I’ve turned down a local, outdoor gig in the city. I’m not prepared enough. I did look into local requirements. Main obstacle for peace of mind is notifying Transport Canada and the use of airspace. I use flight radar24 to monitor when I’m playing out of the city but the one time I was lazy and setup low and need to beam up, I did get the attention of a plane who was interested in what I was doing. Makes your heart skip a beat. I tried filling out forms with the help of A.I. and conclusively, it has made getting properly safety trained one of my next steps. I thought I was a Laserist until these were in front of me.
The forms seem intimidating, but if you have all the data from your laser manufacturer, its not terrible, but you need a spreadsheet or look into the software called Skyzan because there are some calculations needing to be done. Do NOT TRUST AI for this. I dont know any AI projects that have trained this sort of data.
Having a plane take interest in what you’re doing definitely is a high butt pucker moment… I once had a helicopter land directly in our laser paths at a festival with 20,000 people waiting for the headliner to start… about lost my shit. Talking to the PM we found it was the local medivac coming back to the site from a major car crash. We were able to work out a direct line the the medivac team so if they needed to go in a hurry, I will slam the e-stop so they could take off. Oh…for extra pucker factor, this was literally my first time shooting open sky with FAA coordination. What a night…
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YouTube might have some videos that will help. Argon Animation Inc. on YouTube has some videos for US variances. I don’t know how Canada’s differences are with their paperwork
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Unfortunately, shooting sky is a little bit more complex than just having a variance, especially in the US. In US and Canada, you MUST coordinate with proper Air Traffic Contoller and you must submit paperwork detailing your install, time of rehearsals/show, and really specific data about your lasers (wavelength, diode type, safety measures, etc), and THEN do the math for them so they can cut out a pice of sky for you to shoot in… its a pain, but…also keeps us from crashing airplanes. The good news is though, Once you assemble the data, largely it doesn’t change much so it tends to be rinse and repeat on the forms only update locations and times.
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The ILDA LSO class does a great job walking you through how to fill these out and calculate the values. It’s definitely unintuitive for your first time, and I say that as someone who has a pilots license.
The courses are usually taught by Patrick Murphy, the exec director of ILDA. He was extremely awesome and even generously looked over my first submission months after the LSO course when I was unsure how to submit my first one involving multiple laser models.
A side benefit of ILDA membership is that you get free access to the Skyzan web calculator that computes a bunch of the values for you.
The Canadian form and process is nearly identical to US one. If you can submit 30 days out, I’ve never had a problem.
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Gig is in 2 weeks. I was asked about 40 days out. I don’t have liability insurance. It ’s a one day build - hence no proper focus ( or alignment or whatever everyone is calling when you are doing zone setup/ placement). Probably would need to squash all my looks to be safe…ugh. I’d be up against outdoors winds and video panels which is a recipe for a bunk laser show. 3 hazers ? If I am going to charge like a professional, I’d better be a professional. Comically, the potential client ( I’ve known for 30 years) tried to suggest exposure in the pricing dialog. We never settled on an amount I would have given him a super fair rate, given the general simplicity and short show. Again no need to rush it. I met a senior lighting guy years ago. Told me he takes a month every year to learn new gear, and experiment. I’ve adopted that mentality, but taking by the first year to really getting my skills and gear up to speed, before I commit to someone else’s event. I am in development, the software is in development. Things will harmonize soon enough and I am most certainly looking forward to that day.