The Job AMA Thread! - current AMA@ChickieD through 11/16 at 11:30 PM PST

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Hi. I just realized today is the 19th so I’ma start and let William George finish up any questions that are still out there.

I’m a theatrical lighting designer that has basically had every kind of job one can have with two degrees in theatrical lighting. Architectural, television, films, theatre, dance, opera, industrials, museums, just about everything but theme park lighting. I’ve lit the spectrum, from tiny shows nobody ever saw to events that everyone worldwide has seen and worked with an amazing spectrum of lighting people that I am often astonished that they even talk to me, let alone ask my opinion.

These days I’m doing fewer shows and working as a theatre consultant in New York. When people hire an architect to design their theatre the architect doesn’t usually know anything about theatres. They don’t know that Miss Saigon has 17 tractor trailers that need to be dealt with when there’s only two doors at the loading docks. They don’t understand how seating rows can have 20 chairs but people don’t sit directly behind someone else’s head. They don’t know to ask about how much power is needed or how it’s going to to get used. So they call people like me who sit in meetings and translate between theatre people and architects and vice versa.

For someone who loves theatre but loves to see their kids, it’s absolutely perfect. I clock in and out like a normal job but then talk about theatre stuff all day.

So, what skill is indispensable? Knowing about deadlines. Which ones are vital and what can be sacrificed to make the deadline. I come from a world where there is a show at 8 PM. Sick actor? Find an understudy. No power? Get some flashlights. Costumes caught on fire? We’re doing a show in street clothes. What’s important to the task at hand and how can we make things happen safely?

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Here’s some stuff that I lit at one point or another (or am in the midst of):

https://www.greenhill.org/page/arts/marshall-family-performing-arts-center

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Ask you anything, huh? Can I get a job with you‽

More seriously, I was a Theatre Arts major in college, and you’re basically doing what I wanted to be doing. One of my professors was Barth Ballard, who at the time was a lighting director at the Old Globe Theatre, and I could die a happy man if I’d ended up with his job. In the end, I moved to Hollywood when my brother offered me a PA gig on one of his movies, which started me on my current career.

But the calculus involved in taking that job and moving to L.A. without getting my degree was based upon not knowing how hard it might be to make a living in the theatre. You work in NYC, and I imagine the money must be okay, though I have no doubt the job market is insanely competitive. Is that right? How did you break in? Did you have to starve for a while? I know the San Diego theatre scene isn’t remotely close to the size of New York’s, obviously, but still… I can’t stop wondering if I shouldn’t have moved, if I maybe should have stayed in my favorite city doing what I love best.

After high school I was roommates for a while with another theatre nerd. He ended up the Artistic Director of the San Diego Civic Light Opera at Starlight Bowl for a decade or so, which was probably a dream job, but that ended up being quite a money pit. The company, which had been a going concern since 1945, went under in 2011, after he and many members of its board of directors had sunk buckets of their own money into it for years, trying to help keep it afloat. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlight_Bowl_(San_Diego)

So anyway, I hope your experience has been different! Whaddaya think? Is live theatre a viable career path? Or only if you’re extremely lucky?

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Theatre as a whole is, well, both competitive and not. There are shows I wish I’d lit, people I wish I’d had a chance to work with, and, at the same time, I’m thrilled at the lighting by others in shows I wish I’d done. It’s a super small field in New York especially, and everyone knows everyone and where their strengths are. Basically, if you last long enough in this town you are likely to end up where you belong. But it’s a question as to if you want to last that long.

I got out of grad school in 2003. Did TV for a few years at a grand sum of around 32K a year. Gross. So after grad school was when I got my ramen fix. I left when I realized I was sick of going to work at 4 in the afternoon and missing all my friends shows and ended up in architectural lighting where I started at 40K. But this time with healthcare and going home at normalish hours. But that lighting is about as far from theatre as you can get, there are a lot of people who are going to get in your way to stop your design from being what you want. Contractors, architects, owners, they all have a say in what ends up being built.

I only ended up here because it’s the sister company to the architectural lighting side and that took 11 years of living in New York. I don’t think I would have been remotely prepared to do this job straight out of grad school. But you’re right, it’s a very limited job market. We are one of the bigger firms with a well established clientele and 40+ years and have just two lighting people. I can name offhand the other five or six within a few hundred miles from here.

As to if live theatre is a viable path, absolutely. You just have to be very, very well aware of what you are giving up. Some limited statistics:

Of the 18 people in my grad school class:
12 of us still live around the New York area,
At least 10 of those are in entertainment,
Five of those are active theatre designers full time, the rest are professors, television, film or theatre consulting.

I am one of two in the area that owns a free standing home. Condos, coops, and the majority are still in apartments.
I am one of five that got married and is still on their first marriage.
I am one of three that have children.

So, yes, it’s absolutely possible to have a career in theatre. And it’s possible to have all the stuff you want, family, a house, whatever, you just have to be aware that it might take some time and the hours along the way are going to be awful. I know people who are still living check to check after 20 years in the business, it can be really stressful.

That said, there is literally nothing stopping you from doing theatre where you are if you have any interest. I light shows at my local 150 seat community theatre with pleasure and they are happy to have interested people help out. They pay probably isn’t there but then again, neither is the stress to make everything perfect or get burned out. Why, look at this, I see the Coronado Playhouse doesn’t have a resident lighting designer. See if they want any help if you want to scratch that itch.

The past is the past, the choices you (and I) made to not freelance in theatre and starve and to do other things left a spot for someone else to do that. I don’t regret not freelancing at all but I also recognize I’ve been very lucky in life. But there’s nothing that says you can’t dip your toes back into it and see if it’s worth exploring again. Let a few people in your industry know you do theatre on the side and I’m willing to bet they know of a production that needs a designer.

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C’mon, It’s okay. You can fess up to us. When did you sell your soul to Satan?

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2003 when I went to work in television.

The nice thing is that you get it back when you can prove you’ve been out for five years. Seriously, I tell people all the time that I’m never leaving my job, there’s no way I’d ever find anything better.

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What??? You did the 9/11 Tribute? That is spectacular.

Also, another non question question - did you know I am on Long Island? We should get together.

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I still do. Every year I go out and focus the lights for a few nights.

I did not know that, we should!

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So… how do you apply your technical knowledge to your personal life?

Are there track lighting and disco balls all over the house?

Why not?

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I use halogens everywhere. No LED. I cannot stand the incomplete light spectrum and refuse to bring them in the door.

Track lighting is the lighting designer’s lazy way of not making a decision. I don’t have that either, I make decisions on which walls to light and go from there. Nobody’s house is a gallery, they’re not swapping walls around and changing out art often enough to make it work, it’s just cheap and means nobody needs to decide where to drill a hole.

So I’m not a fan.

We do have a mirror ball (mirror balls were around long before disco, as someone explained to me once), but we use it during the holidays mounted horizontally for a snowfall effect on the front of the house.

Why not? Well, because everything has a functionality, and lighting in the home for me means seeing what you are doing and seeing it well with the actual colors that it is. I get enough of additive color mixing when I do shows, I don’t feel the need to do it when I get home.

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Are there new and exciting technological developments in lighting that you particularly appreciate?

And what technologies (if any) have you loved and been sorry to see slide into obsolescence/unavailability/unfashionableness?

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that sounds super sweet, my dude.

When I was young, there was something my mom was watching on PBS about English life in the 40s, and a scene in a dancehall featured a huge mirrorball while they all slowdanced to Hit Parade style music. My mind was not exactly blown but it was jarring enough to be confronted with my misconception that I still remember it all these years past.

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I mean, I know this sounds vague, but all of it? Every step forward has great things attached to it as well as a sigh of resignation about how not all change is for the better.

Computerized lighting consoles, for example, provide a measure of stability to the design as a whole but you end up with people running shows who are pressing a button and not actually understanding why or when they’re pressing the button. It’s a little like that show Lost where they have to type in the numbers but don’t know why. I miss the era of people setting up a two scene preset and feeling the right time to hit that cue because they know the show.

So LED, while great for so many shows, is missing part of the spectrum (typically in the greens) and isn’t right for everything. However, the things it’s good for it’s really good for. Instantly going from 0 to full, a broad range of color, lower wattage, they’re great. And now they’re getting integrated into moving lights in a useful way. For a very long time you had them in movers and there were fans and other things that made noise to make them unsuitable for smaller theatrical spaces. Now it’s just a larger heatsink and silently running, which is amazing.

The interesting thing about theatre is that when things slide into being unfashionable, something else slides into being back in fashion. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years, there’s very little that goes away forever. This new idea of putting theatre in nontraditional spaces like warehouses? We did it in the 70’s. And in the 40’s. And in the 20’s. Technology like tungsten-halogen? It’s just taking a break until we start doing super simple, clean, one-light non-theatre shows again like Brecht or the next Wooster Group.

So I’m never sorry to see things go, I’m just happy to see other things come back in. Theatre is a living art form, always changing with the times. Given the low costs to put it on and the fact that it has to be live and now it will always be a reflection of current events and that’s what I love about it. I don’t miss the things that are gone because we’re just not doing that right now. It’ll be back.

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I basically saw this once and was like "A hundred bucks? I have a mirror ball, how hard can this be?"

So I made one and it is indeed not difficult. We built a taller stand so snow won’t block it as well.

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My time in the Theatre Arts department at my college straddled the demolition of their old “temporary” theater, which had been built circa 1967 and finally nuked as a fire hazard circa 1989, an interregnum when the space was a black box, and the construction of their several-million-dollar new theater which opened in 1993 or so. One of our lighting instructors was highly amused at our frustration with the old manual lighting console, with its finicky faders that made smooth fades near impossible. None of us missed that console when it was replaced. And she told us stories of the actively dangerous one it had replaced back when she was a student.

I guess we maybe won’t see limelight come back, but that’s probably okay, right?

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I dunno, I’ve seen sodium vapor lights used in shows…

The limelights themselves were always the means to the end, the whole concept of a spotlight will always be vital. Does that make sense? Nobody is advocating for stone benches carved into Roman hillsides but we are going to stadium seating more often. Is that a parallel that makes my view clearer?

I feel like I can see your 1993 renovation in my head already. Lots of blond wood with a certain Scandinavian flavor was all the rage back then. It was a terrible time for theatres.

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The video was beautiful.

Ok. Let’s name a date.

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@enceladus for some reason there is a gap in the designated times. Do you want to shift forward to now or keep times as stated?

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This is an aside more than anything, and there isn’t really a question in here. I read your answers with great interest because I’ve long been interested in movie lighting, which I attempt (badly, if I’m honest) to translate to lighting for still photography (fortunately for the paying clients I get now the lighting needs are simple and straightforward), and now lighting for video - but the big stuff you do is practically a whole other universe. It’s awesome but now just like DSLR video, inexpensive LED stuff is making decent lighting a lot more democratic. (There are good and bad aspects to that, of course.)

The first time I was in talks with a client I had done still photography for about a prospective video project (which was only possible because DSLRs democratized video), I thought, crap, I need continuous light and the modeling light on my strobes probably isn’t going to cut it.

I didn’t have much money so I ordered an amazingly cheap (~$100) knockoff of an ARRI hot light. When I switched it on it blew me away, and playing with it a bit really illuminated (sorry) a lot of things for me about movie lighting and how it works. But, I pretty much immediately realized it was outrageous for what I needed - and gets extremely hot, obviously - so I sent it back and stretched my budget to buy a wide(ish)-spectrum LED one (~$200).

It puts out plenty of daylight-balanced (…almost) light for my needs and runs cool - it does have a fan and isn’t perfectly quiet, unfortunately, but isn’t bad unless within a foot or so of the microphone. The actual light source (under a removable frosted glass diffuser dome) is a 1" flat square so you can gel it by taping a 1" piece of gel (i.e. a sample swatch) directly to it.

Of course, like with anything put to professional use its shortcomings compared to more expensive options are immediately apparent, but the point is it lets me do something - that which makes money - I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. For clients in this price range, the full color spectrum and perfect color accuracy are not a huge concern as long as it looks good, and it does (with some care).

I mean, people with way more clients than I have - here, in the bay area, where a lot of money is involved - use those awful panels that are just an array of regular LEDs. That’s where democratization has failed us, I suppose.

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How much and what sort of light would be needed to make me look as pretty as Ryan Gosling?

Here’s my driver’s ID photo:

gollum_395_394

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