Reply To: JCCC4: Post Mortem (Feedback Thread)

[glenra]

Regarding the Friday morning shadow concerts in the Labyrinth, I have a couple of suggestions: 

1) Lighting: Given that stage layout, there appeared to be no way to light the performers more than the audience, so we all settled for basically performing in the dark. Performers were hard to see and pictures and video from those sets will be murky. If we can’t redirect some of the existing lighting to focus where we need it, this seems like something we could fix on our own in an ad-hoc fashion. A couple of big battery-powered flashlights duct-taped to the balcony rail or issued to folks watching from up there was the workaround that occurred to me.

2) Sight lines. There are already cameras in the labyrinth set up to send a signal to video monitors in the Labyrinth. If we could somehow get a TV monitor placed on the other side of the staircase and send a video signal to it, that would nearly double the number of people on the ground floor who could hear AND SEE the performers in that venue. (As it was, I’d guesstimate that about a quarter of my audience couldn’t see me and at least half of the MollyClicks audience couldn’t see them.)

On the positive side: the techs showed up on time, the sound seemed pretty great even in those out of the way sightless areas and (unlike last year) there was no bar noise problem. And I was impressed at how many people made it to my 10am show despite all the programming running so late the night before.

UPDATE: As I now reread the above, my initial suggestions all seem like TERRIBLE ideas. The chief problem with putting our own lights in the balcony area is they could fall and kill somebody on the main floor (floor-level lights might work better). And there’s no way it’s worth the effort to put in a TV monitor there JUST for our shadow events unless we’re planning to do quite a lot of them – in cases where we think we’d NEED it that’s a clear second- or third-best option behind “use a bigger room”. Really, the only thing I find salvageable is: if we’re putting real *shows* in Labyrinth we should (1) be prepared to bring in EXTRA chairs from outside the room, (2) think more about how to improve the lighting situation.