Spent the vast majority of the day/evening today back in the auditorium of the Royal Theatre in Northampton where we were running the technical rehearsal of Vikings and Darwin, the Youth Theatre show for the RNT’s New Connections festival.
I can’t describe how great it felt to be back in the Theatre and working on something.
I had the morning off, which I spent catching up on piles of work which were still demanding my attention, then had a huge drama with the file I was delivering to the Royal. Somehow the PowerPoint presentation that was being used to facilitate the projection had stopped recognising and playing the video. Cue two hours of mad scrambling to-and-fro between computers, re-encoding video to try to get it to be accepted by stupid, stupid, stupid PPT. I profoundly hate PPT. but what can you do? It’s by far the easiest way to control projection when it’s not running as a full movie, but need prodding for each new element.
Crisis averted, I arrived at the Theatre about 4pm and settled in to a seat to watch the lighting plotting session that was in full-flow whilst we waited for the projection screen to arrive and be hung.
As soon as it was up, we got to work making everything fit, then the cast arrived in the early evening and we began running through it, making the necessary adjustments and changes as we were going.
The cast departed around 9.30pm and we carried on plotting and working through the cues until 10.45, at which point I escaped back home, getting back at about 11.30 and taking myself almost directly to bed for a 7am start the next day.