Tony is a freelance lighting director that keeps a notebook full of big ideas. He'll take you on the road to share his journeys and let you know how he gets more light than he should out of a small budget.
Picking up the pieces is what has been happening as of late. Do you know when you start little projects here and there, but they never get completed? I happened to get quite a few of those done by finishing my ESP Suite at home. In doing so I needed some key components to be able to make it all work. First was getting Boot Camp up and running on my iMac. You heard in my last blog talking about how I couldn’t get it to complete the windows setup. It turns out it didn’t have service pack two, and to run Boot Camp you must have service pack two or higher for it to properly install windows.
Over the past few weeks I have been doing a lot of experimenting with my computers. Back home my friends dad is a retired Computer Science professor at a local university. He also happens to be a Macintosh guru that has organized a party for the past 25 years since the release of the company’s first computers. This year was the first time I attended and it was great. You basically show up with your Mac, plug in, connect to the network, grab a beer, and share away with all the other users there in attendance. Which leads me into the whole VMware Fusion vs. Boot Camp problem I’ve been having.
What up everyone. Well BuckCherry fell through so immediately I had to find another gig. Luckily the gig found me. I got a crewspace message from the PM at BSL Productions who gives a ring when they can use me for a string of days on shop work or show dates. Of course we get the talking about the Inauguration because any companies in the Baltimore/DC area are hella-busy around this time. If you read up in the upcoming February edition of PLSN magazine I got the opportunity to write about the Texas State Society Black Tie and Boots Inaugural Ball held at the Gaylord National Convention. In that piece I concentrated on the event as a whole instead of my own personal experience, which I wanted to share in this blog I'm writing today.
I talked myself down of that ledge after the last post. Recently a representative from BuckCherry contacted me inquiring my availability this coming year for an upcoming tour with Avenged Sevenfold, Papa Roach, and Saving Abel (I think). Jumping at the opportunity , I immediately expressed interest because these are a great pairing of bands.
Hey again, well this weeks is going to be brief because I have not a thing to write about. Currently my work has been put to a stand still because of the winter, recession, etc. Who knows what is to blame. All I can say is that I am not able to do what I love and that is lighting.
Well my Spanish isn’t quite where I’d like it to be but it is good enough to strike up small talk with some of the Mexican crew and band members I have been working with on the Marco Antonio Solis U.S. tour. Most do speak alright English and the ones who don’t speak too quickly to me so my brain won’t spin. So at the end of the day the communication barrier I once thought was going to be hard to break was quite simple to step through if you’re willing to try. Give us your opinion on this story. (0 comments)
Over the past few months the gigs for Marco Antonio Solis has been a real experience for me in many ways. Getting the opportunity to be working arenas and amphitheaters has been awesome. With having bigger rooms, definitely comes more responsibility. I couldn’t tell you how many patch sheets I’ve gone through and updated in the past month, lol. I haven’t done the design gig a lot so Vectorworks was a must purchase.
Last week I was out in San Diego and Anaheim doing rehearsal shows for Marco Antonio Solis. My priority to this gig is to board operate for their upcoming U.S. tour starting in a few weeks. This gig is challenging yet fun at the same time. Where I have been used to doing rock and brass band gigs I find myself lighting more ballad and salsa tunes this time around. Not only has the music switched gear, but the language has too! All of the lyrics are in Spanish which is a new challenge, but it’s a good thing I know a bit of the language. One important thing for me to do is listening to the lyrics closely to associate color schemes with what is being said in the song. So interpreting what the writer is trying to say in his lyrics is a big part of lighting the show. If you’re not an expert at a foreign language you can take the words and throw them into an online translator named Babelfish. It can’t necessarily put it all in perfect English grammar for you but enough to get the point.
As far as music goes… Well that’s the beauty of music, it is universal. No matter what language a song is written in, it will always have a verse, chorus, bridge, etc. for you to write the changes.
Most of July has been a preparation month for me learning all of the tunes, getting all my notes together, and programming practice. A cool thing to do is creating a mock setup of the gear being used (if you don’t have a nearby warehouse to rent the console). For instance, I own a Hog 500 and dimmer console I keep in my basement for local gigs here at home. The console I am using for the gig is a Hog iPC with a playback wing. So what I do is use the Hog 500 as my main iPC unit, then I take the dimmer console and use it as my wing. All you have to do is board tape and label them like you would for what you’ll use for the gig. After that just put the tunes on your iPod and practice getting you hand movements down cuing the show. Visualizers and PC version of the console serve a great purpose through your computer to view and edit the show, but I honestly feel you need to practice hands on situations to keep your chops tight as well. Here are a few pics from the shows rehearsal. I will post some more over the next month and keep you posted on how the shows come along.
Recently I was acquired by a company based out of Omaha, Nebraska named Theatrical Media Services (TMS) to LD the comedy tent for Bonnaroo 2008. If you don’t know what Bonnaroo is then look it up. In brief, Bonnaroo is music festival that has been annually held in Manchester, Tennessee over the years. When it started it would bring bands in that were notably out of the jam band scene with an attendance of 60,000 people. Now it has evolved into a mainstream festival bringing acts like Pearl Jam, Metallica, and The Police with a force of 90,000 fans in attendance along with the jam bands still rocking out.
In the spring of next year I am looking to do some workshops for the Mass Communications and Theater departments of a local university. These workshops will introduce how video and lighting are work hand in hand in the live production industry today. I really want to get the ball rolling and get the students hip to what cool toys we get to work with out there nowadays and no matter what major you come from you can definitely find a niche in both. It's only introductory stuff, but I'm hoping they'll enjoy the workshops and I can get rolling with some more technical stuff for them after this trial run. Here's a rough draft I started...
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