It doesn’t take an inordinate amount of scrutiny to see that the technical jobs in entertainment are a male-dominated domain. Look around at concerts and theatrical productions or on the credits after a television program or a feature film—the LDs, the mixers, the gaffers and the techs are overwhelmingly male. (They don’t call them best “boys” for nothing.)
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Two-thousand attendees. Dozens of high-powered executives. A cavalcade of actors and one rock star, Lenny Kravitz, topping off the night. Putting on the annual Turner Upfront event, where TBS and TNT sell their upcoming season and programs to advertisers of Turner Broadcasting, is no small feat. This year set designers Atomic Design not only transformed the Theatre at Madison Square Garden into a flashy corporate showcase, they also reinvented the lobby as a glitzy faux nightclub for the after-party.
Read More »Although programmers for film do record cues, we typically are not playing back cues like you would on a live show. We do have our… Read More »Live Lighting For Feature Films
Read More »Pop quiz: What are the two most important tools of a lighting designer? If you said Starbucks or the Internet, maybe you should consider a… Read More »It’s all Black and White
Read More »Imagine discovering an incorrect DMX assignment on a somewhat inaccessible unit. Never happens in real life, but hey, let’s pretend. Some newer intelligent lights allow… Read More »Esoteric Light Menu Functions You’ll Be Glad You Found
Read More »I was working at a now defunct lighting company in California, and we had a tradeshow exhibit for a trucking show at the Louisville Convention center. I was in New Orleans finishing up a show at the time, so I missed watching the shop fill the order and ship it out. I flew directly from New Orleans into Louisville, expecting a typical tradeshow load-in. Hardly.
Read More »Whoa! Wait a minute. What I am doing back here on the LD page? I was hired for the programmer’s gig! Okay, I can do the LD gig too. I hope I will get paid the LD rate. What? You expect me to be the LD for the same rate? Okay, just this once. But next time I’m getting paid as both the LD and programmer.
Read More »Few people have escaped opening their e-mail in the morning and finding an appeal to their greedier side, offering to let them share in a multimillion-dollar bonanza tucked away in the Ministry of Whatever in some third-world country. Law enforcement officials refer to these as 419 scams, named for the section of the rather toothless criminal code of Nigeria, where most of these scams originate. Most people simply delete them, figuring no one would ever fall for the grammatically fractured and incredulous requests asking the reader to put up some of his or her own money in order to secure a piece of this windfall.
Read More »In the movie Toy Story, a forgotten toy cowboy by the name of “Woody” is replaced by a “laser-toting” action figure with the dashing name of “Buzz Lightyear.” Surrounded by other talking toys, including Mr. Potato Head and a piggy bank named “Hamm,” the following conversation ensues…
Mr. Potato Head: “How come you don’t have a laser, Woody?”
Woody (angrily): “It’s not a laser. It’s a little light bulb that blinks.”
Hamm: “What’s wrong with him?”
Mr. Potato Head: “Laser envy.”
Read More »Several years ago I was on a job site completing a lighting design and programming a show when the producer asked me a great question: “How do you use color theory in lighting a show?”
Read More »I sat in on a product demonstration for a projector the other day. While the projector was impressive in terms of brightness, noise level, and ease of set up and operation, I was not impressed with the image. It seemed a bit fuzzy. The material on-screen was a rather generic slide show, and the projector had been set up and focused properly. Then I realized what the problem was. It wasn’t the content or the projector, but the fact that the projector and computer were at different screen resolutions. I mentioned this to the rep, who very quickly reset his laptop so that they were matched and the image was improved dramatically. It was a pixel for pixel match to what the computer was putting out.
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If you have a piece of video content, whether you have created it or purchased it, and you load it into a media server to use it in a show, and you think the digital lighting programmer’s work is finished, think again.
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