Standout Programmer and All-Around Lighting Tech
In our search for the next generation of people that will soon become household names in our biz, we caught up with a woman who deserves notice as a lighting and video programmer. Kat Covell was in the Los Angeles-based shop of Fuse Technical Group, familiarizing herself with the video operations of an upcoming tour and programming a disguise server, when we caught up with her.
The Early Years
Kat is an exceptional lighting programmer and all around lighting tech who has honed her craft well since leaving her hometown of Mount Holly, NJ. At 17, she enrolled at Rutgers University to learn about lighting and at the same time applied for a job at Earl Girls, a lighting vendor based near Atlantic City. “I’m still surprised when I see Don Earl at LDI, and he remembers me. He gave me my first opportunity, when I knew very little.”
While at Rutgers she found herself learning about lighting theory and old analog equipment. That gear didn’t jibe with the Macs and other new gear that was showing up at the Earl Girls shop. She felt the college wasn’t teaching her about the technology she would need to know for her career. A relative in Florida mentioned Full Sail University and she checked in. “They had the stuff being used at the time, such as grandMA1 desks and plenty of moving lights. From early on in my career, I wanted real world knowledge as opposed to scratching my head when someone mentioned something I hadn’t heard of. I wanted to learn everything about lighting.”
Programming, Rigging and Spots
She accomplished just that in the first few years of her career, as Feld hired her two days before she graduated, to join the circus and later, Disney On Ice. “Feld interested me because there was so much I could learn. Over the course of six years I found myself learning how to program Expression, Hog and [Martin] Maxxyz consoles, learned how to repair moving lights, how to work on and run spots, even learned to rig. I soaked up everything before I relocated to Las Vegas and decided to try freelancing.”
Over the next couple of years, she worked on a variety of shows, from being a spot op on Cirque’s KA to working on Le Reve at the Wynn. It was there that she met Harry Sangmeister, the well-known lighting programmer. “In a way, Harry was what I’d consider my mentor on consoles. He taught me the [Vari-Lite] Virtuoso desk and a lot about programming and design.”
After a couple years kicking around Vegas, Covell got a call to go back to Feld. During her previous time there, she had found herself constantly teaching new techs the ins and outs of the tour, as they have a very high rate of turnover. She explains, “It seemed that I was getting a whole new crew to teach, every four months or so. This time when Feld called, they wanted me to just go out with the show, Frozen, and help the programmer and crew acclimate to the nuances of being on the road.”
Teaching, Tech Support and Development
While out with Feld that year, she received an interesting call from ACT Lighting. “They wanted to create a position for me, between teaching, tech support and development of the grandMA2 as an overall education coordinator.” For over four years she stayed employed in their L.A. facility and built one heckuva network of people, as she had answered every question one could think of on this console. “During my tenure, I answered over 2,000 email questions from programmers, taught 130 classes, and made some 150 instructional videos – many of which can be found on YouTube.”
We asked Kat if she had any interesting stories about her days of answering tech support. She admits, “Sometimes it becomes a little repetitive. But what I liked is that there are some people I have been answering questions for since they were beginners, and I’ve watched their progress as they came up with more advanced questions. Then one day, I’m reading PLSN and see them mentioned as the programmer on some big show. That’s cool.” When asked if she ever experienced anything uncool in tech support, she simply laughs. “I will say that if you plan on taking a snapshot of your console’s state to send me, you should probably turn off the porn playing on your laptop in the background.”
When Kat gets bored, “it’s time to move on. When I cannot teach myself anything new and there’s nothing to learn with the current position, I feel stagnant and get restless to learn. I was starting to dream about lighting syntax and writing macros. It was time to apply all that knowledge to actually doing what I had been teaching.”
Back to TV and Touring
Last winter, she decided to hang up her ACT Lighting job and move into full time programming, a move that has proven quite successful in the careers of her predecessors at ACT. She had started putting feelers out through her network of friends that she would be looking for programming gigs. “I was really planning on taking some down time between gigs, but within seven days of announcing my freelance, I’d been hired to work on an episodic TV show and was inserted into the 728, the [IATSE] movie union in Los Angeles. That gig lasted about three months.”
Next up was a programming dream come true. “This year, I was very fortunate to work with Michael Hionis, the LD for Coheed and Cambria. I had known Michael from my time at ACT. I had visited him on shows before, because I’m also a fan, and what really stuck in my mind about the way he runs shows is that he really has a passion for the band, which completely translates to the stage. This year they beefed up their touring rig to include more lights and video. I was asked to be a co-programmer for the tour. I got to help create looks armed with all my grandMA2 knowledge along with pixel mapping using Resolume media servers. That was a lot of fun.”
LD Matt Ford recently reached out to her for some help on a reality show that he designed. They lost their programmer and had to bring someone new in quickly. “I had to program the show from scratch overnight. It was one of those shows that follows the cast 24/7 then mixes all the footage together later. Utilizing troubleshooting skills obtained working at ACT, I’d like to think now one of my most important assets is that I can just jump into a show and get the looks up and running very fast.”
She got more TV work when Johnny Bradley from DarkFire Lighting Design was in a pinch for a programmer for a new show called What Just Happened??! with Fred Savage. “We shot two episodes a day for about a week. Once again, the original programmer had to go on to something else and I hopped right in.”
Ben Johnson from Fuse Technical Group reached out to Kat recently. He serves as the video director for Kings of Leon and was in need of a video programmer to operate the disguise servers from a grandMA2. “I learned the disguise by the seat of my pants, definitely dove into the fire on this one.” But her past training came in handy. “While working with ACT and the grandMA2 we had to work directly with disguise for two reasons; so they could see how our console operated and in turn we could see what was needed from us to run their system. It was a classic trade off; two companies helping each other out. While I knew the basics, I had to learn how to program it for this particular act, which calls for some very sporadic video programming.”
At this time, Kat is getting things in order for a festival show in Spain then back to the States for more. She can be reached at katlcovell [at] gmail.com.
