Author Topic: Headset Chatter Blog  (Read 5064 times)

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RuthNY

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Headset Chatter Blog
« on: Dec 25, 2014, 09:55 am »
I have no idea who this SM is (are you here on SMNetwork...?) but I find her latest blog post to be very interesting reading.

http://headsetchatter.com/blog/
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PSMKay

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Re: Headset Chatter Blog
« Reply #1 on: Dec 25, 2014, 03:34 pm »
The author is registered here but not online since June.

nick_tochelli

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Re: Headset Chatter Blog
« Reply #2 on: Dec 27, 2014, 07:56 am »
I know her quite well. If you need to contact her for some reason pm me. I'll see if she'll let me give out her info.

We ran "competitive blogs" while we were on tour together. We both got featured on the Guthrie homepage while we were in residence. It was fun :)

BenTheStageMan

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Re: Headset Chatter Blog
« Reply #3 on: Dec 27, 2014, 06:02 pm »
I read through the entirety of this blog during a very easy tech once.  It was really interesting as a window into the touring world especially.  She doesn't post very often now, but I follow her on Twitter and she's fairly active there.

Nick_tochelli I figured out you were the one she was talking about for so many of the posts.  A shame her links to your blog come back as invite only.  Although perhaps you could pass along some more information about her Filemaker database?
"Show people are doomed!  Doomed to a life of booze...and pills...and heavy meals late at night!" -Judy, "Ruthless!"

nick_tochelli

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Re: Headset Chatter Blog
« Reply #4 on: Dec 27, 2014, 10:49 pm »
My blog had to go bye bye once my wife's students found it. Nothing inappropriate or anything just too much extra exposure for her liking. It was just easier taking it down.

I'm really not at liberty to pass anything on about the database. It was a modified database from a colleague of hers and he gave her permission. It's not mine to give. She's easy to reach though if you want to ask her about it.

Karen Parlato

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Re: Headset Chatter Blog
« Reply #5 on: Dec 29, 2014, 04:27 pm »
Hi guys, Karen here.  (Waves to Nick, who helpfully sent me a text to point me here!) Thanks for the nice comments about the site. I'm glad that new post seems to be interesting a lot of people.  It felt good to have something to write a detailed post on. And I had a 6-hour bus ride back from Ogunquit, which that post took more than half of, so I have to give geography most of the credit.

I wish I blogged as much as I used to. It's partially because I don't have as much time or energy for it, but also with the growth of social media I often find myself in situations where I think "this would be so interesting to blog about!" but then I can't, or choose not to, because to do so would reveal confidential information about my show, or potentially cast it in a bad light. 

I find that you learn very little on processes where everything goes well, but it's kind of hard to be like "let's talk about what we can learn from this mess," especially when the show is ongoing, or even worse, hasn't opened yet. Since I'm not anonymous, it's very easy for anyone googling my shows to end up on the blog, and that unfortunately leads me to have to sanitize what I write about so much that most of the time I just drop the idea halfway through the draft, if I get started at all.  It's not just writing about drama, sometimes it's as simple as not wanting to post pictures of the set design, if it hasn't already been seen in the official press coverage. It depends on how high-profile the show is, but sometimes I just err on the side of caution.

Over the years I've had a few ideas for putting aside an "I once did this show where this happened" post, where I could let enough time go by that I could talk about the situation without it being attributable to any person or show, but I've never quite gotten one of those done.

On the subject of the database, well, it's complicated.  It's in Filemaker, and I hate Filemaker because it's expensive to get everyone on your team using it, and even more expensive to have a properly-hosted DB for everyone on your team to access.  And also, when you need to share documents with people outside your team, your only real options are to PDF it. You can't just send someone a Word or Excel document with your contact sheet (at least not formatted in any attractive way). In most cases a PDF is all you need, but sometimes the producer needs the original documents for something, even if the something is "just because." Dropbox and standard office documents are just so much easier to work with, although it makes me sad to think of how much can be automated with a database.  Really, I want to someday create an app to do what my DB does, but my coding skills are progressing slowly.  And that wouldn't solve all the problems, just the part where I could give it away free to my colleagues. 

Filemaker works great on a show where it's just me who needs to use it, and for that purpose I still find it useful.  I did a big-ish show this summer, and went back to using the DB for the first time in several years.  But I actually re-built it from scratch, as the one that Nick and I used was filled with so much spaghetti code from all the crazy things it had to do over the years (running shows in rep, one-act or two-act shows, plays or musicals, etc.).  The one part that I developed with my other friend was the first thing to go -- it was this cool master tracking list that literally tracked EVERYTHING that happened during the show -- but it was just too much effort to keep it updated, especially by oneself.  It was pretty awesome though when Nick and I were able to use it in rehearsal where we could share the DB and both be updating it in realtime.  On a big show it would be cool to have a PA who just sat in the room and did that. And if anyone is doing a Broadway show and wants a PA to do just that, I will totally do it!

When I decided to give the database another try, I broke out a list of the things I really needed it to do, trying to stick to things that were almost entirely PSM-related, or benefited heavily from the automation the database could do, and I built just those parts, from scratch, but more-or-less based on how they functioned before.  What I came up with was:
1. the report
2. tracking conflicts and the accruing of sick days (which also fed into the in/out on the report)
3. the sign in sheet (I hate manually changing the dates for each week, plus it already knows who's in the show from #2)
4. tracking scene timings (which I've never gotten to a point where it's worth using -- it was doing well on my summer show, until we completely re-wrote the script twice, and all the scenes got re-numbered and changed in length significantly. The second time it happened, I was like, "Welp, we're done with this feature!" and we turned to the high-tech method of the PA and I both doing it with iPhone-stopwatch, pencil and paper, and comparing our numbers.)
5. I recently added a simple single-page view that pulls out the injury reports for the current week, so I don't have to flip through the reports manually to see if there's anything for the weekly report to Equity

The other bonus feature I added back, which IMO is the entire reason to use the database, is a little something Nick and I came up with while touring "Romeo and Juliet." We called it the Are They Dead Yet Machine.  Basically it looks at the run times of each act for the last 10 performances (which I shorten when a show has just started, or is undergoing changes), and based on what run times you've filled out in the current show report (i.e. if only the start time of Act I is entered, it knows you're in the middle of Act I), it can tell you what time the act will end, and how much time is remaining from whatever time you hit the "Are They Dead Yet?" button.  Once a show has been running a while, and assuming it's reasonably consistent, it can be frequently accurate to within a few seconds.  This is useful for a multitude of things, like if you have to go to the bathroom, have someone meeting you after the show, are thinking about what's for dinner, or maybe once in a while you actually can use it to do your job, like you're in a new venue and the house manager wants to know what time to tell the ushers to be ready for intermission. To be able to say, "9:14:20" and be reasonably confident you'll get it within 10 seconds is pretty cool.

And from an automation perspective, the best part is the single-click "Finish report" button, which creates an HTML and PDF version of the report, opens and addresses the email, and all you have to do is proof it and hit "send." Actually it could send automatically, but that's just a terrible idea.  My favorite thing about using the database is how nice it is to know that I don't have to worry about stupid typos, like forgetting to change the date in all the places it appears.

I know everybody wants to know more about the database. Everybody either wants to see it, or wants me to sell it, and I'm kind of halfway between all that.  I don't want to give it away, and it's not polished enough to be used by someone other than me yet, and I kind of secretly still hate the very idea of it and want to find a better format for paperwork than either Filemaker or Office-and-Dropbox, so I don't want to devote too much time to following that path when it doesn't lead somewhere I'm happy with anyway. So I tend to talk more in generalities like "this is what it does" in the hopes that the ideas are ultimately more useful than the actual code.

Anyway, thanks for the comments, and as Ben said, I'm on Twitter all the time, newbielink:http://twitter.com/headsetchatter [nonactive]. I can be a little long-winded, so the 140 character thing is annoying, but sometimes if you follow along I can string together a thought that 5 years ago would have been a blog post.  ;)

 

riotous