Chan's Personal Blog

When you've been in the sound/stage technician business for a long time, you accumulate a lot of interesting stories. Some stories you look back on, and you cry. Some you look back on, and you laugh. Some.... well, a part of you dies. The following story takes place during my high school years. Members of my soundcrew should remember this story quite well.

The senior girls' basketball team had won the provincial championship. The school was putting on a special assembly in the gym, so the soundcrew was deployed to make this happen. We mobilized fairly quickly, and I was talking to the coach to see what he wanted set-up. He told us we needed video set-up because a parent was going to show video footage of the championship game. In addition, the parent was bringing in a video projector for the assembly.

Fine, this was a fairly easy setup. We got our command centre up and running, and got the sound and video systems up. The parent arrives shortly after and brings out his video and projector. I run a power supply to his video projector, and we begin getting him set-up. We do a test run of the video with our sound system's audio, and everything was working great, the video was showing up. Everything is done about 20 minutes before the assembly starts.

The parent then powers down his projector.

CHaN: Ummm.... you might want to keep your projector on.
Parent: Why?
CHaN: So you can play the video right away when it is time to show it.
Parent: The projector turns on right away, so there's no need.
CHaN: Uhhh.... I'm pretty sure that when you power off your projector, it takes 10 minutes to warm up again.
Parent: Look here son, I'm the head of a school board, and I use this projector all the time. I think I know how this thing $10,000 video projector works.
CHaN: .... fine.

Grumble grumble, I don't bother arguing any further. Your fancy $10,000 toy doesn't impress me.

Anyways, we go over the different hand signals and cues. When I signal the parent, he's supposed to turns on the projector and hit play on his camcorder. Meanwhile we take care of the audio from the camcorder.

The assembly starts, and they're introducing the basketball champions and what not. Then, the tricky part of the show starts, the video presentation. I signal my light guy, and the lights go off. I signal the parent, and he hits play on his camcorder, and turns on the projector. The room is filled with the sound of the championship game. The screen meanwhile is filled with a "10 minutes till warmup complete" blue screen of death.

Aaahhh.... sweet lady irony.

The parent starts frantically hitting random buttons to try to get the video working. Immediately he turns to me and starts going, what did you do to the video?!?! Absolutely nothing, like I said before, when you turn off a projector, it takes time for it to warm up again. He tries a few more things, and he's starting to panick as the audience is turning around to see what's going on. He then starts swearing and what not, and the coach comes over and tells him to settle down.

I cut the audio, and the lights come back on. The coach announces that they're expecting technical difficulties, and they won't be able to show the amazing video footage.

After the show, the parent says, "I don't know what happened, it always usually works. I'm going to bring this projector in to get it looked at." I raise a skeptical eyebrow up, and say nothing. *COUGH* Human error *COUGH*.

Don't mess with technicians. . I think we know what we're doing.