Loading In

Well, you've finally made it to load-in, where all your hard design work will be realized. Oddly enough, you don't have a heck of a lot to do during load-in, most of what needs to get done is properly the domain of the ME. Of course, in Harvard theater, you may very well be the ME, but then you need to go and read the ME document. As an LD, your role is restricted to making sure that your design is interpreted correctly and lending a hand where it is needed.

Preparing Your Crew
Marking Your Areas
Resolve Problems
Double-check The Hang
Look For Instrument Problems
Organize Accessories

Preparing Your Crew

Your ME should have gathered and organized a crew, but as there is little consistency about how LDs work at Harvard, it might be necessary to take a little time with them, either as a group or individually, and explain how to interpret your plot. Most things they'll be able to figure out, and the rest they can ask the ME, but since the ME will likely be busy doing the million other things that need to be done, it makes sense for you to help the crew interpret your plot.

Marking Your Areas

To help the crew pre-aim the spotlights, you can mark the center of each acting area with a piece of tape. The acting areas should be taken accurately off the plot, as the locations of the spotlights relative to the areas should be accurate. The crew should be informed of which area is which, so they can point the spots approximately at the correct areas as they hang them.

Resolve Problems

Every hang will have its problems related to the positioning and hanging of instruments. A beam will be in the way, say, or the electric isn't quite as long as it's shown on the plot. Or some instrument or circuit is discovered to be broken and you need to find a replacement or cut something else. In circumstances like these, where you might need to modify your design, the ME can't help. You should be the one making the decisions as to whether to cheat instruments SL or SR to avoid that upright, or which units to cut.

Double-check The Hang

You should also actively seek out problems with the hang. Your crew may not have a heck of a lot of experience, and although they may have seemed to understand your training spiel, they may not have quite gotten all the nuances. If I have time, I try to walk through the plot and verify the following:

The correct instruments are hung in the correct locations: occasionally a crewmember will hang the wrong instrument, by accident or because they can't read the plot. Or they might not understand that 1'6" is not an approximate measurement, or be confused by odd markings in the beams. Just check to make sure that things are approximately correct, so that you won't have to spend time later during focus fixing problems.
The instruments are with slack: Each instrument should be free to move so that it can be focused. Crews often start to tie the instrument pigtails to the pipe, which is a definite no-no. The pigtail should be looped close to the instrument so there's plenty of slack for focus.
Instruments are hung right-side-up: One of the most annoying and unfortunately common problems is folks who hang instruments upside-down. Perfectly understandable, but if you don't notice until after you've spent ten minutes focusing the unit and go to drop in the gel, then you need to spend another ten minutes rehanging, plus another ten refocusing.
Shutters are pulled: Your crew should remember to pull out the shutters on all ERS units after they are hung. Not doing so causes two problems; one, you can't tell the unit is on when your run your dimmer check; and two, as you are looking for the unit that didn't come on, you'll be burning and warping your shutters.
Overall neatness: A clean hang is a functional hang. If you find the crew is creating great tangles of cable, or instruments aren't hung consistently and accurately, you can be guaranteed that come focus when you need to reroute a circuit, it will be a long, ugly job. So insist on a level of order and neatness, which of course your ME should be doing too.

Look For Instrument Problems

Occasionally you'll run into a problem with an instrument that isn't readily apparent to your ME. For instance, you may need a very sharply-focused ERS for a particular special, but can stand to have a less-well tuned one elsewhere. Or you may just find a unit that has something broken, like a lens or reflector or something. Looking for these sorts of problems will usually have to wait for the dimmer check once the hang is complete, but when they get to that point, look carefully at each unit to make sure that it will do what you need (although don't delay the dimmer check to do so). If a Fresnel is making some wierd non-round spot on the ground, or a ellipsoidal is way out of focus in a key location, you can ask the ME to swap out the unit or fix the problem.

Organize Accessories

For most of the load-in, you will just be helping out where you are needed, while your ME runs the load-in. One thing you and your assistants can do to help speed along the process for later is to organize accessories, by which I mean gels, gel frames, barn doors, or anything else that gets added during focus. Cut up and label the gels neatly and separate them into logical piles for each hanging location, so you can just hand a stack of things to the crew and say "Here, these are the gels for the 2nd Electric". The better you do this, the quicker the focus will go, which is always a good thing.

TOC - Focus