CX Magazine - The News Magazine for Entertainment Technology

8th April 2010. Perth WA

Reader reports: How fire retardant are your drapes? It was interesting reading about accidents and near accidents in the industry.  I have two incidents were there were near misses neither of which I was involved in setting up only the solution.

2 April 2010. Mexico

Three workers have been injured after the stage for an upcoming Elton John concert collapsed at the Maya pyramids of Chichen Itza, in southern Mexico, event organisers said.

Read more: here

Here it is! The tool for everyone exposed to music or amplified anything. In fact, any noise whatever.

GO HERE and download!

Note: this is an .xls spreadsheet file.

TO USE: Take SPL readings, punch in to spreadsheet, get exposure times!

RMIT survey shows that girl techies are growing in numbers

Until now there's been a dearth of females in technical roles, and the reasons why are generally known. This year RMIT (Melbourne) and Julius College (Sydney) have record participation by girls in technical courses, although the best result is 25% female participation, against 75% males.

The study by Rebekha Naim, a trainer in Audio Visual at RMIT, drew on interviews with female students, staff and industry, and found that employers tend to favor female graduates. At RMIT 90% of graduates find work in the AV industry, a result consistent with outcomes at Julius College in Sydney.

Females studying AV at RMIT report they enjoyed training alongside men. "They talked of the positive aspects of studying with men and their "...easy going natures..." (Student A), with less "...cattiness..." (Student C). They also mentioned that working with men was a lot less emotionally draining, even if they had to put up with occasional sexism."

How to batten down your hatches and use the great global economic downturn thing as an advantage! A record number of production suppliers face a challenging year as budgets are reviewed and shows are cancelled. The annual CX review of Production Firms shows new entrants running at more than 10% per year, into a market that grew less than that in its boom year of 2007.

“We don’t have less clients, just less income”, one Sydney vendor told CX – preferring not to be identified. “We have private clients downgrading their events, schools trying to do musicals with the same budget or less, and several less TV shows in 2009”. In big concert tour and festival land, things are tight. Audio budgets are the same as they were five years ago, with a two week arena tour usually grossing around $30,000 – including crew.

The only growth in budgets has gone to video, and that is under stress with the slide in the Australian dollar. A steady increase in the number of vendors has seen half of all entrants in our directory as new ventures in the last decade. Between 2004 and 2008 most production firms have invested around half a year of turnover. This has slowed dramatically in the second half of 2008, according to importers. “They aren’t buying moving lights – that market is dead”, one told CX, “and the new LED products are crashing in price, so we sell twice as many to make the same return”. Digital audio consoles are the current bright spot, with most production companies we surveyed saying they have, or will, invest significantly in that area. “I’m not buying anything, but I don’t owe very much either”, one of the largest production suppliers in Australia told us. “We can run our overheads, and sit tight”. Others talk of not meeting turnover targets, and there is a hiring freeze at many firms.

The inside story about lawyers and your court case

There are two sides to every story, but when you've been bullied, yelled at, and then thrown out of your job chances are you'll see a lawyer. Just before the case is heard, you might even call a reporter. I get the call.

          "I have an affidavit you'll love", said a caller. It was a beauty: I have an emailed copy on file that isn't dissimilar to the huge stack produced from the records of the court battle between Gary Hackett and his former partner Terry Davenport. They spent countless days with legal teams, writing in chronological order the slurs and the sins of the other. I spent hundreds of dollars legally obtaining them from the court. That battle was about control of the Melbourne arm of Staging Connections at a time when each branch was part owned by the local operator.

          The affidavit is part of evidence but is more usually just a legal tactic because most cases are settled on the day of the hearing, so the affidavit - although lodged with the court - has not been read into the transcript of a hearing. So with the settlement, the affidavits are buried. They still exist, and I have plenty of them, but I can't report on them.

          Here's an example: a famous musician sacked the sound guy suddenly mid tour. They had a working relationship for several years. The musician didn't actually do the dirty work, the manager did it. The musician would not return the sound guy's calls.

Let's have an intelligent debate about the role of the lighting designer in an era of 'intelligent' lighting. In CX 31 I tell the tale of the well intentioned lighting guy who just blew everything, for everyone.

The problem for the industry is that where there is complex technology, there is a requirement for trust. If the trust is betrayed everyone loses. Read on, and tell me what YOU think.......

Someone asked me the other day at a bump in, “Do we really need one of those; don’t they just cause problems?” So I got to thinking, do we really understand why we use RCDs (residual current devices)? Don’t they just cause problems?

A Lighting Technician’s job is basically to get a bunch of symbols and channel numbers to become reality. So how do you get to the point, after the LD delivers the lighting plot, where the rig is in the air, all is good, and the show is about to start?

Two people buy their tickets and walk into the arena to see a concert. One is your average punter, and the other is a lighting designer. The house lights go down, and the concert begins. In the first few minutes, our punter has seen the stage lighting all move in pretty patterns and cycle through every colour of the rainbow, and while they’re impressed, it’s nothing they haven’t seen before.

This is from the Entertainment Safety Digest, a feature within CX Magazine - the print edition.

For those of you that work in an organisation where a full and proper work method statement has been devised, thinking about safety equipment should be second nature to you. But with new products becoming available all the time, it is worth taking a look to see what might be out there that will make life a little easier.

While our industry continues to make significant in-roads to becoming safer and better legislated, there are still aspects of our daily operations that are in need of priority attention. Accidents such as the death of mechanist Geoff Richards in 2001, killed by falling counterweights knocked from their cradle at Sydney’s Her Majesty’s Theatre, will always haunt the industry as an accident that should never have happened.

Here's what happened. John Spencer instructed his crew carefully before they rigged the very heavy set element. Yet they didn't quite get it right. As John walked quickly down the prompt stage corridor to take a call, he heard - and felt - the sickening crash. He rushed back into the main body of the venue, with his heart in his mouth. The equipment damage bill was $63,400. But in court, John was fined $164,750.

When Jeff White drove his truck up to Dapto Leagues club south of Sydney on Friday March 12, it was pouring with rain. He was ready for a tense tussle with management, who had in the past attempted to force his crew to use the 18 slippery fire stairs to load in the tonnes of production equipment. But he thought previous battles had resolved the situation. He was wrong.

Dear Ed, I read with some amusement & concern at the comments made by Martin CEO Kristian Kolding. (Go to article) Organisations such as CX Magazine, CX-Web, as well as the countless Entertainment industry Magazines, Websites and the like, are there for the Customers, End users, Manufacturers & Suppliers to exchange information, Inform & Maintain standards and to generally keep in touch with what’s happening in our industry.

This is what we asked our CX Web readers on the weekend of February 21/22, 2004: We are conducting a survey regarding product electrical safety. A school teacher called and in discussion about OH&S, told us her kids were in the practice of holding on to lights which were then energised. Then they focussed them. We thought about standard industry practice, which is to assume everything is live and to brush the back of the hand over it before working with it - if at all. And we thought about how, as an industry, we are all approaching safety and standards. Our CX Web Question of the week: " If a manufacturer or distributor of a product becomes aware of genuine safety concerns about that product, should they issue a recall notice or a safety advisory voluntarily and in good time? "

Well the short answer is that you actually cannot do it - despite the fact that this is what is installed in most venues across the country. You may have thought that your dimmer, with its twelve 10amp outlets could have all channels run at full capacity at the same time, but if you actually did this (and your facility was wired correctly), then a circuit breaker should trip.