As many of you are aware we had a fantastic technical crew supporting the Wind Road Boys production at the Sunderland Empire on August 2012. All musical
theatre productions require a strong technical team and boy did we have one!
The calibre of our technical crew was amazing. We not only had a fantastic crew from Sunderland Empire, but our own technical team included Graham Murray and Barnaby Hallem. Graham Murray is Deputy Technical Theatre Manager at the Playhouse, West End, London and Barnaby Hallem was until recently Stage Manager on Dream Boats and Petticoats (The Playhouse, West End London). They both thoroughly enjoyed being part of The Wind Road Boys technical team and were amazed at the dedication and skill level of our young people.
It was wonderful to watch our young people working hand in hand with all of the technical crew. Anyone involved in theatre will know how time consuming the process of plotting lights is for a new production. However, we were all amazed to find that Sunderland Empire were able to bring a virtual theatre to our studios. This meant that our lighting designer and some of our students could sit in our studios with The Chief LX from Sunderland Empire and look at a 3D virtual theatre and plot our whole show. This was a fantastic experience and saved time when we arrived at the theatre.
Graham and Barnaby have now travelled back to London’s West End and are hard at work. Graham is currently working with Simon Callow on his new one man production about Charles Dickens and Barnaby is Stage Manager on Wicked, starring Rachel Tucker. We would like to extend our gratitude to them both for their time and energy. They provided wonderful learning experiences for our young people and we very much look forward to working with them on our next production.
We were particularly impressed with one of our students who went the extra mile when he was asked to cue the whole show. Sean Major, a media student with Enter CIC knew the whole show from rehearsals and grabbed this fantastic opportunity to work with Nitelites on the sound desk. To cue the whole show is an extremely difficult job and we thought he did a fantastic job!
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| Sean working on the sound desk at the Sunderland Empire. |
The tech crew unloading the props van. |
Setting up the stage. |
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| Otis securing the rostra. | Paul Flynn working on the animations for the back drops in the show. |
