Our industry is ever-changing. In my lifetime, I have watched the transition from tungsten to arc to LED, and now we are seeing lasers start to flood the market. The same tools that I used even 20 years ago have become obsolete. They have been replaced with newer, more effective, and far more complex gadgets. Herbert Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” in his Principles of Biology in 1864. But a far more accurate description is “survival of the adaptable.” Those of us who are willing and able to adapt will thrive in this constantly evolving industry. Those of us who clutch to outdated technologies and practices will be relegated to the fossils of lighting history. I’d like to take a thousand words to discuss how we can learn to retrain our brains to thrive in the modern world.
Online Tutorials
Twenty years ago, if I wanted to learn how to program a console, I had to pay the manufacturer to hire someone to teach me. I had to take time off work, fly to their office, rent a hotel room, spend three days in a darkened room, and learn by osmosis. This was expensive, time-consuming, and laborious. Nowadays, the internet has given us a much better option. We can simply Google Search the console we want to learn and fall down the rabbit hole of online learning. We can download the console software in seconds and be learning in minutes. If we need to focus specifically on how to build a timecoded show, we can simply type that into the search bar and skip directly to the section that we want to examine. We don’t have to raise our hands or wait our turn in line. To not take advantage of this resource is foolish.
Asking Advice Online
Even 10 years ago, if I needed advice on which fixture to use for a backlight in a small venue, I’d have to call several professionals to get multiple opinions. In 2022, I can type my specifications into a single post in any number of Facebook forums and get multiple opinions in seconds. Most of these opinions will come from experienced professionals who have made similar decisions in the recent past. A few of these opinions will come from manufacturers who would like to see their products on my project. A minority of these opinions will come from trolls who want to see my project crash and burn. In the past, I wouldn’t need the wherewithal to filter out these bad ideas because I wouldn’t be asking them in the first place. Having access to the entire hive mind comes with pros and cons. In the current era, learning how to filter out information is just as important as learning who to ask.
Naming and Shaming
On one of the first gigs I took back in 2002, I replaced another crew chief who wasn’t working out. His attitude was keeping him from impressing the production manger based on how he treated the local stagehands. On a particular morning in Los Angeles, one of the stagehands came to me and said, “My friend worked with this tour a month ago and he said that you were going to be a jerk. You’re not a jerk at all.” I explained that I was new to the camp and that the former crew chief was back at home. It took a month for his reputation to get back to me. Reputations getting around the industry is nothing new to the professional world, but the speed at which our reputations disperse has been accelerated exponentially thanks to social media. In this modern day and age, any stagehand with a Wi-Fi connection can publicly name and shame anyone to the entire industry in seconds. With this great power comes great responsibility. As professionals, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves if we are unjustly blasting someone online out of spite or if we are publicly making the industry aware of a bad apple. I have seen this course of action go both ways. I have seen good people become the target of a witch hunt as many times as I have seen a bona fide megalomaniac pay the toll for berating their local crew. This conundrum comes with many nuances that we need to be aware of. Knowing that every person we interact with has the power to call us out forces us to consider how we treat every individual with whom we work.
Wage Transparency
Job posting has almost exclusively gone digital. We have access to so many professionals online that trying to cold call individuals will go extinct in our lifetimes. Posting a job online comes with the inherent duty to post what the job entails and the compensation. This puts the onus on the poster to be transparent about what they are willing to pay for three people to come and load a truck for them. Inevitably, the comments will reflect our opinions of what that labor is worth. Three truck loaders in Louisiana will not be expecting to receive the same amount that the laborers in Los Angeles would expect. This often leads to people berating people for accepting such low wages for the same amount of work. This can easily devolve into claims of undercutting our efforts and lowering the bar. The flipside of this transparency is that we can all see what our fellow workers are getting paid. We don’t have to ask individuals how much they are making because that info is already available online. This can give us the bargaining chips we need to negotiate for fair compensation. It is up to us to use this information to raise all boats and not to sink others.
Remote Programming
One of the major concerns that I can foresee is the access to remote pre-programming and even live programming. During the pandemic, we used video conferencing to solve the travel problem. I was the sole programmer on a gig in Las Vegas while my designers sat in a design suite in London. We used modern technology to solve a problem. Having this technology available opened a whole new box of issues, though. The same technology could be used to hire a remote programmer from any number of places to do my job for a fraction of the price. The same tutorials that I mentioned above could be used to teach that programmer to patch a show and build a 3D model far below what I have come to expect. As bandwidth improves, we will see programmers in one country running shows in another country. These distant programmers will be capable of charging far less than I could. The clients will inevitably see that they can get a similar product without paying for flights, hotel rooms and per diems in lieu of paying for a Zoom account and a solid broadband connection.
Learning to stay ahead of these digital innovations will give us the power to adapt more quickly and easily. Becoming a dinosaur in 2022 is a very real fear for many of the aging designers and programmers. Keeping up with pace of change is the only way that we can stay ahead of the game.
Reach out to Chris Lose at close@plsn.com
