Designer Profile

A show director in the live events business is the person who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatrical production. This person unifies all the different production elements and departments through their own vision to achieve the end result. This individual commands an army of specialists in their fields, working with the lighting and set designers, costumes, video directors, content creators, audio engineers, musicians and choreographers. To name just a few.

Post hardcore bands Senses Fail and Silverstein shared a great deal in common, beyond their excellence in their musical genre, when they toured together in 2015. Both had achieved critical acclaim; both had loyal cult-like followings, and both maintained relentless touring schedules. Unfortunately, both also lacked the budget for the kind of lighting rig that could do visual justice to their hard driving music. It was then that Victor Zeiser stepped in.

Mindpool officially started out in 1998, when a young video director with a big imagination got his break: being asked to shoot his first music video, The Beastie Boys’ “Three MCs and One DJ.” He followed that by producing The Beastie Boys’ “Video Vanguard” set at the MTV Music Video Awards later in the year, cementing the idea that he needed a creative space in his hometown of Milwaukee. Josh Adams had the idea to open a place for producers and directors to collaborate on content development. An editing suite with a few cameras was what he envisioned. Thus Mindpool Live originated. And today, 18 years later, it’s so much more.

How an Unknown Musician and a Young LD Paved Each Other’s Career

In the late 1970s, Roy Bennett was a young tech working for Zenith Lighting, a vendor with a Los Angeles office at the time. The head of the company knew that his employee wanted to get into the design part of the lighting business and promised him if he ever got a call, he would submit his name. In 1980, that call came from an unknown singer from Minneapolis that few had ever heard of. This was the start of a 14-year relationship between two young men who ended up rising to be the pinnacles of their respective industries.

PLSN Talks with Several Designers About illuminating Prince

It was a sad day in the city of Minneapolis last month. The musical icon who put the First Avenue performance venue and this city on the musical map had passed on. The streets outside the club where Prince Rogers Nelson had filmed Purple Rain some 30 years ago closed down as the masses gathered to “get through this little thing we call life.”

One remarkable and impressive transition after another has happened for Parnelli Award-winning lighting designer Seth Jackson’s career since he was a teenager growing up in St. Louis. “I hate to say this, since my students might see this, but I only got my first job with a resume. Everything else has been an evolution of relationships,” he says. “I have always had such a passion for this business and this industry. I worked hard, I did a good job, I built the relationships, I studied the people that came before me, and the result is that I kept getting opportunities. It was never planned, per se, but I was obsessive about getting where I wanted to be.”

Lighting designer Kevin Hardy’s frequent flyer accounts must be too heavy to lift. Now 53, his peripatetic career has taken him to Beijing, London, Sochi, the Vatican, Niagara Falls and most of the U.S. He has applied his art to subjects as diverse as the band Twisted Sister and Barbara Streisand, Keith Olbermann and Howard Stern, the Ohio Ballet and the election of Pope Francis. As PLSN spoke with him in late January, he was gearing up to head to the Trump-less final Republican presidential debate in Iowa, where he would direct lighting for the post-debate “spin room” and other support segments.