LD at Large

I heard about a tragedy the other day. A designer lost a tour based solely on color selection. A particular band that chooses a different color for each album cover hired this person to do their tour. During a televised promotion for their upcoming tour, the production manager mentioned to the designer/programmer that they would like the color of their album to be in every single song. The designer chose to go against the band’s wishes.

Keeping the Lonesome Road from Dragging You Down

On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha… No, I’m not going to read into that Seger song. Karaoke doesn’t start until 8 p.m.

I am well aware that you are more than capable of designing, operating, teching, programming and facilitating every single show that comes through your fine festival grounds. But today, you are my festival lighting designer. I only need a few things from you and I need them done to the best of your ability. I need a patch, a plot and a functional rig. A smile would be nice, but not necessary. I don’t need your résumé nor do I need your sob story. After checking in with a handful of my favorite programmers and directors, I have come up with a comprehensive list of tips on how to help me help you to make our time together as de-light-ful as possible.

Will a theater degree help you to avoid a hard knocks life?

As a proud recipient of a bachelor of fine arts in theater from University of Nevada Las Vegas, I often ask myself if all of the time, money and effort spent obtaining that piece of paper was worth the hardship. Has my ability to differentiate Half C.T. Blue from 708 Cool Lavender ever been a deciding factor in my employment? My education is listed on my résumé, but has an employer or client ever thought to confirm my accreditations?

We need to come up with a solution for all of the elusive fixture profiles that are costing us countless hours of hunting down DMX charts and building our own hacked-together libraries. In the last few months, I have received several emails, text and even Facebook messages asking if I had a fixture profile for everything from a two channel smoke machine to a 48-channel beam wash hybrid fixture. These cries for help are coming from newbies as well as top-level programmers who are scrambling to find the correct profile for the current fixture that needs to be patched immediately so that they can get to programming.

While touring the world, I have spent far too many hours sitting at FOH, wondering who in the world designs some of these venues. I decided that I should put my two cents in writing instead of stewing in my own disgust of poor forethought. Here are a few remarks that I would like to make to anyone who is considering designing an entertainment venue.

“It doesn’t hurt to ask.” Taken literally, this well-known phrase implies we should always ask for what we want. However, if you’re a professional and/or over the age of seven, you should know that if you ask the wrong way, it could damage your reputation and limit your ability to ever ask the same question again.

In science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s famed “Three Laws,” written in Profiles of the Future, a book-length collection of essays that was first published in 1962, the third law stated: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Checking e-mails: a few days after another successful corporate awards show. Okay, maybe there were a few minor goofs, but I’ve always been taught to just forget about those and move on. Don’t worry about stuff you can’t do anything about, right?

For a creative and expressive field like live music production, it’s amazing how jaded some people can be at times. But I’m not going to talk about that; I am going to talk about the exact opposite of that. I want to talk about the energy that pushes you to keep moving to create something almost beyond this world. If there is a single word for it in English, I don’t know what it is. It’s beyond enthusiasm. It comes over you like a spell until you see the project through, then it goes somewhere else for a while. It comes back again later. This energy, as I know, it can manifest in at least three different ways.

Your boss heard that you really love the theater and would appreciate some extra hours on show site, so he offers you the chance of a lifetime to come and work on his next show for no money, as an intern of sorts. You jump at the chance to gain experience. The next gig comes along, and he asks you do it for no money again. Now you realize that you have no way to get to the show site because your gas tank is empty.

The horror… The horror.

A New Year presents itself as an opportunity to hold out the torch of understanding and tolerance with those you may have had “misunderstandings” with in the past.

Exes…Former Employers…Promoter production reps.