Professional Lighting & Production - Fall 2018 | Page 31

THE 2017 CALGARY STAMPEDE GRANDSTAND SHOW
FEATURING AUTOMATION FROM DRIFTER RIGGING
PL&P: At what point were you seriously considering automated
rigging services as a career focus? What potential did you recognize
in the production landscape that you wanted to take advantage of?
MD: In February of 2016, I was working for a production company as a
production rigger and servicing motors on top of being the IATSE head
climbing rigger. I had reached a point where, after spending years on my
career, I was left feeling uninspired and unchallenged. I had drunk the
automation Kool-Aid and wanted more.
After drinking a tall bottle of navy rum one night and promising
myself a change, I woke up with a strong hangover, but an even stronger
determination to make my dreams of being an automation guru a reality.
I started work on Drifter Rigging that morning.
I recognized that there was a lack of qualified automation techni-
cians. I also saw the increasing demands for automation services, and
the failure of others to be able to take advantage of these exciting and
lucrative opportunities based on a lack of trained and experienced
personnel. By narrowing my focus, immersing myself in the field, and
studying my butt off, I was able to gain a lot of specialized knowledge
in a very short period of time. From there, it was fairly straightforward
to put myself in a position where I was making more decisions and
controlling my own fate.
PL&P: Tell us about the origins of Drifter Rigging. How did you
go about choosing and acquiring your kit, and then plugging
yourself into the industry network to start landing projects and
building a résumé?
MD: After becoming addicted to automation and deciding that I needed
a change in my life, I made up my mind very quickly that Drifter Rigging
was going to be a thing. I threw myself at it with all of my energy and
things progressed very quickly. It went from an idea to its first project,
to its first tour, to, “How the hell do I work out international shipping
import details and taxes for next week while I’m out of the country doing
a show?” before I ever knew what hit me. We literally hit the ground
running with our first project and just kept going with the momentum.
Having such an active interest in and knowledge of automated
rigging, I knew what I wanted before I knew how I was going to get it.
The next step was opening up dialogue with friends and colleagues
in the industry to prove to investors that there was a market for what I
had to offer. I gained a lot of traction by offering live demos with intro
courses to many of the industry’s top vendors. Once people knew what
we had, what we could do, and what we had done, it became a very
much inbound call-based operation.
PL&P: In addition to automated rigging, you also provide the
standalone service of load monitoring. What is load monitoring in
a nutshell, and in which cases would a production consider taking
advantage of that equipment and service?
MD: Standalone load monitoring is not something I do a lot of, but it’s
something that I wish more people took an interest in. Typically, riggers
will calculate loads manually. We will do a lot of math to determine the
weight loads on each element, and how that will transfer to each individ-
ual motor. The next step is to calculate how that load will be applied, and
spread over the roof structure that is supporting it. This work is critical to
rigging safety.
While this math is very accurate, there are a lot of mechanical vari-
ables that affect how weight is actually spread out. When load cells are
used to monitor the weight of each connection point to, say, a video wall
or a stick of truss, you are able to properly distribute the weight along
the connection points with a much higher accuracy. This allows users to
safely distribute the weight in the way that their math has predicted. An
example is if you have more than three motors on an object and move
one a 1/4 in., you can shift the weights of the connection points by
hundreds of pounds.
Fall 2018 | 31