Part III: Everything else at the Hill Cumorah

Now that you all have an idea of what kind of work that I was involved in, allow me to move into the many other awesome and fun things I did at the Hill Cumorah. I did forget to mention the new rock cannons we invented this year for the destruction scene. It's just a water cannon with roughly 90 foam "stones" that we cut ourselves shoved into the cannon. The foam was a very vivid green color, but since the explosion was back-lit, you only saw the silhouettes of the rocks so we left them without any paint. A couple of the boys took up sculpture-making during our slightly-boring cutting sessions.

Brother Lyman also made a whale-looking fish named Wiggles. Wiggles was launched out of a cannon every single show, leaving us the game of finding Wiggles after the show was over! I found him once :D

My fun during the show involved my camera, of course. I had to smoke stage 4 during the Nephite/Lamanite battle scene and noticed the light rays coming through the fibergrating were awesome! I took advantage of this on the last two nights and tried out some photography.

I have plenty more photography shots that will be posted on here in the future (or you can sneak-peek them at my deviant page!).

While we were taking down the stage, we were visited by Moroni the cat.

Apparently this cat has stayed around the hill for a few years now and is still doing ok. I'm told the sister missionaries at the visitor's center keep him well fed :P

I also haven't mentioned the fact that the workcrew members are treated as celebrities by the cast and staff. We sat in the front of every devotional meeting. Not the front row--we were in front facing the cast and sitting next to the pageant presidency and the directors! The first time we saw the cast at the first devotional, we were applauded for as we walked in. Even the primary kids would often start chanting "Work-Crew!-Work-Crew!-Work-Crew!" Of course, we would follow up with "Pri-mary!-Pri-mary!-Pri-mary!" I absolutely loved the kids--you couldn't help but smile and just be happy around them. We drove over with our tractor and trailer, picked up the kids, and gave them a ride for a little bit in the field.

Brother Krebs told them that our tractor was a funky one, in that it only went faster if it heard louder singing. So of course, we spent the next 20 minutes just riding around with all these kids singing whatever church song they pleased. I definitely thought we could've gone longer. The kids thought so too:

We got to witness 2 mission calls during the experience as well!

Congratulations to Brother Gassoway for his call to Cebu, Philippines and Brother Nelson to his call to Sao Paulo, Brazil! For both calls we travelled to the top of the hill. We also would go to the top of the hill whenever we hit a major transition in roles, such as switching between construction and tech crew or as we were finishing up our experiences in Palmyra.

The Wind Tunnel served as our home.

I often describe it as a glorified garage. It's located behind the hill. The picture shows the front entrance, which leads to a "day room". Pretty much only us boys were allowed past this room. We also had a big bathroom and the wind tunnel itself.

If you've ever seen The Newsies, this reminded me a lot of how the opening scene feels. I took this picture standing on my companion's bed, which is above my bed. You'll notice the door on the far left: it led to a few washers and dryers--yes, we did try to keep ourselves and our clothes clean during the month.

This was our backyard, home to many cornhole games. It's quite a simple game: 2 teams of 2 alternate tossing beanbags onto a board (shown in blue). You score 1 point if you get on the board and 3 points if you get it into the hole. We also played plenty of other games too, ultimate frisbee being a frequent one.

We ate very well at the hill too. We actually had a personal caterer for the whole month. I'm quite impressed at the meals that we had. Here's a pretty average-looking dinner for us:

Can you believe I still haven't gained weight?! :D

We were involved in a few competitions at the hill as well. The workcrew holds a little mail competition for the month.

Here's our point system. A letter without a stamp usually came in the form of a note from a cast member. However, if the cast member was a girl, you got 15 points, period. I ended up with 203 points by the end (thanks for those that wrote! :) ) I was a little below-average from the rest of the boys though. Some were just absolutely spoiled. Some actually had like every young women in their home ward write them a letter, which majorly boosted their points.

Don't mind the doodles: This was taken on the last day and they went on a drawing craze that night.

The Golden Spoon award went to the winner of the annual bake off competition between the cast. The judges just so happened to be the work crew ;) We actually had over 40 entries this year. We had sooo much food!!! Pretty much all of it was amazing too. We had to create 2 food categories because there was so much food! I loved it though :) I got to draw the winners on the board too.

Oh yeah, and you can't forget the 38 pounds of smarties we received! :D

Part II: Duties of the Tech Crew

After the stage was completed and all of the lights made it up into the towers, our work crew held an important meeting where we divided ourselves into the light crew and the ground crew. I chose to be on the ground crew and I loved the experience on there! Every boy enjoyed his particular assignment as well. I'll start with the light crew.

(bottom to top, left to right: Brothers Davis, Nelson, Abutaa, Pike, Delgado, Spinder, Hirschi, Conover, Brown, Halterman, Brockbank, and Burkhart) The light crew was responsible for the covered light in this picture--the spotlight.


Before the show, each would climb up their assigned tower and run a spotlight for the show. They lit up various people and groups of people on the stage. The nice thing about running the show from 9:15 to 10:30 is that it's dark enough that we can create a blackout if needed! One of the hardest cues for the light crew was spotting (meaning hitting with their light; they could see him floating in midair just fine) the actor portraying Christ in an instant to make him "appear" after a blackout.

Two advantages come to mind with being on the light crew: not as much physical work (and low-sleep demands) and they had the best view for pictures and just looking out at the audience, stage, and sunsets! The light crew did a fabulous job this year and were much appreciated.

The ground crew (bottom to top, left to right: Brothers Powell, Cox, Jensen, Zobell, Ireland, Sumpter, Gassoway, Swasey, Lyman, Bishop, Gulbransen, Hooker, Lester, (Jones was the assistant director), and Krebs) was responsible for anything to do with the technical aspects of the stage.
This included lifting any set pieces into place, such as columns, walls, the tree of life...

...large idols, rock and cave pieces, Lehi's tent, and heaviest of all--Nephi's boat.

The sail could fold down into the stage and was covered when not in use. It was actually pulled up by our workcrew boys during the scene so they were required to be in costume. The next picture shows Brother Cox (far left) with the rest of the cast as they pose at the end of a musical segment.

You'll also notice that the side of the ship must be put in place (I actually helped with the particular piece shown). Overall it's an awesome part of the play. Partway through, a storm hits the boat and the effect of the storm is created as well. Our ground crew actually causes the sail to be ripped completely off, leaving fragments of sail on the mast!

Another fun part about ground crew is the pyrotechnics and water effects. We cause smoke to rise. We also create small flames...

...medium flames...

...water cannon explosions...

...and slightly bigger fireballs ;)

The destruction scene (described in the passage of scripture 3 Nephi 8: 5-23) was the baby of the ground crew. It was a 76-second segment of fire, water cannons, fireballs, columns and walls falling over and flying, chaos, and plenty of cast members falling and/or dying. The person calling the cues over our headsets would literally start a stopwatch and count from 1 to 76 and we just memorized what we had to do at what second. I can still whip out that I launch 4 water cannons at 5, 21, 72, and 76, and I also had a fire that lit for a few seconds at 55! Of course, if you know music or emotional drama, the best and most moving effect comes at a huge climax followed by silence. We definitely had that. At 76, all 3 of our fireballs launch along with a few water cannons, followed by a blackout, silence, and then a couple emotional voices finishing out (paraphrasing) the rest of that chapter in 3 Nephi (verses 24 and 25). The biggest part of the explosion was caused by the 3 in the next picture.

The pit: located between stages 1 and 3 and held 4 water cannons and a fireball. I was in charge of the two on the stage-left side, Bro. Sumpter the 2 stage-right ones, and Bro. Zobell over the fireball. It was cool :D

Among my various roles on the ground crew, my main role gave me the title of fontmaster. At 3 different times during the play, a baptism occurs on the stage. The baptismal font consists of a little step-down area on stage 4, where just about all my other cues were by the way. The only difficulty is that other parts of the play require the space where the font is for scenes such as the Nephite/Lamanite battle scene. To prevent actors from falling into the font, the font is covered, and then uncovered before a baptism scene occurs. That was my job--moving the two wooden panels above me in the next picture.


Allow me to explain the pillow and my goofy smile. During a particular scene with a wicked King Noah and the prophet Abinadi, I have no cues except to uncover the font. The scene is roughly 10.5 minutes long. Funny side story as to why I know this: the director of the scene actually called for some workcrew boys to act as guards in the background of the scene. He required them to hold this position...

...for the entire scene! The whole ground crew thought it was hilarious and we all tried it during one rehearsal, with me timing the whole thing. Arms were held for 10 minutes and 15 seconds...and it burned sooo bad!!! It quickly became an inside joke amongst the crew.

Anyways, back to my font pillow picture. Since I didn't have anything to do for 10 minutes, I decided to bring and store a pillow underneath my home in stage 4. At the start of the scene, I would bring out my pillow and lay in the font! I even had a bag of honey-roasted chex for the last 2 performances!!! It was great :) I opened the font halfway and still layed there, watching the light tower in front of me and the bats that flew by eating moths in the sky.
A special crew within the ground crew was the flight crew. 3 boys (Brothers Bishop, Hooker, and Krebs) were in charge of the flight harness as the actor portraying Christ was floating in midair. There were appropriately 3 jobs: horizontal motion, vertical motion, and unhooking the harness during the scene (given the title of ninja since they dress in all black for the part). Of all the rehearsals, I think they rehearsed that particular part the most.
Overall I'd say the crew delivered a wonderful performance to accompany the beautiful performance of this year's actors.

Part I: The Basics and Stage Construction

Before I get into the specifics of how the stage transformed from a blank hill to this:

I just want to give a brief rundown of what this work crew experience consisted of and roughly what we did during our month in Palmyra. The work crew consists of 26 young men ages 17-19 (67 boys applied this year). The work crew experience is meant to provide good preparation for our missions. We arrive a week before the 700-some-odd cast members and spend the first 5ish days building the stage from scratch. The cast arrives at this point and the work crew becomes the tech crew for the show. 14 of us work on the ground crew while the other 12 work on the light crew. I'll go into details of each crew in a later blog post. For the next week, we rehearse our parts with the cast as they rehearse their acting as well. The next week is performance week. After performances end, the cast and most of the staff leave, leaving the work crew to strike the stage. We do this in about 2 days, leaving a few more days to do last-minute playing around and sight-seeing.
This is an extremely rough rundown of what goes on. There are plenty of activities we participate in in between our work crew duties, which will be laid out in better detail in (you guessed it) another blog post.
But anyways, onto the construction! The stage is layed out as follows:

By the way, now that you've seen the diagram, I get liberty to name the stages and assume you know where it is ;)
We arrived at the hill and found palettes that looked like this:
Fortunately the stage pieces have been labeled sufficiently that the construction of it becomes a fun little puzzle for us. If you zoom in on the following picture, you'll notice little yellow numbers on the beams and posts. The posts are placed into premade holes (or set on pads on the asphault pathways). The beams either fit into little holders on the posts or bolted into other beams.

After all of the posts and beams are in (and tightened down), we place the fibergrating. This is fiberglass grating that made walking on the stages possible! You can see it on palettes in the previous 2 pictures and in place in the following one.

After screwing in all the little fibergrating clamps, we place all of the staircases. The forklift places them nearby where they belong and we lift each one into place, except for the 3 larger staircases that connect stages 7 and 3:

After the stairs are in place, we throw down the rubber matting (the red stuff 3 pictures back) and zip-tie it to the fibergrating. This is to help protect the actors from the splintery and harder fibergrating.

During all of our construction, a couple staff members in charge of safety lighting install the lighting in. The end result is cool looking and extremely helpful during performances:

That's pretty much all there is to the construction of the stage. Our schedule required us to be building for 10+ hours on an average day, waking up at 6:30 and getting to bed by 10:30. I was very sleep deprived by the end of the experience by the end of all of this, but it was so worth it!
Here's a view during performances:

...and then some pictures during strike:

Lots of heavy lifting, plenty of sun and tan time, and enough rain to soak my gloves at the same time! But I definitely loved the work!

A Notice of Arrival, Warning, and Introduction

I'm back home!!! The Hill Cumorah Pageant was so incredible! Soooo many lessons learned, both temporal and spiritual. To give you an idea, I bought a new journal to start writing in for this pageant and my mission. The pageant experience alone took up 23 pages in that journal and I definitely didn't include every fiber of detail in there! Seeing as everyone who follows this blog is curious about what happened, and the fact that I'm writing for different kinds of audiences, I've decided to tackle describing my experiences in Palmyra, New York through multiple blog posts. Each post will address a different aspect of my work crew experience. Right now I plan on the following posts: stage construction, duties of the tech crew, other experiences on the hill, trips away from the hill, and spiritual/personal takeaways. This list is subject to modification and not limited to its order, but I'm starting with it. I'll try to get all of these done soon so that I'm not dragging on forever about it. But yeah, I'm super excited to tell you guys all about this--Stay tuned!

Here's where you get to start--The Hill Cumorah:

Thanks to everyone for your love and support in all that I do. I love you guys!!!