Tuesday 31 May 2011

aerial boot camp!

Aerial boot camp! My aerial class do it every year but I'd always been working and had never able to go so I was very excited this time round! Basically.we take our tents and trapezes to a new location and do some intense training over a lond weekend.
This year, camp was at Strathaven Airfield as one of the woman in the class works/lives there, a brilliant location had the Scottish weather not been involved!!
The aerial is suppose to be done outside on the truss which is covered, howver it was SOOOOO windy that it became almost impossible to get the truss up in the first place. So aerial boot camp became aerial-less boot camp.

Luckily there was backup, our two heroes and a trampoline. Our first hero, Lauren is a gymnastics coach so she took a trampolining class for a couple of hours inside the hanger where they stored all the aeroplanes.

I hadn't done any trampoling before so it was brilliant to have a go and learn lots of different tricks and somersaults.


Our other hero was Felipe, handbalancing extrordanaire who did a couple of classes to help us out with our handstands. My shoulders ached afterwards but I feel like I know the right poition my body should be in, its just a case of being able to control and hold it now.
As the wind really wasn't giving up , the people at the airfield agreed to let us hang the equipment in the hanger with the planes. Finally some aerial work!!!
Part of boot camp is you get the chance to do some new things that haven't come up yet in the normal classes, so I got to do some hoop- which I've always wanted to have a go at and a little bit of single point trapeze. The video is on its side, but you get the idea......






Even though all didn't go to plan I still had a brilliant time at camp. I really enjoyed the handbalancing classes as its something we hadn't really covered properly before. Although my wee body is a bit sore at the moment, it was definitely worth it.

Friday 13 May 2011

The first show goes up!!!

So the first show of the season has opened!!!
It was quite a push and I was still pasting text onto the set at 6 oclock opening night- praying that the paste would dry before the show went up.
I really enjoyed working on this set because it was so different from other things I'd worked on. There wasn't much painting it was mostly composing and pasting lots of pieces of text onto the various bits of scenery.

The biggest challange was the sliders, thats the really tall flats in the pictures above. We spent quite a while layering all the pieces, making sure that there wasn't too many layer over the light boxes of the windows. Its amazing how much these pieces can change, when the lights are off there is no traces of any window the just llok like normal flats. Its a realy nice surprise for the audience when the do all come on.


Unforunatley though, that's my time at Pitlochry done for now. I really enjoyed it and felt this time round I had more responsibility and say in how things could develop.