Can't Sleep

It's official: I am nocturnal. I just spent a couple hours laying in bed trying to drop off to sleep with zero success. My brain is going 1000 miles an hour with no sign of slowing down. Since I already woke the wife up with terrible results I thought perhaps I would just share this time with the blog.

Here's where my head is...

I think I am going to shelve the Technical Direction book. After several months it is still hovering at 50 odd pages. I could get going on it again except for two things. First, while I have been writing this book, several people have mentioned to me that they would really like to have a Production Planning book. All things being equal I am just as close to being able to have that text and it has a wider market. So maybe that should be first. Except, I am actually attaining what could almost be called prominence with regard to Stage Rigging. I am an ETCP Rigging Subject Matter Expert and in fairly short order will be a certified Theatrical Rigger. For a very short time I will be one of very few certified people - like 1 of 10 for about three months. If I could put together a rigging manuscript in that time it might have a very good chance of being published. I have the outline already, it's titled "Rocky Says That's Not Rigging."

So there's that. The birds outside the window just started chirping, undeniable proof that one has stayed up too late.

I've been obsessing over the crazy scheme. We're trying this new idea for the leadership of the scenery department on our shows this coming year. Instead of using the TD-ATD-Master Carp regional model we're going to use the Unit Manager-Project Manager-Job Lead commercial model. For quite some time now I've thought that our students spend too much time on crew but don't do enough shows. The footprint for our productions has gotten longer and longer to accommodate an educationally sound design and preproduction period. The problem is the longer each individual show becomes, the less shows a given student is available for, which leads to more overall weeks of crew, and more uncomfortable overlaps. Also, having a student TD assigned for the entire length of a small studio is just wasteful. These shows have scenery budgets in the world of $75 and 16 hours. Why should someone be tied up by that for 6 weeks? Enter the crazy scheme. The idea being to embrace the overlaps and give each production only what it needs to get finished. This way a group of students can gang up on the small studios and what used to tie up one person for 6 weeks now ties up 3 or 4 people, but likely for less than 6 days total. If it works we get more projects per person while working less weeks. More experience with less commitment? I guess we'll see.

Now I just have to figure out how to explain it to the people that will be doing it. I need a base list of tasks to go after each title in the scheme. The idea is that it's flexible, but if it is too flexible nobody will know what they are doing. There's also another wrinkle. There are sort of primary crazy scheme members and secondary crazy scheme members. Expectations for participation from each group are different. We also have to figure out how the build crews work as the organization wants a general pool of labor for assignment, but the way the rest of the school runs will want to give each show its own crew. So I've got that to reconcile. I don't know. I am sure it will be fabulous. There might even be an article out there "Integrating Commercial Structures into Educational Theatre Production."

Sounds kinda dry.

Kevin mentioned to me I might be teaching his class tomorrow (ie in a few hours). I hope since he didn't call that I'm not doing it.

With one thought leading to another while my head was spinning I started thinking about updating my RTP binder. I don't come up for more than a year, but I was still turning it over in my head. The submissions all need to be done electronically now. They burn CD's for the review committee. I can't figure that out. How do you put D-Sheet drawings in an electronic form that looks like anything? I spent a real long time the last time composing these portfolio pages as kinda collages and they'll all be useless this time around. How do you convey that kind of composition in an electronic document? I mean, I could paste them up electronically and then do a .pdf of the portfolio page size, but it won't read properly on a screen and the committee members won't likely be able to print them actual size. I wonder what they were thinking we'd do when they made that policy.

The sun is coming up. Maybe I could get to sleep now. I tend to sleep better during the day. I guess I'll go try.