The get-in is treated as a labour problem and it is a geometry problem first. Everything that will be on stage has to pass through a sequence of openings, and the largest piece the production can contain is set by the smallest of them.
The narrowest point is rarely the door
Dock doors are measured and published. What is not published, and what stops more scenery than any door, is the corner: the place where a corridor turns and a long flat has to rotate within the width available. The governing number there is the diagonal of the object, not its width.
The rest of the path contributes its own limits. A lift has a floor area, a door aperture and a weight rating, and the three are independent of each other. A ramp has an angle, and at the bottom of it there is a transition that a low trolley will ground on. A corridor has a radiator, a fire door held open on a magnet, and a low soffit that appears on no drawing.
Design for the door, and the joint is the design
The productive response is to break the set into pieces that fit and to treat the joints as a design problem rather than a concession. A flat built in two halves with a well-made vertical joint is a flat that arrives. One built in a single piece because it looked better in the model is a flat that gets modified in a car park.
For touring work the constraint tightens: the smallest venue on the schedule sets the sectioning for every venue, including the ones with generous access, and finding out which venue that is belongs at the design stage rather than at the third date.
Measure the route rather than reading about it
Venue technical specifications are frequently old, and buildings change. A survey walks the actual path with a tape, from the point where the truck will stand to the point where the piece will stand, and records every constraint including the ones that seem generous.
The items that most often go unrecorded are the ones nobody thinks of as part of the route: where the vehicle can legally park, at what hours a truck may be on that street, whether the dock is shared with another tenant, and whether the lift is also the only way the building moves anything else that morning.
Weight is a separate question from size
Something can fit through every opening on the route and still not be allowed to arrive. Floors have loading limits, lifts have ratings, and overhead structures have capacities that depend on where the load is applied rather than only on how much it weighs.
Structural and rigging capacity is assessed by qualified people under their own procedures, and this publication does not describe that work. What belongs in a production's own planning is knowing the questions early enough to ask them: what does this piece weigh, where does that weight sit, and who has confirmed the building can take it.
What technology changed about the load-in
The shift from painted cloths and tungsten to projection and LED altered the profile of what comes through the door. Cloths are bulky and light and forgiving of a corner. A projector, a media server and a rack of power distribution are small, dense, expensive and intolerant of being dropped, and an LED wall arrives as a large number of heavy panels plus the structure to hold them.
The consequence is that the constraint moved from volume to weight and handling. A get-in that used to need space and hands now needs cases, trolleys, a lift that works, and somewhere secure to put things, and a venue whose access was adequate for the old profile may not be adequate for the new one.
The get-out is when things break
Everything above happens again in reverse, at night, with a crew that has already worked a full day and a vehicle on a deadline. This is where scenery is damaged, cases go missing and people are hurt.
The single measure that helps most is loading the truck in the reverse of the order things will be needed, and having decided that order before the get-out rather than during it. A pack plan drawn once at the start of a tour repays itself on the second date.
What we cannot verify
Venue dimensions and capacities come from the venues and are sometimes out of date; the reliable figure is the one measured by the person who will use it. Loading limits and rigging capacities are matters for qualified assessment on the specific building, and nothing here is guidance for that work. Case and equipment weights published by manufacturers exclude what productions put inside them.
The short version
- The largest piece is set by the smallest opening on the route, usually a corner.
- At a corner the governing dimension is the diagonal, not the width.
- Break the set into pieces that fit and treat the joint as design.
- On tour, the smallest venue sets the sectioning for all of them.
- Weight, floor loading and rigging capacity are separate questions from size.
- The get-out is where damage happens, and a pack plan is what prevents it.