I’m just waking up again. Now it’s 3PM on a Saturday afternoon. After a long night of party preparation, I finally got some sleep. What is party preparation? It’s a lot of fast programming the many areas of a Bacardi Live Event in Miami.
I know people who book all kinds of events for all kinds of sponsors. For all kinds of money of course. Whenever they stage something huge, they call me in. This one’s not so bad, it just covers a lot of space and area. This translates into a lot of lights.
There’s a main stage on a makeshift amphitheater called the Bayfront. I have a pretty decent sized mixture of movers. The production manager designed the truss layout. He tells me to place some lights on it and make it pretty. There’s 3 national acts playing. I know little about any of them. I have a hog 2, a wing, and the Ultimate punt page. I’m not afraid.
I basically write 2 pages of cues in an hour and wait for dark to focus some positions.
But that’s just the tip. Behind me at FOH are two massive structures known as the VIP area. This is where 600 people get to stay away from the other 10,000 normal people who squash into this free publicity driven event. They have there own light show. Ground supported towers holding up banks of lights. I am required to write cues for all these and light certain areas. This will take several hours as I have to have riggers in man lifts focusing.
Also need to light an entrance way that is 500’ away and over a hill from me. Pull out a GMA console and start whipping cues into all of these movers. It takes the man lift about 10 minutes to dig into the hillside to get from tower to tower. So I run between the console and the VIP decks to direct his leko focus, and keep writing cues for the movers. Finally at 5 AM, we finish up. I thought.
Turns out they gave away an extra 9000 free tickets, but they have o place to legally put the people. So they will usher them into a field next door. Someone has thrown some video projectors together and hung some screens off some branches. They’ve also brought along 30 movers to light some trees. And a hog IPC desk. But by the time they figure out how to patch it, everyone is burnt and they need a programmer. All part of the gig I remind myself. 2 hours later, the sun has risen and I’m off to bed.
