I attend a couple conventions every year. Of course they have to do with Lighting and video equipment. But I attend a lot more of them for another reason. To get paid.
Lighting booths at trade shows is a fairly lucrative business. Just ask anyone who designs the booths at the car shows every year. These guys can make stacks of cash. This week I'm in Chicago at the McCormick Place convention center.
This trade show is for all the manufacturers of radiology equipment in the world. Sound boring? Yup, everything about it but the pay check. There is a tremendous amount of ass time. The time where you sit on your butt waiting for an opportunity to do something, anything.
My friend has designed a booth that is literally 2 football fields long. It will take him 2 days to focus hundreds of conventional fixtures. I spend about 2 hours focusing 50 moving lights on to xray machines, then I’m back to reading my book. Until some client comes over and asks me to move or dim some light because he cannot see the computer monitor on his machine.
Now I’m headed over to a smaller booth. This one contains a whopping total of 4 moving lites, 4 lekos, 20’ of truss and two gay contortionists. These men are part of a skit. For some reason people who design booths at trade shows like to have skits played out on a small stage every hour. Normally these skits have pretty actresses in them, to attract passing men into their booth. But my skit has 2 strapping young men in strange positions while a narrator talks to the audience. For some reason I think these guys would be better suited to do their skit in a Minneapolis airport, but who am I to question a client. They are aying me.
So I write about 10 cues, then put the lighting console in a small closet, serving as a control room. There is only room for 1 guy in there, the TD for the show. He will hit the go button on the light desk with his left hand, while playing back video with a mouse in his right hand. He will also ride the audio faders on that console.
But good for me, they want someone to babysit the system all week in case a bulb goes out or a fuse is blown. So I get another 5 days of day rate, which doesn’t suck since it’s almost December and work slows down.
