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AARP Brings Vision to Their Annual Event

Event Producers Sets the Stage

The schedule looks something like this: Get in to town on Sunday, maybe Friday or Saturday if you are lucky. Walk through Hall D of the Anaheim Convention Center late Sunday night, go over some points, make sure that you have all of the gear and prep yourself for a long week. This 221,284 square foot convention hall needs to be turned into an 11,000 seat theatre by 8:30 a.m. Thursday for the opening ceremonies for AARP’s National Event, “Life at 50+: Lights, Camera, Anaheim,” a gala-event with performances by Bill Cosby, Jose Feliciano and Elton John; along with appearances by Maya Angelou, Geena Davis and Dan Rather, among others. 

The Greatest Band (Lighting) on Earth

Tenacious D has been described as “this wild lead singer with pipes of platinum” and “the heavy-set bald fellow churning out riffs of pure profundity.” Of course, it was Jack Black and Kyle Gass, the two founders of the band, who came up with that description. You would expect nothing less from the self-proclaimed “Greatest Band on Earth,” the same duo who said their show “couldn’t be explained but had to be experienced live and in person.”

Saturday night dance party

    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.

Burning the bulb at both ends?

I’m on a show site in Palm Springs right now.

I’m getting married in a little more than a week.

The producer wants to know why (with my meager budget) I don’t have more lights for the cyc.

The band wants to use the CD player so that they don’t have to learn the music for my first dance with my (soon-to-be) wife.

The video guys want to know why I have so many lights on the cyc.

And my dad (for some reason) thinks all of this is happening a week early.

Bloody Pirates

Hello to all, picking up where we left last week. I’ve spent sometime watching live shows, whether it is in front of my eye, TiVo, television or DVD player. I recall seeing Primus, Galactic, Muse, and Nine Inch nails very visually oriented shows.

Advice, give it up.

 I have long been a supporter of people who ask questions. I would much rather have a lighting tech ask me a stupid question, then assume the wrong answer and have to do something twice because they were afraid to ask.

Writing A Cue, LEDs, and Track Lights

Ok so last week I ended the blog by telling you about how I incorporate track lighting into my light show. Well, at first I embarrassingly zip tied them to mic stands. It was really a desperate attempt to get a vertical ACL wash across the stage. It began to be a pain in the ass for the band and myself to drag them around so I took the two pieces I had, untied them and cut them down to about a length of three feet each. The day I went to set them up during a load in a really cool thing happened. I placed them horizontally on the ground one in front of Nathan’s bass rig, and the other in front of Matt’s guitar rig. When I patched everything and turned up the faders I was astonished. It lit the rigs up so intense. Everyone looked over at me and said it looked bad ass. I was complimented in a weird way that day by Geoff our drummer and Erik our sound engineer. They told me that I have the most f#*ked up ability to take something shitty and make it into something cool. I was proud that I made it cool, but also analyzing that it was shitty in the first place.

For Chrissakes, It’s nowhere in the manual?

    I majored in English in college. I can write a mean resume'. I can also write my own opinions here. And nothing pisses me off more than a company that is trying to peddle a product, but fails to write a decent manual. Or at least a pamphlet that can explain to any idiot like myself how to operate something they just spent money on and need to make use of right away.

Winter and your work ethic

 I get a lot of emails and calls this time of year. Some are old friends, some acquaintances and some people I've never met. They are all looking for the same thing. Work.