Two... Two... Two Shows In One...

Work has been really slow for me. There hasn't been much to do, thus not much to write about. Last week and this week, there was finally a couple of shows I got on. I knew about the E3 show I just finished on Tuesday for a while, but the show last week sort of came last minute.

I have to give a shout out to lighting designer Tom Beck, he does his best to keep me busy and I appreciate it very much. He got me on the show last week. It was a pilot shoot for a possible up coming weekly show on Comedy Central called, "Ron White's Daily Buzz". I'd not heard of the comedian before, but I will admit, I found most of his stuff quite amusing.

It was two days of work, one day of set up and step thru rehearsal, and the second was a dress rehearsal and taping. Day one, pretty easy, I was able to snap a couple of photos, neither of which will give away the "plot" of the show.
This first picture is just an overview of the set as it was being completed. The lighting was quite nice if not very basic. We had a wrap around cyclorama that kept the background lit no matter what the angle was that we shot at.

This second photo is my "art shot" for the day. I was going to do a whole series with this being the first shot. In the background is house lighting console covered with paperwork and a bagel wrapped in a napkin. I thought this would be a great series of shots of food and the lighting world, but then the house guy came over, collected the paperwork, threw out the bagel and finished his slurpee and burrito. We decided we were kindred spirits the house lighting guy and I. Both of us love slurpees and burritos from The Cactus Taqueria.

The taping went fine. The big wigs seemed very happy and Tom Beck and I are hoping it gets picked up and we can have a weekly gig in the fall. Fingers crossed.

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The second show I did was part of the massive E3 Expo in town this week. E3 stands for "Electronic Entertainment Expo". It's basically the largest convention on the planet for video games. I remember working one of the first ones back in 1998 in Atlanta, and here we are, 11 years later and the thing is huge huge huge.

So huge, my little part was just a party for the Xbox 360/Microsoft console and it's games. We were holed up at The Standard Hotel in downtown L.A. setting up two rooms full of high definition flat screen monitors attached to many many Xbox gaming consoles. The lighting was minimal in the rooms, lots of LED lights and green gel (green is the colour of Xbox, FYI. No blue. That's the colour of Playstation). I wish I had pictures of the rooms to share, but security was being a bit snotty and didn't want people taking pictures. Although I'm sure somewhere online, someone has posted pictures of the rooms.

I was able to sneak a couple of pictures of the main event, a rooftop pool party for the release of the new game, The Beatles Rockband. For those of you not familiar with gaming (I'm talking to you dad and Sandy), the Rockband franchise is a series of video games where you and 3 friends get together and play fake guitars and drums, and sing the music for different bands. It's like souped up Karaoke. On the screen is a representation of a fret board and these little coloured circles float down the screen and when they get to the bottom of the fret board you have to physically play the note (delineated by coloured buttons on the fake guitars and coloured drum heads on the drum kit) in order to score points and win the game. The better you play, the more songs you unlock and can play. If you suck, the game lets you know so.

The Rockband's latest release is The Beatles music. As you can imagine, this is a big deal. Xbox sunk some money (not a lot in lighting) to set up this stage on the roof of The Standard Hotel so that the big wigs and game reviewers could come up and try their hand at the game. Anyway, here are the pictures. Whoa, how about a little vertigo? The Standard Hotel isn't terribly tall compared to the buildings around it, but where I had to set up my console, I was on a secondary roof above the fire escape stairs for the main roof. Needless to say, there were no handrails since no one was supposed to be up there in the first place. I didn't fall off. Here's the stage as it's getting set up. Not terribly huge, I only had 5 moving lights and a bunch of LEDs to light the wall and The Beatles sign. It would be sufficient since I had no idea what was going to happen during the night and if anyone would actually get up on stage and sing and play the fake guitars and drums. And they did. The evening was supposed to kick off at 8PM with a demonstration by the design team. That didn't happen until about 9:30PM and from that point until 1:30AM, the stage was full of people trying their hands at different Beatles songs from different eras. By the way, that's me cheating and lighting up the buildings across the way in green. The big wigs loved it, but the production people kept coming up to me and asking me if that was legal and if we obtained a permit to do it. We didn't, but if someone was to complain, I would have just pointed the lights back on stage, which I did every now and again. And finally, what big Los Angeles party wouldn't be complete without a celebrity sighting. I was honestly hoping Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would show up, but I guess that had already made an appearance at the big press event for Xbox earlier in the day. Can you guess who we had playing fake guitar? Closer look? Yep, that's Fogel aka McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) from the movie "Superbad". Not the biggest star in the world, but the only one to get up on stage and play fake guitar for the crowd. Other celebrities could have been there, but I didn't see them.

And that's my new excuse for not writing in my blog. I was working. My next excuse is already lined up, I'm going to San Diego with Nicole for a show she's working on and I'll be spending my days playing "Mr. Mom" with Sean Patrick.

See you again in two weeks (but hopefully sooner).

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