Rhys' website

Roses 2022

What a blast it was. This did happen a little while ago now, but better late than never!

This post kind of goes over what I was doing as the tech lead. (billed 3rd in credits bby)

The lead-up

I felt this the year before, but at the start I’m just not in the mood for it, it’s things like people yappin’. But once I started getting more and more into it, it does become enjoyable very quickly.

So the main things I had to do at this phase was setup our approach.

Discussing and deciding

Grant

What a palava. This was something that just kept on coming up throughout Roses, and I pretty much lead it in the end.

Kit allocation

This is not a very fun thing to do but necessary. Productions are limited by the crew and the tech. The production team handled the crew.

We effectively took a venue, said this set of kit (OB kit) was going to stay at this location all day.

Only the big ticket assets were allocated during the meeting. The rest were done by me and the tech leads.

Tech crew organisation

I decided to split tech into two. Tech planning and tech crewing. This really helped as the crew could be kept focused on their tasks and I could spin the abstract planning into something tangible for them to work with. The communication was primarily done through Slack and the occassional Zoom.

Let’s make an MCR

This is partly addressing issues from last year. The tech people on the ground are very busy. The more we can distribute that workload, the better we are performing and keeping people from getting overworked.

The MCR was one of the avenues to combat one of the tech’s tasks. And it provided some nice features.

This worked suprisingly effectively, I do believe there was room for further development as well.

It’s go-time week

This was probably the period where I was the most worried, but at the same time suprisingly not that stressed. I even reached out to two alumni last minute to see if they’d be available. Which we didn’t leverage in the end.

Tech update meeting

Coming soon!

Training

Coming soon!

The day before

Great vibes here. Just getting into the studio early getting the music playing and just getting things done. The station was in full-swing with people coming and going, training going on, people getting other work done, and lots of helping out.

Spreadsheet filling

Kit was still being allocated since I like to take the “lazy loading” approach when it comes to certain tasks. Equipment was clarified to a pretty good detail and negotiation was done with producers and other tech people.

Let’s sticker

This was one of the great outcomes of Roses this year, kickstarting an inventory system. The amount of equipment that we were taking was large, ranging in value and size, it ended up being a little over 300 asseted items being taken. We purchased a role of stickers with barcodes on them containing a unique number for each asset and some nice YSTV branding on it and a wireless barcode scanner.

In order to get the ball rolling as soon as possible I designed a basic Google Sheet which acted at the inventory for Roses, each asset that went was recorded in this sheet and a crack team of volunteers was assembled to fill it in. It was quite interesting to see how quickly it became an efficient unit with a process that went sort of like this:

  1. Find an item in the kit allocation sheet.
  2. Get a sticker on it.
  3. Snap a picture of it.
  4. Record it on the spreadsheet.

What was also great is that we had multiple people doing the same job so getting through assets was suprisingly quick!

Thursday

Van loading

Originally it was planned to have a tech meeting lunch since none of the techs for Roses had all convened in-person at the same time. However the asset labelling ran overtime and we had to cancel the lunch.

Van driving

First time driving a van! A luton van as well?! A huge amount of fun, and tormenting Isaac the entire time was great. The van was also suprisingly powerful, just the amount of torque it had was insane.

The van needed to go pick up the rentals first, so a quick pit-stop in Leeds, wasn’t too bad getting there, albeit getting lost in an industrial estate! (had some interesting rail track there though) Had to play a spot of tetris getting the rentals to fit since we were a bit suprised that the rented SDI came in it’s own quite large flightcase which was super handy of keeping all their kit together.

It’s showtime!

These were long days, getting up somewhere between 6:30-7:00am and getting to the sports centre around 8:00am and departing at 7:00pm! Quite fun though. We ended up sleeping in a college common room for most of the nights which made it quite a socialable experience.

Signage

This was actually one of the easiest times I’ve had with signage. Lancaster were an absolute treat. Just so compotent, it was unreal. Just a brief chat about the signage in-front of the sports centre, and boom we had it there and available in the SU bars.

We ended up using our channel 1 HLS feed as the source for the signage. It did mean that the quality was a bit varialble at times, but overall it got an image out.

York-side however was a bit more challenging. I had a limited set of people who would be able to cover signage for me. But regardless, we were able to do greg’s place screen and the SU bars. The unfortunate part about greg’s place screen was that it needed to be manually switched to our feed every day due to the AV system defaulting to the University’s signage feed. Then it was a pickle actually knowing if we were live in student bars since whilst I was able to sort it out ahead of time speaking to YUSU IT, I had no-way of knowing if the feed was selected.

The problem-solver

A big part was being support, making sure that things were happening so to speak. This would be me rotating between every single OB making sure it was all in check, really beneficial as it let me have a very accurate state of what we were at in my head.

Friday was actually a bit of a down day to me in some regards, there just wasn’t any issues for me to tackle! Saturday however, it was absolutely fantastic, we were able to be successful in pretty much every stream bar one. My phone was pretty much going off every 15-30 minutes, and being able to address every issue that came just felt great!

Let’s scarper!

All great things come to an end, no different here, and it started as soon as possible on Sunday.

Organising the equipment

The ruddy lift! Get’s closed for maintenaince!

Grant chasing

Coming soon!

Getting out the sport centre

Coming soon!

Unloading the van

Coming soon!

#events