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The New Training Day

Live performances have become the currency of the entertainment industry. It’s most obvious in music, where an ever-growing percentage of recording artists derive more revenues from their concert tours than from CD sales. But the rise in the number of live events is evident in many other sectors, from spectacular corporate presentations to events like the celebration at the start of the New York City Opera’s season last year, which saw Times Square filled with thousands of folding chairs facing huge video monitors beneath light and sound rigs. With gala events taking place in unique outdoor settings, it isn’t just Elvis who’s left the theatre.

 

Bonerama March/April Tour Pics

Hey all, just dropping in to post some pics from the tour. It all went really good and the band was throwing down hardcore. A lot of new tunes were played and some really neat arrangements to a few classic covers were thrown into the mix. We ran through Nebraska, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Pennsylvania I believe. Sometimes we all forget where the heck we are on most of these tours so I imagine I may be forgetting a state or two, hah!

 

Old studio, new look

    Well I’m back at the old Sound Stage TV studio at WTTW in Chicago. Familiar building, but boy has the look changed. This is my fifth year doing shows down here, with 3 different directors. This time Bob Peterson is at the helm and the difference is quite noticeable.

One night in Moscow

It's been 10 years since I went to Russia to light a gig. Last time I was there, I had one of those gigs from hell, where it took 2 days to set everything up and it still didn't work correctly. I'm here to say they've come a long way.

Slow > High Gear

Part One

The past month not a whole lot has been going on with me. I’m sure I could have sat down and told you all about my personal life but who really wants to hear about that? I don’t even want to think about it from time to time. I learned from other colleagues that this is typically a slow part of the year for touring so it didn’t bum me out too much, but I am definitely a guy who likes to keep busy. So in brief I was bored off my tail but that didn’t stop me from getting things ready for this next tour with Bonerama. The tour kicked off at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado starting a two week run through 11 states. To get ready for it I had to do some organization and a little bit of shopping. Recently I got a new Hog 500 from t2k lighting. I spent my time doing mostly data entry and some programming offline with a capture visualizer. When you have a large catalogue of music to work with every night you have to perform a lot of data entry to organize the show in the way you see fit. So I guess we’ll see how it all goes down.

 

The Road to Happiness: Techs versus Reps

That giant fluttering sound you heard last month was the sound of 600 million American eyelids opening at once. Such was the reaction to Mike Wallace’s report on 60 Minutes highlighting a study from Leicester University in Leicester, England about happiness. The study reported that Denmark was the happiest country in the world. In fact, it has ranked first in Eurobarometer surveys for the last 30 years.

 

Putting the Brakes on Aerial Risks

Motorized rigging eliminates the need to figure out how to safely adjust rigged loads with counterweights in a conventional fly system. You just push a button, and up it goes. And so far, for the most part, it’s stayed there. Catastrophic hoist brake failures have been exceedingly rare. With the scarcity of major hoist failures, we want to avoid breeding a new kind of danger: complacency.

Inner Circle Distribution

 

Nick Freed, president, Inner Circle Distribution

 

Who: Nick Freed, president; Noel Duncan, vice president; and Gary Mass, vice president of business development.

What: A full-service distributor of entertainment lighting products for professionals.

Where: Sunrise, Florida

The Tao of Electrical Load Calculations

Let me put this right up front: I’m not the brightest lamp on the truss. At times, I can make Jessica Simpson look like Marilyn vos Savant, who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for five years under “Highest IQ” for both childhood and adult scores. I’m not particularly proud or embarrassed about that, but admitting it has served me well. An empty head can be like being an empty vessel looking for understanding with which to be filled.

 

From a Lighting Tech’s Point of View

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 Strike Season

The first Strike Survival Workshop that IATSE’s hard-hit Local 728 in Hollywood ran late last year was standing-room-only, which suggests the impact that the strike by the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) was having on those who literally do set the stage for filmed and televised entertainment. The second one, held Feb. 8, a clinic for financial help and counseling from the Motion Picture Trust Fund, was just as packed.

 

So You Want To Run Lights In A Nightclub?

You’re in a nightclub on a Saturday night, you’ve had a drink or two, the DJ is spinning wicked live, and the most incredible guy/girl in the place walks up, and stands at the bar next to you. You (A) lean over and softly say, “Hey babe, are you tired? You’ve been running through my dreams all night.” (B) put on your sexy voice dripping with suggestiveness and ask if you can buy him/her a drink, or (C) don’t notice because you’re too busy watching the light show.