I had a great Easter although it was rather busy. I was on the production team for my church's Easter celebration which was held at Cheltenham Racecourse's Centaur conference centre. That meant rolling up at 7am to get all the kit out and assembled ready to go at 10.30am - well actually earlier so that the band can have a run-through.
First problem was that the big central screen which was supposed to be in position wasn't - it wasn't even there. So find the screen and then erect it - easy? The screen is 20ft x 12ft and is hung from the lighting gantry, so Pete and Dave had to go up on the Picker and climb onto the gantry, rig pulleys and ropes and get the screen up.
So that brings us to problem number 2. The projector was also hung from the lighting gantry but too close to the screen so the picture didn't fill the screen. No probs says Pete, we'll just fiddle with the screen resolutions of the PC and the iMac (and the dvd and the cameras) so that they fill the screen. No, the computers didn't want to play, so Pete tried stretching the image on his magic video controller system. Unfortunately, that didn't work terribly well either,but hopefully most people didn't notice the black bands down the sides sometimes. Actually during the early part of all this I was looking after a lovely little boy who belongs to our team. He's very bright, he was playing with my camera and worked out how to change the playback image and how to zoom in and out.
While that was going on, Dave was trying to rig all the lights with a picker truck which had decided that it wouldn't move! And the band were doing sound checks and trying to get organised. Not only that but the audience began to arrive and get in the way - not sure why people were arriving quite so early!
Oh, and the power on the video desk tripped out perhaps because of a faulty computer screen which we had to replace. And the comms system wasn't working properly so that Pete couldn't tell Al on the sound desk to turn up the sound when he played the welcome dvd.
Of course, by about 15 minutes late, everything was working fine - amazing. It seems that no matter how early we start getting ready, there will always be problems which mean we are praying hard right up to (and past) the official start time. Perhaps it helps keep us humble.
