LD at Large

The majority of my work is lighting live entertainment. In the process of lighting design for these gigs, I have always thought that the main tools I needed were a bunch of wash lights and a few hard-edged profiles to make some pretty scenes. This would run true whether I was using strictly conventional or moving light rigs. But nowadays the daily advancements made in technology have brought us what I like to call “Accent Lights.”

As the summer goes by, I find myself playing lots of festival shows. Concerts put on with multiple stages, spread across a gigantic fairground. While festivals like these are really nothing new, the sheer number of them showing up in different cities is staggering. They are all huge, they all have to provide an infrastructure of a small city for a few days. And they all need a lot of employees to put it all together. But most of all, they need the SWAT team.

I’m one of those guys who likes to do everything himself. I like to draw my own plots. I like to make my own artistic renderings. I like to load in my own shows. I like to paint my own house too, but I don’t always have time to do any of these things myself. So for just about everything there is in life, I got somebody for it.

A few months ago I got an email from Kim Martin, an LD I met when she toured with Ringo, some 20 years ago. I had not seen her since she was the LD for Natalie Merchant in the 1990s. She inquired why I never seem to write about female lighting designers. I honestly don’t know why, as I have met and learned quite a bit from them my whole life. Looking back, I can’t believe how many great women designers share my job in the concert biz. And they all taught me something about lighting. They didn’t make it because they are women; they made it because they have talent.

I’ve opted to spend the summer lighting one offs for my bands. Between them, they are working enough to keep me busy. I will bounce around the world doing a large amount of corporate gigs, Internet broadcasts and TV jobs. And if I want these gigs to go smoothly, I am going to need some cooperation from the house programmers at all these venues. A little help from my friends can make things go so much easier for me.

For years, lighting designers have been matching lumens between the lighting and video elements. The video was always brighter. For most of my life, I have had to design live concerts by placing the lighting fixtures, and aiming their focal points, wherever the video wasn’t. It became a science to be able to design lighting that wasn’t washed out by the big TV upstage center. In the last couple years, much of that has suddenly changed. That’s because we lighting guys now have some powerful weapons in our fight against video dominance.

There’s an old line I like to use. “You cannot win if you do not play.” Some think that may refer to gambling, or playing the lotto, but I look at it a different way. I look at it as, “Nothing’s gonna happen unless you make it so.” Rarely will someone give you something without you asking for it first. Lord knows this is true about getting a raise in the entertainment biz. Nobody’s giving you one unless you ask for it. But there’s a lot of ways to help yourself in life, to win a few bucks back, if you just pick up a pen.

Few shows are put on without a budget. In the 30 years I’ve been gigging, I may have only done a handful of them. And they were private shows for billionaires. Even giant shows like the Rolling Stones travel on a budget. Of course, ticket prices at any event are directly reflected by this budget. Thus, to put on the greatest show on the planet, you may have to charge exorbitant amounts. But that’s not saying you cannot design a large, original design within your budget constraints — you just have to figure out how.

I travel to different venues daily. I’ve done gigs in every grand arena as well as crap hole pretending to be a proper concert venue, on this planet. Of course some gigs are better than others. Some are very tough to load into, but many of them can be overlooked as physically bad gigs because the local stagehands there are just great. But often enough, the opposite is seen. Horrible venues with less than desirable hands are not fun. Especially when the local hands can’t shut their mouths for a minute. Then these gigs just plain suck to work.

By now, most of you should know the number one rule in the entertainment business. “Never Assume.” By this we mean, never assume a lot of stuff. You can never really assume you are going on a gig until you step foot on a plane to take you there. You can’t assume that because you spent days designing something, your client will like it. And you can’t assume that everyone responsible for pulling your gear for this gig tested everything before it left the shop.

I’ve viewed a lot of huge cool productions this year. The photos I always see are giant productions that require trim heights of 50 feet and stage widths of 80 feet or more. This is great if you are playing stadiums and the local Enormo-dome. But to be honest, outside of the EDM festivals, there are only a handful of artists out there that play these kinds of venues exclusively. But that doesn’t seem to stop certain production designers from building unpractical touring packages.

No matter what show I design, I always strive for one aspect — to make my show look theatrical. It doesn’t matter if I am illuminating the unveiling of a new automobile, or an opera; I want dramatic lighting. The biggest problem I endure at most events is actually the venue itself. The place where you are holding your show can make for a pleasant experience or a long, slow day.