This month I got to program a tour that wasn’t all hard rock music. Quite a change for me after the last 5 concert tours I programmed this year.
Mikey Z is the production designer for the Counting Crows. With the advent of lighting folks running video elements these days the word Lighting Designer just doesn’t cut it. So for lack of a better word for the guy who designs the set, lighting rig and video layout, I call him the production designer.
Anyway, he’s an old lighting programmer type who’s been my friend for quite a few years. We’ve worked on multiple projects over the years. A few years back Mikey hired me to help him learn the catalyst media server and how to fine tune his programming on a hog2 console. He had been a long time Vari-lite/Artisan programmer. We developed a good vibe at that time so I was looking forward to working with the Crows again and aiding him.
Mikey had spec’d a hog 3. But he had rarely used one. These things are quite reliable these days and I’m pretty good at hunting and pecking my way thru any desk. So we sat down to give this console a whirl. Quite frankly, I had given up on the hog series of desks a few years back with all the crashing etc. But working with this desk was like running into an old friend. I found it quite friendly and I only had to call Brad Schiller once with questions.
For each song, Mikey would give me a color scheme. Then within 2 hours I would have all the basic lighting cues for the song done. Mike would critique my work and give it a nod or suggest a few modifications which were always good suggestions. While I programmed the lights, Mikey was picking thru a library of video files and surfing the internet for jpegs of images that would fit the song. So as I was finishing a song, he was loading new media into the Catalyst 4 servers. Once I was done, we switched seats and he added all the video stuff into the lighting cues.
The only thing missing from the whole sequence is the lack of networking two consoles together while programming. With other desks (particularly the GrandMA), we could have both been working on the same cuelist on two separate consoles, then merging all the info onto the main console. This saves hours of time. He doesn’t have to wait for me in order to add his video and I don’t have to wait for him to finish his video editing on the console before I can write the next song’s lighting cues.
