This was Softs week. Softs were on Monday and it involved us presenting an experience as close as possible to the final performance. For this, we set up most of our equipment in the second floor classroom. We had 4 stage risers with the tall seats on them, with speakers filling in for musicians. We had our self-fabricated screens in place in front of the stage risers and we had our main screen up too. This was the first time we were displaying our visuals the way they were going to be on the final day; on five separate screens.
We got pretty good immediate feedback from the faculty with respect to the visuals. Almost everyone loved the use of color and felt there was a good connection between the visuals and the music. There were still some doubts about how the setup would look at the actual performance space. Some felt that the virtual camera movements were too fast and possibly distracting.
This week, we had another tech rehearsal at the Kresge Hall. This time we were able to take most of our equipment to the hall and it was the first time we were able to set up like our final performance. We had all our stage risers and all our screens ready. We were supported by School of Music staff and had access to the house projector and screen. It was during this tech rehearsal that we learnt about further technical requirements, such as adapters, converters, extra power strips etc. We were still able to have a test close enough to the finals performance. We were still substituting speakers for our musicians, because we wanted to be sure to have everything perfect and ready before having our musicians come in. We tested our system with the Countryman ISOMAX unidirectional microphones for the first time. So far our system needed to be calibrated by switching the microphones on in a particular order after the system was running. On encountering the new microphones, which had no on/off switch, we realised we would require to add a functionality to calibrate the microphones within the system, regardless of the order in which the microphones become functional physically.
The rest of the week was spent in collating all the feedback from the softs presentation and collating all the new information we got from the tech rehearsal. We have two more tech rehearsals planned for the next week and want to be able to have the strongest build possible for those rehearsals.
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