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Production Nightmare

Eye Candy

Today I am in charge of eye candy. This involves throwing different pieces of media onto soft LED panels and some V9 hidef video modules that Nocturne has brought down to WTTW's TV studio in Chicago.

Scheduling and Walking The Line

     OK, so now that I have the introduction out of the way. I am going to speed up with the more recent things I’ve been up to. Recently I’ve been running some bigger shows through outside production. I got to run a great club show with an LSC Maxim XL console 6 Clay Paky mirrors and 6 Martin 250 washes with 200 pars at The Rams Head Live in Baltimore, MD. They have a fun rig and I think the pat pad on the Maxim was fun. You can pretty much use this pad like a touch screen but instead you can assign parameters by moving your finger right or left across a certain part of the pat pad.

 

Keeping Your Old Numbers

    Being found is important in our biz. I think that’s why people keep their old email addresses and phone #’s. I got a couple calls this week from cell phones with area codes I recognized as San Francisco and Atlanta. However, both of these calls originated from friends I know who now live in Seattle.

Saturday Night

I just spent 90 minutes jumping up and down behind a lighting console. I wasn’t angry. I was lighting a punk rock band.

The Show Must Go On: When the Intercom is Bad on a Good Day

For whatever reason, intercom seems to be a no-man’s-land of technology for many of us.  This is probably for a couple of reasons.  The first and foremost is that most of us don’t consider it part of our technical field.  We figure ‘sound runs through it’, so the sound guy should be in charge of it.  Sound guys don’t want to run any more cables, so they think the lighting guys should do it.  [Did I say that?]  Secondly, many production companies (including one of my old haunts) categorize this as a light crew’s responsibility.  This probably stems from the fact that we end up needing a lot more stations than the sound crew, and possibly that we’re better at coiling cables properly.  [Where did that come from?]

Hi there, I’d like to introduce myself!!!

Hello to everyone who is reading this blog! My name is Tony Caporale; I am 24 years old and have been working as an exclusive lighting director/ designer/ programmer/ videographer for a band named EastonAshe for three years. Here’s a rant on my background and how the hell I ended up doing what I do. I basically went to college following the footsteps of my older brother Brian who happens to be a freelance Cameraman. I also got some direction from a close family friend Tim Walbert who is a video director from WWE Entertainment. So I pretty much went on to get my degree in Electronic Media and Film with a TV production focus from Towson University in Maryland.

Other Duties

Being a lighting designer often brings up a whole slew of duties that one would not expect to have to look after. I get calls about what outfits the rock stars should wear on stage to questions about where they should be standing when playing their big rock god solos.

The Little Things: The Art of the Gig Bag

Almost everyone of us has a workbox or gig-bag that goes out with us to every show.  What form your gig-bag takes can vary quite a bit.  For an international man of mystery or hot shot Video Director, it may be a simple computer bag, with your favorite kewpie doll sharing a compartment with the most important weapon in your arsenal, your laptop.  On the other end of the spectrum, the road-hardened lighting tech may have a twelve-hundred pound fully-customized thirteen-drawer double-hardened triple-galvanized welded-steel-frame road case that is designed with the perfect truck pack in mind.