suckie situations

[klapper]

Im curious about your worst problems with
the presentation of your work due to outside/inside forces?

I. E.
The lighting, speaker placement, decorations, spectators blocking the projections/camera, owners of the venue

And how you delt with the problem/s

[syzygy]

worst one we ever had was a load of rotating, dimming pinspots that a corporate sponsor pout in right next to our beamers and cable runs.

Turned out each pinspot had an individual dimmer, so they were throwing out ridiculous amounts of interference, fucking merrily with the sync on our projectors.

We'd have turned them off, but they were hardwired to all the other lights the sponsor's sparkies put in all over the venue...

Dan.

[thomase]

my worst experience was probably yesterday. the computers all just fucked up and when we finally got it working, it had a crappy image... i was sooo embarrassed... :o

[minimalniemand]

second last weekend I had my rig directly next to the dressing room. There were people incessantly bumping at my table and I was in permanent fear that some drunk idiot pours his beer over my lappy.

Which geezer decided to put the technicians next to the f**ckin dressing room???

[julez]

my worst situation was having someone spill shit all over my main lappy. It wasnt ruined but i had to run a backup tape from a vcr:o :mad:

it was a gig for a friend at his party as well so it wasnt like i was making anything out of it. I was so scared for my poor lappy:scared:

The rule i discovered was that the amount u get paid was in direct proportion to the amount of professionalism. On a shit gig everything is going to go wrong.

[sleepytom]

we had someone pour a full bottle of red wine into a vestax dj mixer before - fortunatly due to the really good design of the mixer it caused no damage

[julez]

ive heard that about only two brands that take that kind of abuse.

The other is the 1200 which can just about be dropped out down stairs and as long as the extension cord is long enough it will keep playing. (ok maybe not but it sounds good)

[labmeta]

in one of my old residencies some odd job man managed to spill a litre of green gloss paint all over the floor where i had set my gear up. i had green feet, icky paint all over me, and all my cables got stuck togeteher. de-riggin to go home was horrible.

[fluchtpunkt]

...beer spilled over the lappy's keyboard.
...a screwdriver spilled into a vcr.
...almost every piece of kit suffering from some mysterious malfunction - vcr to laptop to beamer to cables to power supply in the location (!!!) - so that setting up was one huge marathon of solving one problem after the other & it never seemed to end.

[neoteo]

it was not on an vj event .. but preety suckie

multi camara concert recording

i was at the mixer ... and the intercom was failling time to time
it felt like flying a plane blindly ... terrible !

i almost went to panic

lucky the concert was not a big gig .. so the master tape went to archive ...

[signal55]

last week i was doing a gig and a virus kept turning off all my software, in the end i ran a watermarked version of vjamm that i had on my computer with the midi keys taped down and just changed them every so often and then got pissed instead!!!!

xxxmossy

[spaceman]

2 in a week
1-After talking to the manager, who was out of town, it is confirmed that the gig is thurday; when i turn up there, the other guy tell me that the party was wednesday !?!
2-After turning up at the venue the guy tells me that the inhouse projector has gone for repair and they didn't get a replacement.......as it was a busy saturday night no projectors in town were available for rental ...... .. . .. .

[akira_k]

Oh boy, sucky stufff..


Well once I had to perform at a restaurant kind of thing. Thing is, I was in a place where the constant pass of waitresses made me nervous, they passed their plates all over my iBook. if one of them spilled shit on my machine I would have kiled everyone there.

I always fight with lightning people. Over here they think they own the cabin and that their work is the most important shit, so they keep on pointing to my screen and doing stupid shite. Gotta hate them.

Recently my Arkaos fucked up badly at a gig. I was like 30 minutes trying to bring it up again with the promoter breathing on my neck saying "can you do it? is it broken? eh? eh?" ... hated that!

And anotehr "nice" one... Last year in November, Creamfields BA 2003. It started to rain cows, dogs, eskimos and extraterrestrial shite. The water started to leak in through the tent, falling all over the audio consoles. Major havoc going backstage. Us, looking out for our kit, which was a shitload of money. Luckily nothing happened to us. But then some water entered and went all over a projector, which gave some garble and then died. It was burned! We were there TWO or THREE hours waiting for people to come and fix our rig, the projector owners decided to turn off the otehr one to not risk it, so we were there satting in our arses doing nothing, being nervous and constantly calling the promoter to see why the fuck nobody came to check out the stuff and turn my screens back on. To help things out, the cellphone networks on the area were completely crowded and we could barely make contact with the promoter and when we did we couldn't hear shit!

Ohh that's got to be the shittier one :D

[unjulation]

1) working of the bar in a club in town - no room, constantly haveing to move out of the way for the bar staff, saying no i carnt get you a redbull and vodka every five mins, and then some muppet pours beer into my keybord,

2) finding out that for some reason the output from my computer is not working 30 mins before a gig and spending the next hour trying to sort it out

3) falling of the top of a ladder while holding on to a borrowed projector only to land projector first - the whole front end fell of fited it back togther only to find the zoom and focuss was fucked -the life saver that week was to meet someone from savills a/v company at a free party the next weekend who fixed it for some beer mony, what i found funny was when i fell off the ladder everybody was woried about me and i was thinking fuck that if it comes down to it i get fixed for nowt at hospitall this projector could cost me hundereds that i just aint got

4) doing squat partys years ago with 16mm projectors on a ledge 8*5 15 feet up only to find that after partakeing of to much "fun" didnt have the bottle to climb down again for the next two hours, i was dying for a piss

5) terning up to a festi with a band i work with who do a u.v. dance show only to find that the organisors wants us to play at 2pm on a sunny afternoon

doing any riging/de-riging when im too batterd to see propaly dont know how i used to manage doing 3 gigs in a row on as much drugs as the punters, if not more - never again!

[mondo]

lol UNJ.....I AINT WORKING WITH U M8..YOU ARE dangerous!!!
LOL

[3YE]

it was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

this is my tale, and this is what i learnt:

1) drug filled muppet grabs all the cables at the back of my kit and just pulls :confused: . one small beamer dived to the floor, but powered up fine once it was recovered. total damage? one cable lost a plug. still cannot comprehend why someonewould do this, but be warned - NOTHING IS FOOLPROOF, FOOLS ARE SO INGENIOUS

2) my first VJ gig. someone dropped a scaffolding bar. one end landed on my pile of VCR's, but fortunately only dented the top one. the other end sliced through my extension cable, and blew the fuse. having to walk a couple of miles to Maplins and back to get a 50p BNC to phono converter. also my video card drivers weren't installed properly, so i was using a video camera pointed at my monitor to get a feed for the beamer. finally the promoter, despite me okaying my set-up a month in advance, wanted to change everything on the night :banghead: . after everything else that had happened i just said 'Bollox' and did it my way anyway - NEVER COMPROMISE YOUR ART

3) setting the screen up at the BACK of the dancefloor. as everybody faces the DJ. No-one knew we were there!! not bad, just frustrating. to paraphrase the blind dude in 'kung-fu', 'if a vj performs and no-one is there to see it, did they really do a gig?' - BE SEEN

[bassballs]

My worst experience was when I was doing visualz for warp artist Chris Clark and had signal loss on all the projectors randomly, their was 8 off them, and they just showed a blue screen with the text no signal and after a little while all was ok again and so on the whole gig, This was a gig I had really looked forward to with a lot of preparation so after the gig I just felt like digging a big hole and jump into it. The next day they replaced the splitbox and everything was ok again. So don't rely on hardware that you have not put up yourself is what i learned off this experience.

BB

[unjulation]

lol UNJ.....I AINT WORKING WITH U M8..YOU ARE dangerous!!!
he he mate, but that was my munterd phase, honest :) but at least 3YE didnt say working with unj ;)

oh and haveing the power die at glasto 3 hours before the live cammera feeds were surposed to go on, when i think about maybe i am dangeous to work with

[3YE]

Originally posted by unjulation
when i think about maybe i am dangeous to work with

Interesting I'd say. Yes, definitely Interesting...

[akira_k]

Originally posted by 3YE
1) drug filled muppet grabs all the cables at the back of my kit and just pulls :confused: . one small beamer dived to the floor, but powered up fine once it was recovered. total damage? one cable lost a plug. still cannot comprehend why someonewould do this, but be warned - NOTHING IS FOOLPROOF, FOOLS ARE SO INGENIOUS
LOL! You reminded me of one. Almost finishing up my gig. I was fucking battered. And I left the iBook there doing its job on its own for a while. Drunk stupid punter, big as a fucking rugbier, comes near my setup table (which was put at the stupidest place, as always), grabs it and starts rattling it. I almost kill the motherfucker, he tried to say "chill man, all is well" and I was like "nothing is fucking well, you stupid goon". Luckily my gf was around and I didn't punch this idiot's face.

And about screen settings.. oh boy, did I have stupid setups! there were lots of nights when I feeled like nobody bloody saw the stupid screens.

[littlecatalyst]

i can think of two easily the most frustrating:

last week- great crew, great djs, nice venue, everything allright, they even gave me this special table to work with-- usually their dj table, with cusom built plugs and lamps.... but that was actually the problem. all the power came through dimmers (I guess so that the dj can dim the lights) about once per 1/2 hour some staff member or clubowner would come by and dim the lights, thus dampening the power to all my gear (!) at those points it was easy to tell what was fucked-up and i would just max out the dimmer again.... but the problem was that even at "100%" it wasn't really 100 and all of the sudden things started to tweak out; one dvd player woudln't do AB (which it does wonderfully) one stopped playing DVDr's and then eventually started speaking some strange language where normally it says "loading" by the end of the night i was left with one DVD player and my AVE5 (still managed to do some fun and fancy stuff, but totally stressed and not the kind of mood i like to be in)

ok and heres the absolute suckiest situation i have yet to be in. Played this psytrance outdoor festi this summer. about 36 hours before the event, people were all there to set up (like 3 hours into the woods). it started to rain. in fact it only stopped raining about when people showed up teh next day. the @#%$*ing promoter took my gear out of the nice dry truck and left 1/2 of what i own on the stage, in the rain, before the tarps were set up. so again in thi sshow almost everything but V4 and lappy were out of comission. On top of that, my tent was flooded in the rain and everything i had to wear was soaked. this was a heavy heavy storm. The promoter, who asked us to all arrive this early, was saying how he will get some warm dry sweatshirts for people as everyone was soaked, unfortunately he as a little too busy a) chauffeuring the two main acts from their dry hotel rooms and also selling weed, to remember to get the warm clothes. the show started around sunset, the rain has turned into a nice dew with great refreshing winds-- that is refreshing if you are tripping and dancing and moving about..... not quite the same if you are on the stage in soaking clothes from head to toe. the breeze was freezing-- i spent the entire night shivering and asking the promoter when he was going to remember the dry clothes-- he never seemed to remember (he remembered to offer me acid twice and other things.... but never went to get a dry shirt). so there i was soaking wet, with three out-of-comission DVD players, and soaked DV tape player and camera. all i had was one soft and a V4 and managed to stay interesting all night, but by the time the sun came up, i couldnt walk cause my feet were so soaked. I actually went to the doctor a few weeks later and found out i got pneumonia. it wasn't the rain, or teh cold, but teh fact that the promoter had his headup his ass teh whole time-- way too busy picking up the big name talents and selling drugs to actually deal with the problems that were happening every few seconds. never ever ever will i ever work with that crew again. ever. ick.

and sooooo sad = ( last night. had to give up a show (props to Jason/Momentfactory for picking it up at last second thnx!!) had a gig i was really looking forward to; vjing at a snowshoe race up on the top of our little mountain (montreal has a mountain in its center). it was one of those multi cam happenings, with lots of trees and nature and archival mountain shots... was gunna be a blast. (with one of the GNN crew doing camerawork). alas, got some flu and have spent the past 36 hours puking and passing out, and no way i could possiblly play well. totally sucks. oh well, there will be more..... plus no longer sick, thats good.....

[myogenic]

just a thought, advance warning for AVIT Birmingham peformers:

if it rains heavily, the Custard Factory leaks :rolleyes:

[syzygy]

The leakage problems at the CF aren't really a problem any more - the roof of the warehouse has been pretty much fixed so there are only a few drops of water here and there.

A couple of years ago, it was a nightmare - you had to be careful where you put kit because of lots of water coming through the roof and, when it rained heavily, the dancefloor would be under 6" of water (actually, this was fun for a while but ultimately a bad thing...)

Dan.

[23523]

...some of the most embarrasing situations i had were my faults:

once i forgot to disable my screensaver during the mixing and on an other event i just forgot to take my mouse with me (i?m using a desktop pc)!

but the most suckie situations always had something to do with the owners of the clubs... it seems that most (not all) are meaning that a vj is something like a lovely (not necessary) plant in a living room, treat them like shit and place them in a corner!