainment industry.

    For their part in safety violations connected to the death in May 2009, both the stage company that employed Rodriguez and the hotel that owns the theater have been cited by the Nevada Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

    MGM Grand paid a penalty of $19,800, down from a proposed penalty of $38,700, said Steve Coffield, head of Nevada OSHA.

    Rhino Las Vegas, the stage company, must pay a $4,000 penalty, according to terms of a settlement reached in late May. The original fine proposed for Rhino was $25,000.

    Coffield said both fines were reduced partly because of duplication of charges. Also, Rhino's fine was cut because of the company's small size.

    Coffield said it is legally difficult to apply Nevada's safety regulations -- which are geared more to construction sites -- to the entertainment industry, which has grown more sophisticated with technologies that present new workplace hazards.

    David Michaels, head of federal OSHA, recently discussed entertainment safety with reporters.

    "The current penalty structure is too low to compel companies to take workplace safety as seriously as they should," a federal OSHA spokesman, Michael Wald, wrote to the Review-Journal this week after it inquired about Michaels' remarks. Despite inflation, the agency's penalties have increased only once in the past 40 years, Michaels told a congressional committee in March.

    Occupations such as construction, offshore drilling, mining and logging are routinely viewed as dangerous, while risks to entertainment workers are not always well-publicized, Michaels told the media. Most of the public knows that an animal trainer died during a performance at SeaWorld Orlando in February, but fewer people realize Disney World also suffered several work-related fatalities last year.

    On a telephone conference with reporters, Michaels talked about a Florida stagehand's death in late 2009 but did not seem to be aware of Rodriguez's death in Las Vegas, which was not coded in OSHA's database as entertainment-related.

    Michaels wants to tighten national safety standards for entertainment, which Nevada's business chief, Donald Jayne, seconds. "By inference, we'll match" what the federal agency adopts, said Jayne, who is administrator for the state's Division of Industrial Relations.

    Marychris Rodriguez, mother of the young Las Vegas stagehand, said Wednesday the family has been unable, for more than a year, to obtain a police report about the death. She also wants federal OSHA to investigate Nevada OSHA's investigation.

    In the May 20, 2009, accident, Vicente Rodriguez fell almost 37 feet to the stage floor as crew members were tearing down stage fixtures after Tom Jones had finished a run at the MGM Grand.

    Nevada OSHA's accident report, issued in September, said that in the stage area where Rodriguez fell, workers had to balance on a catwalk before they could clip a harness onto a horizontal life line. And then, they had to step over 33 inches of false ceiling, without any guardrails.

    Rodriguez was wearing his safety harness improperly, but OSHA inspectors also found a risk that sharp edges on structures above the stage could sever lines attached to a harness worn correctly.

    A similar stagehand fatality in Florida last December led to an OSHA fine of $3,675, which was announced several weeks ago. That accident occurred at a West Palm Beach concert hall, when a lighting technician fell 25 feet from a stage catwalk, which lacked mandatory safety rails.

    OSHA can levy a maximum $70,000 civil penalty for a workplace death when willful safety violations are proved. But in 2007, the national median for OSHA fines proposed -- not necessarily the finalized amount paid -- for violations leading to a workplace death was "just $5,900," Michaels told a congressional committee in March.

    Rhino's safety violations were not found to be willful, state OSHA records showed.

    State officials and Marychris Rodriguez have said they will work together to develop a campaign promoting entertainment safety in Nevada, whose casinos hold many performance venues.

    Sunday, September 1, 2013

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