I Got to Push the Buttons...

With a show of hands, how many of you tuned in last night and watched The Blue Man Group on The Tonight Show last night? Okay, how many of you fell asleep before they showed the guy with the big snake bite on his butt? How many of you TiVo'ed the show and plan to watch it when you get home from work? How many of you who TiVo'ed it are now going to rush home and fast forward to the guy with the snake bite on his butt?

How many of you have no idea what The Tonight Show is because you boycotted TV back in the mid 1990's when satellite TV starting bringing over 300 channels to your living room and your head exploded from the choices?

Anyway, this was my first time on The Tonight Show. I've been to the studio before with Tori Amos. But with her, the management always felt it wasn't necessary for me to be involved. Which was fine, just girl and her piano, key and fill light, a little bit of colour in the background and we're done.

With Blue Man Group, they like to make sure all aspects of any performance are well rehearsed. And seeing as the song they were performing is new and only being performed on the tour, made sense that I come in and make sure the light was what happens (more or less) on the road.

Plus it doesn't hurt to have a few days off at home with the wife. Well, the only reason I got these extra days at home is because the nearest airport to Carbondale, Illinois is about 2 hours way. Let me sit home and then fly to someplace civilized like, Indianapolis.

The people at The Tonight Show are very nice. I had met with the lighting director and electricians the night before to talk about where I wanted to put some of the fixtures I had ordered for our performance. The morning of the shoot (Tuesday) was a little busy and a little chaotic. Like with any TV or film shoot, there's a whole lot of "hurry up and wait". Hurry up! Get the lights into position! Okay, wait until the set and backline are in place. Hurry up! Program the lights, Okay, wait until the filming starts in 2 hours. Turns out, I was my own worst enemy that morning.

For those of you who saw the performance, and for those of you who hadn't, there are strobe lights built into the PVC instruments they play. I needed power and data sent to them. But the trick was, the electricians and board operator weren't too familiar with how to patch the console. I spent a good part of Monday night and a little bit of Tuesday morning with the board operator trying to figure out how to patch these new strobes in. He had to get onto the phone with the tech guy from the lighting console company to be stepped through the process of patching in the strobes. When we finally got it all patched in, I had to go and assign the strobes a DMX value (data value) so that they could talk to the console. I won't go into great detail about how this is done, except to say that there are 9 switches on each strobe that have to be set to on or off depending on the DMX value. I went and set the switches to what I thought was correct.

Turns out, the switches were all off by one. If 9 was supposed to be on, I had turned on 8 because, well, I'm a ninny. So we spent a good hour and a half chasing our tails trying to figure out what the problem was. Blaming the console, blaming the cable, blaming the strobe, and then rightly, blaming me.

With all that sorted and the band on stage, they started rehearsal and camera blocking. For those of you who didn't see the show, there was a huge video screen hung behind the band on which lots of psychedelic colourful images were projected. I told the board operator to match it with a wild colour chase in the moving lights. Then I had him make three bump buttons, 2 big white hits, and one hit where some of the lights behind the band strobed.

And that was it, key and fill light for the blue dudes and band, and off we went.

So if you saw the show, or plan on watching it, every time you see a strobe hit or white flashes during the song, that was me pushing the button!

Now, I gotta go walk the dog.