Putting on our dancing shoes
This fall is…insane is the only word to sum it up. Mary and I have never been booked so solidly.
Fairfield University called when their Technical Director, my longtime friend Kevin, had to leave for a wonderful opportunity out of state. I had some pending contracts coming up, and wasn’t going to be able to fulfill the whole role, so I have been tag-teaming it with Mary this semester.
September was filled with a video shoot, a rotation of shows my friend Alex was designing, corporate AV gigs in NYC, and a last minute sound/light design job for me with Rocky Hill Community Theatre’s “Blythe Spirit.” The latter show was so last minute, I wasn’t going to be available for one of the performances, so I had to make sure my notes and cues were extremely tight so that I could hand them off to my replacement board op. I also finished tracking and mixing Evan Wahlquist’s album, “Seven Years in Constructive Oblivion.”
Listen to it here on Bandcamp.
In October, I leapt into the world of “Dancing at Lughnasa” as co-technical director with Mary for Theatre Fairfield. The set and effects have come along beautifully. It has been a great honor to step into the shoes of one of my mentors. I’m working with the student sound designer, and will be teaching her Qlab, so that we can create a more immersive world to compliment the beautiful scenic design – stereo output just isn’t enough and chasing aux faders is more work than it has to be. We’ll already be chasing faders with the mic I’ve hidden on the narrator, so that we can push just the reverb return out the PA, giving his monologues a dream-like quality rather than traditional reinforcement.
Mary built an amazing dead rooster prop for the this show, which you can read more about here.
Another great prop from Mary – a coal fire that did everything but give off heat!
The next month will see me switching gears back to NYC for a corporate AV gig for the entire month, while I use the commute to edit a wedding video with Chris Scalzi of Distilled Minds Studios. I’ll also be compiling footage for a video wall project – next year, Boston’s The Power of Love (a Huey Lewis tribute act) will be playing a string of shows around the Northeast. My job will be to do lighting and video for the run. This means I need to gather a few hours of clips of ’80s movies to mashup and project behind the band. This is the next step from the live video feeds I designed for Talking to Walls.
Somewhere in all of this, I also start a contract with Naugatuck Valley Community College for the rest of the semester.
I should be getting a break around Thanksgiving….
-brian
