Helping the Community Theatre Stagehands

Posted July 8, 2003

Helping the Community Theatre Stagehands By Greg Weigold

I'm the volunteer Technical Director for a small community theatre in a semi-rural South Carolina town. Of course we don't have large budgets for various things that don't actually go on stage, but we needed a way for the stage hands to see what's going on on stage from time to time. I immediately thought of X10 cameras!!

I mounted one on either side of the audience, just under the stage lights, on a 5' long wooden arm so they aren't blocked from seeing all the way to the back of stage regardless of the set being used. I then bought two cheap 9" color TV's and made a small shelf for them on either side of the stage in the backstage areas (called wings). Each camera is set for a different number, so they don't interfere with each other (they are almost 50' away from each other anyway) and wired the receivers on each side of the stage to the TVs.

But the trick was to allow either TV to monitor either camera, in case a set piece blocked a visual cue that someone backstage needed to see. So I set the receivers to use separate output channels and wired them to splitter/combiners so that both TVs can receive either channel 3 (stage left) or channel 4 (stage right)!!

We spent about $200 and had color monitors on both sides of the backstage area and the crew was thrilled! They could finally see, and hear, everything!

A quick note: we put another small monitor in the light/sound booth to replace the old microphone/amp/speaker combo we had up there and we can see and hear better than ever before!! The booth is about 80' from the stage so people always looked kinda small and small visual cues weren't always visible. They are now!!

Greg Weigold
Chapin,SC

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