With our Parnelli NextGen series, we profile up-and-coming live event professionals who have been making their mark on the industry. All are in the running for the ”NextGen of the Year” Parnelli honor, which will be announced at the 21st Parnelli Awards ceremony in April 2023.
For Amanda Facemire, it’s simply about the hours. “The more you put in, the easier the learning curve gets,” she says. “If a gig ends and something didn’t go perfectly, I’d spend the time afterward to figure it out—or at least find the explanation for what happened.” That curiosity to learn was noticed during a key step in her career. Sean Cagney, CEO of Amazing Industries, notes that Facemire is a standout media server programmer for live events, including virtual productions and those that have any kind of a virtual element. PLSN caught up with her to learn more about her journey so far.
Figuring It Out
Facemire grew up in Norcross, GA, a northern suburb of Atlanta. “My parents had their own small independent production company when I was growing up,” she says. “Before that, they worked in news broadcasts and on film sets as hired crew. Later they produced environmental content, home improvement shows, and similar projects. I actually was attracted to live events because I knew I wanted to work in entertainment in some way, but I wanted to find my own path.”
Specifically, she never saw herself in the live production world, but she landed in it anyway, “kind of in a roundabout way.” She went to a local college on a scholarship as a theater major and by the end of that second year, what she learned most was that she didn’t want to do that. She transferred to University of Georgia located in that hotbed of live music, Athens. There she got in to see many shows by hanging flyers in exchange for free tickets. She met a lot of musicians and behind-the-scenes people and asked a lot of questions.
In May of 2015, she got an internship with Shimon Presents, a third-party volunteer coordination company that engages music fans to help with music festivals. It exposed Facemire to all facets of a live event from catering to Artist Relations. “I quickly realized that I wasn’t going to get anywhere without a highly specific skill.”
While she would graduate with a Mass Media Arts degree, her next job would round out her education with a wealth of practical experience. In 2016, she was hired as a lighting operator at Atlanta-based Music Matters, a Parnelli Award-nominated production house. While today it’s a growing company with additional offices in Nashville and Salt Lake City, when she joined it was running on a tight crew of five full time employees during a period of rapid growth. A big piece of that was an expanding video department. “One day [owner] Aaron Soriero handed me his phone and said, ‘I need you to stay on the phone with tech support until you know how this works.’” “This” was a batch of Absen X5 LED panels which he had just purchased. So, there she was, on the phone with Absen in Orlando, figuring out how the panels worked. “Then I became video manager just because there was no one else to do it,” she says, laughing. “I made so many mistakes at that job! But sometimes learning as you go, having to figure things out, is sort of an advantage. Maybe not knowing the ‘right way’ allows you to go outside the status quo and find your own path.”
During her time at Music Matters, she dabbled in freelance work. With those gigs, she was able to further hone her skills in media server programming and playback and projection mapping. She was soon also working with, and programming, NovaStar and Brompton Technology processors.
Bad Timing—But New Opportunities
After five good years at Music Matters, she decided to leave the management side of the business and plunge into being a full-time freelance media server operator. She made this jump in January of 2020, “which was terrible timing,” she emphasizes with a laugh. This is when she found work with Cagney, which was “a wild ride exploring unique options that could bring in money starting in the XR world.” They learned Mo-Sys’s StarTracker technology and then did their first XR gig for NordicTrack. “It was also the production team’s first venture in XR as well, so it was interesting.” And it was successful as a project and for her career, as she so impressed Mo Sys’s Gary Attanasio that she would soon get a call from him offering her a position as on-set technician in Los Angeles. In February of 2021, she left her longtime home in Atlanta and headed west.
Meanwhile, Cagney continued to hire her as a media server operator for gigs. “Amazing Industries was, and still is, growing to the point that Sean needed to be in two places at once, and the idea was that I would be the ‘other Sean,’” she says. Some of the highlights included a Wells Fargo activation, Wells Fargo Summer Nights, held at The Vessel in NYC’s Hudson Yards. “Sean and I specifically worked on the media server integration for Summer Nights, the interactive LED tunnel.” Elite Multimedia provided the LED panels and Smooth Tech provided the interactive LED tape. It involved a multimedia live concert, too, with headliners Amber Mark and JoJo.
When the pandemic first hit, Facemire and Cagney were in the middle of working on a traveling activation for Tullamore Dew whiskey. Early this year, Facemire worked with Cagney again for the NAPA Expo 2022 in Las Vegas at the Venetian. “I was media server op for the Main Hall, which consisted of driving an LED screen that was 11,544 pixels wide x 1,040 pixels tall, plus two projection screens each at 7,680 x 988. Amazing Industries is very much a fan of building their own PCs, and we did this on a single tower with Quadro A6000s on a Threadripper motherboard so it could run dual cards at full power.”
Grateful
After exactly a year at Mo-Sys, she was recruited to disguise’s L.A. office, the London-based media server and XR software developers. “It was the perfect place to further explore combining live events with the virtual world,” she says. As Technical Solutions Specialist, she “sits at the intersection of technical and sales.” Her duties included consulting with clients and the sales team; managing client projects; and performing software demos for prospective clients, among other tasks. “It’s been great,” she says.
The words “grateful” and “lucky” come up frequently when she talks about her career, but clearly Facemire has the work ethic to succeed. But she is inspiringly forthright. In addition to her commitment to “putting in the hours,” she adds: “And let’s be honest: With my background, I’ve been able to be in the position where I was given opportunities.” She points out that like so many other industries, this industry is really about access—to knowledge, education, classes, mentorships, etc. “It all compounds, and opportunities beget more opportunities. There are a lot of talented people out there who want the chance to prove themselves.” She is grateful that she has been able to have access to that unpaid internship that gave her a springboard, and still be able to graduate from college debt-free, but she is self-aware about it. “It’s an immense amount of social privilege, coupled with white privilege, on top of able-bodied privilege, and I would even say that at times being a woman in video has actually helped me because it just makes me more memorable.” She pauses again, laughs, and adds an aside: “Not to say that I haven’t dealt with my fair share of sexism, but we all know that story by now.” True enough—but she is certainly making the most of those opportunities, no matter how many hours it takes. And her story continues.
