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WARNING! This is LONG, so make sure you have time!
If you ask my parents, they'll tell you I was destined to be in the lighting business from the day I was born. According to them, from the time even before I can remember, I wanted to play with every light switch I could find. If my dad was carrying me as he walked into a room, I always told him to stop so I could flick the lights on and off.
As I grew more into my single-digits, I could be found collecting every flashlight I could find to set up little lighting rigs for my stuffed animals. As well, I would use my legos to build whole lighting rigs. And the flicking of light switches iin the house was replaced by the fine-tuning of the dimmer knobs for the chandeliers in the house. What a geek.
As most other kids had dreams of being a fireman or an astronaut, I wanted to be a followspot operator. My dad grew increasingly frustrated when every time he took me to an ice show or the circus, I would spend the whole time looking up at the ceiling or back into the followspot booths. Every colored beam of light interested me to no end. This was all in the days before moving lights.
Then came the day it all changed. I would say I was probably around 7-8 years old, sometime around 1981 or 1982. My dad took me to see the concert of one of my favorite bands at the time, Genesis. As I looked up into the grid during the show, I saw lights that moved. Lights that changed color on their own. I was in awe, and it's all I could talk about when I left. I knew this was something I wanted to do.
Up until I was 13, I had never actually done anything with lighting other than amusing myself at home. I hadn't worked in any theatres or anything of the sort. For some reason, it just never even occurred to me that there was a business in lighting. It just seemed like one of those things that just happened. While I was in seventh grade, I needed something to do. Over the past several years, following my parents' divorce and subsequent remarriages, I had grown increasingly withdrawn and lethargic. My interests in just about anything had disappeeared.
My step-mother, seeing my need for an activity, led me towards my high-school theatre. It was the spring of 1988, and they were preparing for their production of The Music Man. I attended one of their work calls after school one day to see what it was all about, thinking I could find something fun to get into. During the entire four hours I was there, I actually did something for about two minutes. I stood at a point on stage so some guy could focus a light on me for a special. Thinking this would be all I would ever get to do, I decided not to return. Sidenote...I know everyone has to start somewhere, but these were the darker days in my life, and I wasn't ready for it
After a year, in the spring of 1989, I decided to give it another try. This time, the theatre was starting to build their biggest production ever, My Fair Lady. This seemed like a good time to jump in. Although most of the first few months were spent building scenery, and a LOT of it, soon the time turned to lighting. I, of course, jumped at the chance to help out. During the next few weeks, I started to learn what all the instruments were, how each of them functioned, and what we could do with them. Hanging, plugging, and focusing became part of the game. I was loving every minute of it, and wanted a part of every project that was going on. I even remember one day when my dad came to pick me up, and I wasn't out front. After waiting forever, he came inside to find me hovering my the lighting console so I could be the one to turn off all the lights. What a geek.
As time went on, I learned how the entire lighting system in our theatre worked. This was well before a high school could afford a computer console (as they were relatively new to the market), and we didn't even have a two-scene preset. What we had was this massive block of sliders which one had to work out at the gym to push up and down (these weren't the old handle-style dimmers...a little newer than that). In fact, for complex lighting changes and levels, we actually made plywood cutouts so we could achieve all the correct levels easily. We only had 12 dimmers and 36 or so circuits, so it was a small start! Thankfully, this monster had an ingenious patch system...a bank of sliders which could run up and down to click into each dimmer (rather than a bunch of cables and plugs!).
As the years went by, I learned more and more how to run the lighting and how everything worked. I even got involved in a local community theater (directed by our high-school theatre teacher as well), to help with their lighting there.
By the time I was in 10th grade, in 1990, I was in charge of the lighting for every show in the high school theatre, as well as the local community theatre. From design, to hang, to execution, I did it all. I was having the best time ever. I was getting to do something I had dreamed of since the day I was a kid, and to be creative all at the same time. For my final year at high school, we were able to upgrade out lighting system to a brand new computer-based console, a Leprecon ???. We upgraded to 18 dimmers and even installed a few extra circuits. This was my first jaunt into actual programming.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had done the lighting for almost 30 different productions, ranging from one-act plays to Battle of the Band shows with full rock lighting (still all conventional!). I know a lot of poeple say high-school theatre means nothing in the professional world, but I think it depends on the size of your program and what you get out of it. And I can say that almost everything I learned, I learned during these years. It wasn't so much just what lighting was or how to use it, but how to work. How to make a show professional. How it's all supposed to run. THAT was the most invaluable experience.
Those were the most interesting years. From the time I was in 7th grade, and was told I'd never amount to anything more than a gas-pumper by our humble religion teacher, to the time I graduated having raised the bar on the way lighting was done in our theatre. I will never forget my mentors during all these years, Mr. Saunders. He was the one who led me all the way to what I had become and what I had learned. He was also my 7th grade religion teacher. I should also mention Mr. Eikner, my other theatre mentor during these years.
I graduated from high school in 1993, bound for college at Auburn University. At this point I wasn't planning on going into theatre or lighting. I wanted to go into architecture (which had been kind of a hobby of mine during the past few years). I was talked out of this by my father, who thought a more lucrative career would be engineering. So I entered college as an engineering major.
I moved down to the college a few weeks early, as we had discovered that their theatre was already preparing to build their next play. I thought it would be funn to get down there and get started early. The first few days were quite interesting. I had already had numerous discussions with Lynn Lockrow, one of the designers for the college theatre. The first day I walked in to check out what they were doing, one of the older students started showing me around. Lynn walked up to the older student and said, "Don't let the white tennis shoes and golf shirt fool you, this guy really does know his stuff." Yeah OK, so I had come from a prep school!!
For my first year at college, I did work at the theatre whenever I could amidst the grueling work that is freshman year preparing for engineering. As well, I happened upon an organization called the University Program Council, which was responsible for bringing all the entertainment to campus, from movies, to comedians, to major concerts. One of the divisions of the UPC was the technical committee, who were responsible for sound and lighting for all UPC events. I started out helping the head of the technical committee setting up thier decent-sized sound system for events almost weekly. They did not yet have a lighting system.
Throughout my freshman year, I struggled to keep up with my studies. I just simply wasn't interested in engineering or the cold hard facts that came with such an occupation. By the time third quarter started in the spring, I started my Calculus 3 class. This was the last straw. After the first day, when the teacher walked in and without a word just started scribbling something like
cos2Ø = cos2 Ø - sin2 Ø = 2cos2 Ø -1x
then asked what x was, I knew then and there that I could not continue in such a profession. I wanted to do lighting. I called home, practically in tears, and said to my parents that I just couldn't do it anymore. We were on the phone forever, and I just told them that I wanted to be a lighting guy. I wanted to create something. I wanted to be a part of something. I thought by the end of the phone call that my dad would disown me, but he agreed to see where it would go.
I officially changed my major by the end of the spring to theatre technology. By the end of my first school year, I had already done four productions in the electrics crew. On the other side of the campus, back at the UPC, I had worked my way up in one year to the director of the Technical Committee, now responsible for providing all technical support to the various entertainment venues.
During the summer after my freshman year, I was asked to go work on a small summer-stock outdoor drama in Boone, North Carolina called Horn in the West, whose director was Lynn Lockrow (see above), one of my theatre professors. This would be my first "professional" theatre gig...as professional as summer stock gets. This was a totally new, and just amazing, experience. I had a chance to work with some of the OLDEST equipment still in existence. 40-year-old lights which had spent most of their life in the rain were just the start. And in the black box was a auto-dimmer console (those big handles), which required the use of hands, feet, and chin to run effectively!!
Back in college for my sophomore year, I moved on up in the theatre. I was the master electrician for all three mainstage productions of the year, which was a first. I also continued as technical director of the UPC, beefing up the program as much as I could with new equipment and extended availability as a rental shop. In the summer, I returned to Horn in the West as Master Electrician. I took this chance to completely overhaul their setup and make it work much better.
Over the next few years, I continued to work in the theatre and UPC. While my theatre gig stayed pretty solid (having to try out different things due to departmental requirements for graduation), my position at UPC grew and grew. Over the next few years, I became responsible not only for sound and lighting setup for our events, but for actually talking directly with the incoming acts and their managers to prepare for large concerts and other events. As well, i was the local production manager for all of the events, including the major concerts. I also started advising other committees on how to book their events, and what would work. In addition, I started up the websites for the organization and began working with the television committee producing and editing commercials and promotional videos for the UPC.
While all the above was volunteer, a position was created by the university for me in my senior year to allow me to get paid for all the work I was doing. By the time I graduated, the abilities of the UPC had almost doubled with the addition of a new lighting system, cumputer-based video editing system, and a fully-networked online office.
Back in the theatre, my senior year was marked by my senior design project, the lighting design for the spring musical, The Threepenny Opera. As the theatre had JUST upgraded their dimming system, I was the first to get to use the full capacity of the system. I used almost every circuit and every light the theatre had available. It was, in my opinion, a beautiful lighting design which I unfortuantely have no pictures of (all of my photos came out so overexposed they are almost unintelligible).
Finally the time came for me to graduate college and move on. By graduation, I had yet to work towards getting a job. I don't know why, just because. So for the summer following graduation, I stayed in Auburn and worked with the UPC during their summer programs. I also landed a job at the local nightclub running the lights for the weekends. Although small by current club standards, it was still a TON of fun, and offered me a chance to work in a more live atmosphere. The club owner actually told me that he thought the lighting had improved so much that it was improving business. I guess he thought since the lighting actually matched the music, that the experience was better than before when they just had random chases that ran all night. Indeed, the club was seeing heavier business by the end of the summer.
In the middle of the post-graduation summer, I received a call from my dad who had just run into an old high-school friend of his. Talking to this friend revealed that he was the head of purchasing for Feld Entertainment, producers of Disney on Ice, amongst other things. He encouraged me to send in a resume and see what happened. I did, and was called a few days later with a job offer with their newest touring ice show as an electrician. Over the next several weeks, they called about 20 times saying I was on this show, then that show, and they finally settled on The Spirit of Pocahontas.
In September of 1997, at 22 years old, I embarked on a new experience. On tour around the United States with a large ice show. On my first day, I was dumbfounded by the sheer size of the show. Eight trucks and a 65' x 160' playing space. I was astounded to think that I had come from high school and college theatre with modest inventories to a show with almost 90 moving lights and hundreds of conventionals, not to mention foggers, scrollers, and confetti...oh, the confetti.
A funny thing happened when I started with the ice shows. I got in an argument with my head electrician on the third day. I know, it sounds bad. But on loadin day, several of the large fans used to blow confetti weren't working. I said I would keep them on the ground and fix them. The head told me he didn't care if they worked or not, to hang them. We went back and forth a few times. I don't know, I guess I had been taught that making everything work was top priority. We ended up fixing the fans.
I spent my first year on tour with the ice shows learning as much as I could about all the equipment. I was stuck on followspot for my first several months, so I rarely had much time to get in with the moving lights and such, but boy could I call an 8-spot show!! However, I continually expressed my interest in learning one of the consoles, especially the Compulite Animator (as opposed to the VL Mini-Artisan2).
Within 6 months, they were training me on the Animator, and showing me how to run the show. Unfortunately, that is all they would show me. No one would teach me how to do anything else (in fact, the console was run by timecode, so it ran itself for the most part). When I expressed an interest in how to program or customize the console for me, they refused to show me, citing that all I needed to know was how to press the go button and how to focus. So I took it upon myself to learn the console on my own. When the next tour started up, the new head electrician and I sat down and reprogrammed a lot of the show which had been messed up by previous operators.
My next few tours took me through Europe and Japan. Piece by piece, I learned everything I could about this higher-tech lighting. During the next two years, I programmed all of the lighting for a 30-minute segment which was added to the beginning of our show, learned how to repair certain types of moving lights, and had even written a manual for the Animator console (if you've ever seen the manual that comes with it, you'll know why!). It really helped to have a head electrician (Mike Wilkinson) who knew more than the inventors of half the stuff we were using. I've never met another guy who could just sit down and design a variable-speed, height-sensing motor control system down to the resistor on a paper napkin at lunch.
Following my time with Pocahontas, I was given an amazing opportunity. Feld was planning to re-release their production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. They were going to use mostly the equipment from Pocahontas with a few extra pieces thrown in. What they needed was someone to design and program the lighting, and they wanted it done internally. My head electrician and I jumped at this chance. Over the course of our Japan tour with Pocahontas, we watched videos of Snow White over and over and came up with ideas. Then we worked on the system design and layout followed by how we wanted each scene to look. Following that, we started blind-programming the show using the spare consoles and just one or two lights each for reference. People really thought we were odd as we would picture looks and moves using our hands. Like a big sweep being our fingers being up high and bringing them down low, or a sparkle by twiddling our fingers. I think people thought we were on drugs.
Less than two weeks after returning home from the Japan tour, we travelled to the Philippines where Snow White would be opening. Myself and Mike (the head electrician) finalized our plans, and, with the rest of the crew, started rebuilding the Pocahontas electrics package to work for our design. Once everything was up and running, we started final programming during the nights. This was regarded by many people who saw it as one of the best lit shows they had seen on the ice shows. To see pictures, visit the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves page.
Over the next several years, I continued on. Following Snow White, I moved to Toy Story as head electrician, Jungle Adventures as a Wholehog operator (which I also mostly taught myself), and Toy Story 2 as a moving light tech. During my time on Toy Story 2, I had a lot of free time as they had cut my video gig out of the show. I used this time to learn every detail about the moving lights we had. I took every one apart down to the driver chip and made diagrams of every board, cable, and motor. On this show, we also had a then-new breed of moving light called the X-Spot. Having a brand new style of moving light on a show can be exciting, but also a headache. For the first two weeks in tech, I spent countless hours on the phone every day with the High End software guys, tracing down problems we had located, as we were running on beta software. I must say, though, that those guys took care of us!! During this tour, I also made the show's electrics book which became the standard for the company (much to the chagrin of others who would now have to make nice books!).
My final show with Disney on Ice was another tour of Jungle Adventures, on which I was head electrician. During this final year, it all caught up to me. The crews were being filled with high-school graduates with little knowledge (but big attitudes), the salaries were just too low, and policy run-amuck was the name of the game. I knew it was time to move on. But to where?
That question was answered by a chance encounter in one of our cities. Staying in the same hotel as our tour were the cast and crew of Cats, produced by Troika Entertainment. I met most of them and found people who were happy where they worked and who seemed a lot nicer to be with. After talking with them, I found that they were just starting to hire crews for their next production of Starlight Express. The idea of working in theatre again seemed like a great experience. I sent in my resume, and within a week was called with a job offer. They wanted me instead as a head electrician on their production of Swing. This was a Monday. They wanted me to start on Wednesday. Seeing that I was still under contract for my current tour, I had to turn down this offer. A few days later, the offer for an assistant position on Starlight Express came through.
So after 5 1/2 years with Disney on Ice, I turned in my notice (hey, I gave 5 weeks!) and went to work building Starlight. The show is huge electrics-wise, with a total of 613 fixtures and 1823 lamps (hey, I get bored sometimes during the show!). With Starlight came the opportunity to learn the GrandMA lighting console inside and out. The show has changed many times, which has required repeated reprogramming of lights. Instead of bringing back in a programmer each time, I covered most of the programming changes. In fact, when all was said and done, well near half the show was programmed by myself! I have been taking whatever chance I can get to learn everything I can about this console, as it is my favorite I have every worked on.
But, as all good things must come to an end, so did Starlight Express in June, 2004. Soon after the end of the tour, I moved, with my fiancee, to Atlanta, GA. The first summer was definitely slow, as not much happens in town during the summer. I had a few union calls here and there, and got on a couple of show builds through some people I had met when touring through the city. But other than that, work was almost non-existant. That's when a chance instant message changed everything.
I saw the lighting designer from Starlight Express online every day. One day, out of the blue, I just decided to send an IM to say hi. His response was "Hey, are you busy now?" Of course, I replied that I most certainly was not. He asked if I could draft a few plots for him for some upcoming Titanic museum exhibits. It sounded like a cool deal, so I started drafting, although the exhibit people were driving me nuts asking to have this wall moved one inch this way, or that case rotated two degrees. I did a few plots for that company, then got referred to another exhibit company, Arts & Exhibitions International, who were producing an exhibit about Princess Diana (with the same lighting designer).
What started as drawing a few plots turned into much more. They were looking for a lead electrician for the exhibit. After some talk, I decided to take the position, although it meant having to be in Florida the day after my own wedding in New Hampshire. Needless to say, my wife was a bit peeved about that, but knew that it was something I had to do. Fortunately, a small rain shower (better known as Hurricane Ivan) thwarted plans for a loadin that week, so we got pushed back a week.
This was my first full-scale professional Lead Electrician job, where everything from the original lighting and electrics plot, to equipment bidding and ordering, to full install was included. Everything went almost perfectly, and we installed almost the entire thing in just under three days. This was the start of something big. Work on the Diana exhibit led to a position on a new exhibit they had in the works, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. This was slated to be one of the biggest, most extravagant touring exhibits in the world, and indeed it was/is. Lighting plots and pre-production meetings started six months before install ever began. The exhibit requires over 800 lighting fixtures, and many more circuits of plasmas, projectors, sound equipment, and worklight. Needless to say, it's one of the most nerve-wracking installs ever, and that's before they move everything at the last minute!!!
The exhibits have kept me quite busy, and will continue to do so. I have just closed my fourth Diana city, and just finished the install of the third run of King Tut, with so solid end in sight.
Also during the past year, I have programmed two national tours for Troika, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and will reprogram Joseph this fall for the cut-down version. I programmed both shows over the course of about 10 days each on a GrandMA console for two different lighting designers. One of the coolest parts was the experience of the pyramid LED wall in Joseph. This brought a new element of programming to my pallete, and it turned out to be quite fun. Hopefully, pictures will be posted (have to check on these Equity rules!).
Now where do I plan to go from here? It's a hard question. My main passion lies in the creative part, drafting and programming. Some design is fun, but I kind of lost my desire to design, and much prefer to work alongside fun, talented designers to help bring their ideas to life. The main problem with that career path is the constant out-of-town commitments. The out of town shouldn't be as bad when you're only there to program and such (rather than stress over install schedules and such)! Lately, though, I've been dreaming of an almost 9-5 job, in a production house or road house. While I would more than likely have to give up a lot of creative and the excitement of a constantly varying job, the stability of a weekly paycheck and the thought of going home each night is also a bonus.
Which way will I go? How will I get there? I have no idea. New things seem to creep up all the time, so the possibilities are endless.
One thing I do love is to hear from people who are either going through the same thing, or have already been through it, and have their own stories to tell. If you want to discuss, shoot me a line at samiwas [at] gmail.com. (Sorry for the lack of a clickable link, but the spam reduction is the key!!)
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