I’ve been having a lot of fun this year doing something I don’t often do — lighting heavy metal tours. While it’s not my favorite kind of music, I am having a blast. I mean, what other genre of music enables you to hit 160 cues in a three-minute song?
Often enough my work takes me abroad. And just when I thought I’d played a gig in every corner of the world, some band has found a new locale. There was a time when South America seemed like a distant land, an impossible place to do a proper show. But that’s in the past. Now I get to teach the locals how to do shows in lovely places like Ethiopia and Kazakhstan.
In the last issue (PLSN, June 2008) I joked about the usefulness of being able to BS your way through a difficult gig. But while I was pondering what I wrote last month, I realized that what is important in our profession is just the opposite. I think what makes someone good is that they run a fair business, earn their money the old fashioned way and don’t rely on BS to save a few bucks on a gig.
In every business, there is a lot of scheming and plotting to get accounts. Presentations mean a lot. Not just the financial charts or 8-inch-by-10-inch glossy renderings of a stage, but of the presenter himself. Whether we like to admit it or not, lighting and set designers are salesman. And as we sell ourselves to any potential client there is one thing we must be able to deliver on demand without any hesitation whatsoever — BS.
Every month I see new products on the market. It seems the latest LED and media server technology is constantly outdating last year’s cool stuff. Automated lighting manufacturers are dueling to keep up with each other in terms of lumens while trying to come up with new features. This stuff is impressive, but it makes me wonder…“Why don’t people concentrate on making new cooler versions of existing gear?”
I’ve recently worked on a couple of gigs that truly required more than one lighting designer. Each gig had multiple lighting systems supplied by different vendors. In the past I’ve done gigs like these where I was the only console programmer/operator. While there was a staggering amount of overtime, the end product delivered to the client was not as good as it could have been. That’s because I wore too many hats and burned myself out. Nowadays I’m thankful to share LD duties on many large gigs.
Last night I found myself sitting in a bar with a bunch of lampys. How unusual. So I decided to check in with them on how they’ve seen the business of lighting shows change in the last few years. Between the five of us we have close to 100 years of experience in the entertainment biz. And since we’re lighting guys, it goes without saying that we have opinions about everything. So I posed a few questions.
The rules for lighting a concert in front of a camera are quite different than lighting one for the eye. The cameras tend to pick up things that the human eye cannot. Over the years I’ve had to teach myself how to change and adapt my show so it still looks the same to the audience and still looks good on camera. The fact is that this particular evening’s performance is not meant to be perfectly lit for the 15,000 people who bought tickets; it’s for the million people who will view the concert footage.
It’s winter again, which means t’is the season for trade shows — the time of year when new products like automobiles, housewares and electronics fill the convention centers of America. And somebody has to light them.
I have a feeling that we in the entertainment biz actually like our jobs. The reason is that we are always working with different people on various jobs until that project ends; then we start another project with a whole bunch of different folks. Along the way, we meet a lot of buddies — people who we meet with on occasion, but with whom we don’t stay in constant contact.
The hardest thing about our business is maintaining a balance between work and the rest of our life, as most of us spend time working away from home. Being away from home for long periods of time can be stressful for anyone, but what happens when we have to deal with a sudden change in routine? What do we do when something happens to interfere with the gig? Whether it’s a new child or a death in the family, how do you adapt while maintaining the old adage, “The show must go on?”
No matter which part of our biz you’re in, chances are you’ve worked a business conference. You set up like a dog for 18 hours straight, just to repeat the procedure for days. But as the meetings commence, you become aware of the hardest part of the whole gig — staying awake.