On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 19:44 +0200, douglas edric stanley wrote:
> I'd like to know more about "Alex's stage management techniques".
A few years ago I collaborated on a headphone festival in london as part
of the international "placard headphone festival." We'd got a bit over
excited and invited loads of people to play which meant that there was
only room for 20 minutes each over 14 hours. So I built a robot, a
bunch of relays attached to a parallel port:
http://state51org.static3.state51.co.uk/62/95/0070054_llSv/original.jpeg
then wrote some software that switched between the performers at the
right moment. The idea was to have four inputs, where one input was
live and playing, two had performers setting up, and the final one had
someone who just played taking their stuff away. A projection told the
performers when and where to set up, and ticked down to switch-on time.
I nearly chickened out at the last moment but in the end it worked like
a charm. It broke the next year though so last year I bought a more
professional USB controller to do the switching.
We used a similar system at the runme/dorkbot citycamp, a conference
which would otherwise have had too many participants.
Really nice to know of others doing similar things, maybe we should make
another organisation for automatic conductors :)
alex
Received on Sun Apr 23 2006 - 20:24:10 BST
