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Part 1
The Flying Effect Lifecycle
We may well want to jump right to a discussion of types of winches, kinds of rope, or everyoneâs favorite carabiner. Those are 1-foot-off-the-ground kind of decisions and topics. We need to start 30,000 feet above the ground to make sure we are seeing the whole picture before we can concern ourselves with such details. In this first part we will cover how to think all the way through your effect early and often, focusing on the important parts of the Design, Fabrication, and Administrative phases of any performer flying effect.
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1 Proper Prior Planning
Where else to begin but at the beginning? Usually these endeavors start with someone calling and saying something to the effect of âI have a terrible ideaâ, and you responding, âIâd love to help!â From there begins a long and winding journey that requires equal parts knowledge, skill, patience, luck, and perseverance.
Before we get too excited and dive in head-first we should ask, âShould we do this?â or even, âCan we do this?â For people employed at companies that do this every day, obviously the answer is âHeck yeah!â, assuming your best-suited staff are available to work on the project. But for others who may have limited or no prior flying experience, this is an important question to ask both as an organization and as individuals. As an organization it is important to decide if you have the skill internally to handle an effect that can, without exaggeration, kill someone. While unpleasant to think about, it is important not to approach these effects with rose-tinted lenses. Do not make this decision exclusively in the conference room. Get out there and talk to your staff whom you will be thrusting this responsibility on, and make sure they agree that they can do this and do it safely. Certainly, flying a person should not be your organizationâs first foray into defying gravity. If you are deciding to do your first in-house performer flying effect then at the very least your organization should have a recent history of successfully flying inanimate objects!
What to do though if you decide your organization is ready to take this step into flying people, but you recognize you donât have the skills in-house? The good news is there are many reputable companies out there that specialize in performer flying; Foy, ZFX, and TAIT immediately spring to mind. They, and others, will be more than happy to take your call, hear what you are trying to achieve, and help you do so at your budget. Depending on your precise needs these companies can do as little as cold-rent you gear, if you feel you have staff to run the effect but not to design and manufacture it from scratch, all the way up to being a member of both your artistic team and your technical staff, helping you reach your goals safely.
Now, if you as an individual are having this responsibility thrust upon you and you donât feel prepared or capable, say so, loudly and often. This is not the time to push your comfort zone. You should make sure your boss or bosses understand that you do not feel ready for such a gig. Hopefully this will help them realize that your organization should get some advice and help. This can come in the form of bringing in a whole company to help, or bringing in an individual with a work background to supplement your skills. Either way, the point remains the same: bring in some reinforcements!
Whether you decide to bring in some help or take on this challenge with your team in-house, it is critical to recognize that the most important part of any phase of a performer flying effect is communication:
- Making sure you fully understand the artistic vision.
- Making sure you are clearly communicating how that vision is being translated into reality.
- Making sure your mechanical designers (that may be you) understand both what is required and what is not.
- Making sure the fabrication team (again, this may be you) is paying ample attention to details that matter.
- Making sure the end users (and again, this may be you too) know what they are doing.
Keeping all these people on the same page can be a monumental task, even if you are singularly all these people. Each of the above-mentioned roles are not necessarily different people. In plenty of organizations in our industry one person could wear several of those hats, if not all of them at the same time. While that does make miscommunication between the parties harder, it does not negate the need for an introductory meeting to make sure all parties are on the same page, in the same book. Do not be lured into thinking though that one meeting is enough over the full lifespan of creating such an effect. Never forget that creating from a blank page is far harder than editing something that is sitting in front of you. Even with the best intentions and the most qualified staff by your side, the waters will still muddy over time and therefore need periodic sifting.
Client Meetings, or Extracting Information
âClientâ is one of those words that may have you thinking, âThis book wasnât written for me.â A lot of performer flying in the US is done by a few companies who rent out their skills, and as such âclientâ is an apt word for their relationship with their customers. That said though, there are many homebrew rigs out there created by perfectly capable regional, community, or educational theatres. In this context your client can be your boss at your theatre who has assigned you this project, your theatreâs resident Artistic Director, or even the artistic half of your own brain if you are wearing all the hats! Our client is the person we are trying to impress with all our efforts going forward, and the quality of the final effect.
The first meeting that you should arrange after accepting to take on a performer flying effect is one with the person or persons who will determine the artistic success or failure of the gag. Usually this will be with the Show Director, but depending on how large and/or complicated the production is, this meeting could be with or include the input of client project managers, composers, technical staff, performer management, safety officers, or others. It is important to set aside time to only talk about the performer flying effect. Do not let this meeting be rolled into some larger meeting, or be a single bullet point on a long agenda. This is your first opportunity to get the people you will be working with, or reporting to, to understand the attention to detail that is required to successfully execute this effect. One way to do this is to circulate a detailed agenda a day prior to the meeting.
Hopefully you already had some basic conversations before you agreed to take the helm this performer flying ship in the forthcoming high seas, but it is always best to go over everything with everyone involved one more time. Maybe someone with an important opinion is unaware of the timelines involved, or doesnât know that this is happening at all! After this meeting everyone will (very briefly) be standing on the same point on the map. And immediately after, everyone will start running in different directions until the first rehearsal, when all the parts meet again. This meeting is your first and last chance to document everyoneâs needs and desires, and your plans to achieve them. Remember that no question is too broad or too specific at this juncture. All that said, your agenda should include items like:
What is the effect, or, put differently, what are we trying to achieve?
Is this performer flying or acrobatic rigging?
When is the first rehearsal?
When is opening night?
How long will the production run?
Is it a touring production, a permanent install, or a one-off?
How many performers will be flying?
Do they have prior experience flying?
Is the effect used once per performance or repeatedly?
Is the performer flying in a harness or on a prop?
That is usually enough to get the conversation started. Depending on your clientâs ability to verbalize their vision, or their level of prior experience with such effects, it can be helpful to have some footage ready for the meeting to spur the conversation and get everyone speaking with the same vocabulary, both verbally and visually. In an ideal world, this would be footage of your previous very successful work; however, not everyone has the ability to film everything they do so donât be afraid to use YouTube to find work that is illustrative of what youâre talking about. The important thing, however, if youâre going the YouTube route, is to have those videos bookmarked and handy.There is nothing that slows a meeting down quite like waiting for someone to remember the title of the video in their head. This should help your client be able to answer the questions above, the hardest of which is likely the first one: âWhat is the effect?â Based on the answers to those questions you should have many follow-ups, which will help you create a specification, or âspecâ as it is often called.
Creating a Specification to Define Success
Having all concerned parties agree to the âspecâ is crucial to success. A more technically inclined client might well provide you with a spec to meet. Even in this case, however, it is always worth going over it with their representative to make sure the spec is actually achievable. There is nothing worse than putting in all the effort needed to create one of these effects, only to have the client be dissatisfied with your work because it doesnât do something they wanted it to, or thought was needed, when that particular was never achievable in the first place. For example, if your client wants a performer to launch out of a trap in the stage high into their rafters very quickly, letâs say at 20 feet per second (normally abbreviated as 20ft/sec), but their ceiling is only 20 feet tall, then that 20ft/sec is likely not achievable. With time to accelerate to and decelerate from top speed there is not enough room to run to get up to that speed. Our system will only be able to accelerate so fast to our chosen top speed, to say nothing of the limitations of the human body. These are important things to consider before blindly agreeing to a spec that might not be possible. (For a more detailed discussion of acceleration and forces, please see Chapter 4.) If this speed is allowed to be a measure of success, however, your client may end up disappointed even if your gag does everything else it needed to. This is the kind of thing that you should be looking for in the very beginning and getting out in front of.
Another example not rooted in speed would be not thinking through the choreography of the show as it relates to your flying machine; many productions of Peter Pan come to mind. You may have a situation where you want to use the same machine for multiple effects throughout the show. There is no problem with this, as long as you and the creative staff have talked through the choreography of the show. If you intend to use the machine to have Peter fly through the window, then logically the line needs to be preset there from the top of the scene. It seems obvious, but details like this are often missed. Make sure the creative team understands that flying lines cannot preset themselves! Put differently, the line cannot disappear up into the rafters one moment, and suddenly be strung through a set piece the next without some intervention.
These are the kinds of things you want to discover in your initial meeting with the client. Both of the given examples are too specific to put on an agenda, but are emblematic of the kinds of things you will need to read between the lines about as they answer your more basic questions. In our first example about a specific (unachievable) speed being spec-ed by the client, right then and there is your opportunity to explain why that specific parameter is unachievable, and propose an alternate one that they find acceptable. In our second example of one machine not being able to be everywhere at once, this is your opportunity to point out that we need more systems than we were planning, or need to rethink the flow of the show. In all these instances this is also an opportunity for you to show your understanding of the big picture and willingness to help your client see their vision through. While it may seem tedious in the moment, having these conversations early and often will always result in less drama (the bad kind) along the way. So much of a successful performer flying effect is the execution of soft skills in working with various kinds of people in our industry. This meeting is your first big hurdle and test of your soft skills.
By the end of this meeting you should feel confident that you know exactly what is expected of you and how you are going to execute it. Your client should feel they were heard, understood, and have found the right person for the job. You should know exactly what your scope is, both where it begins and where it ends. So many difficult conversations happen on the first day of rehearsal because of a âscope gapâ. This is what happens when one vendor understood their spec to be providing A through C, and another vendor understood their spec to be providing E through G, but no one was ever planning on providing the D in the middle. Having this meeting with your client may not prevent scope gap from rearing its ugly head, but at least you will have excellent documentation showing that you have showed up with everything you and your client had agreed to previously. Having this documentation also puts you in a great position to be able to be seen as bending over backwards to help your client by filling this scope gap, should it exist and should you choose to.
A tricky conversation at the initial meeting will be when the Creative in the room wants to talk about the âfeelâ of a flight instead of a recognized unit of measurement. It is only âtrickyâ because is it not a black-and-white, easily understood, same-page-same-book kind of metric to be held to. It is not a bad thing that creative people want to talk in those terms; quite the opposite in fact: itâs how they enter the world and we want them to be able to relate to us in a way that makes them comfortable. Itâs important then to know who on your team can translate âfeelâ to speed, height, flight envelope, and other more technical measurements. It might not be your strong suit, and thatâs okay. You want to make sure you have your artistic-minded tech in the room when the conversation turns this way. This is another time when having videos of effects that were designed to elicit different moods can be very helpful. Another technique that has proven variably successful is to equate the speed of your machine to var...
