Yesterday, February 17th, marked my first day on-site for the internship at Athens! My time was spent with Lamar, the Director of Sound, at the theatre to get things prepped for this week’s designer runs and next week’s tech rehearsals.
Upon arrival, Lamar showed me around the theatre. Even though I’ve been there before, I had only been there previously in one area of the tech bay, and even I didn’t get a good look-around at things back then. This time, I was able to learn about it to a more in depth degree, as well as looking at the backstage area, tech closets, the catwalk, and the rehearsal hall two buildings over, which I didn’t know existed until then. I also met Nick, Athens’s Lighting Designer.
My first task as a part of this internship was to help plug things in to record a band later in the evening. Simple enough. I met the Assistant Stage Manager, as well as some of the band members–one of which was Craig Uppercue, who is a professor in the School of Music.
My next task once we’re back at the theatre? Building a desk…with only two legs? This desk was to be positioned over one row of chairs, and would house the SQ 6 console, as well as a monitor that would have the script on it for us to reference during rehearsals.
My next set of assignments were in the tech bay. After getting that together and bringing the console, monitor, and hard drive downstairs, we had to feed wires from upstairs to our station. I learned how to set up a Cat6 cable properly, clipping it together with an RJ-45 plug. We ran two cables from the tech bay to the catwalk, down to the second floor, and then to the first floor.
After that, I would then be tasked with labeling microphone packs for the actors. The labeling system is to put spike tape on the packs, and write the character names of the principal roles or the actor’s name for anyone playing two roles/ensemble. The fun part came when I repeated the labeling process, but this time I was doing it in the SQ 6 and SQ 7 consoles. The labeling process was the same for the names, but this time there was color coding: yellow for male principals, pink for female principals, and cyan for ensemble roles.
The next thing I did was go with Lamar to the rehearsal hall to record the band. Not much was done here except stopping and starting the recording, but it was cool seeing them play. I learned that Logic and Pro Tools are the main DAWs that Lamar uses. I haven’t used the latter before but I’m familiar enough with basic uses of Logic.
The last thing I did was set up microphones on stands. DIGA 361 taught me plenty about microphone set up and shootouts, so there’s familiarity there.
It was mainly familiarizing myself with the workings of what goes on for the first day, but I had a good time! Scheduling is complicated because of so many moving parts (the schedule of my class load and other School of Music activities, Lamar’s schedule with his company, and the theatre schedule), but we’re taking it by day. I enjoyed learning what I could and just taking everything in. I’m returning tomorrow, 2/19, for the first designer run (which I’ve heard also referred to as crew watch), meaning I’ll be able to see the cast run through the full show, and we’ll learn how everything is to be put together. I’m very much looking forward to what’s to come through this internship. There’s a lot of moving parts and so much to learn, but I’m looking to take in as much as I can!