Stagehand Work: Life is Beautiful

This is a picture of the main stage of Life is Beautiful 2014 being built. I am currently working on call with a staging company that gets hired to build stages and work events and Life is Beautiful just happened to be one of them. This job was about a 9 hour day to unload and set up all the equipment.

My position at this job is a stagehand and as such, I get work in a lot of different areas of stage set up. During this job, I had to help unload all of the equipment cases out of the trucks. This portion of the job took up about 2 hours to get everything out and sorted where it needed to go.

On this particular day, I was mostly helping set up the audio equipment. After having unloaded all the speakers, we had to push them to the end of the stage to get them into position to be set up. The speakers were stacked by 4 and there were about 10 speakers to an line array.

Another thing I had to do, was run the power cables for some equipment. All the cable had to be run under the stage and there was a lot of work to do to keep it organized. Once the speakers were up and the cables were run, I, along with other workers, had to clean the stage to make it ready for the next day performers.

All in all, the job was exhausting but it's not something I had never done before. It was really interesting to see how much goes into building a stage that was as big as this one.

Field Sound Recording: Life is Beautiful

This picture was taken of me on top of the Western Hotel in downtown Las Vegas. This was a job I did for Fremont East Studio at the 2014 Life is Beautiful festival. My job was to capture the sound of a host that was covering the events happening at Life is Beautiful.

This was my second time doing this particular job. I had done the same thing a year before for the 2013 LIB festival. My second time around though, I had already had more experience doing this type of work.

The job was for all 3 days of the festival and I was working along side a director, cameraman, and the host. My job was to get clean audio of the host while she went around and described different attractions in the festival and interviewed and interacted with people. The recorder I was using a 702 Sound Devices field recorder, the microphones I used were a Shure wireless handheld for the host and a Senheisser ME66 on a boom pole to get more of the ambience sounds.

The job wasn't difficult but what did make it challenging was that it was an all day event. We didn't get much breaks except for lunch and having to wait on standby but besides that it was work all day. It was physically demanding having to care the gear around everywhere and during the day, the heat made it much harder. However, I enjoyed being part of the production because it gave me some experience and was also lots of fun.

Location Sound: Louie Anderson

This is a screenshot of a project I had the opportunity to work on. It was the recording for a podcast commercial for Louie Anderson. The project was really last minute notice for me but I took the opportunity as soon as it was presented to me.

I was able to work on it because a colleague of mine is a comedian and had connections to Louie. He set up a project to film him doing his podcast and needed someone to do audio and asked I could do it right away.

For gear, I didn't really need much, I used a Tascam DR-100 as my portable recorder and a Sennheiser ME 66 on a boom pole. I had a lavalier mic on stand by but Louie did not want to use it so I went with just the shotgun mic.

The place we shot at was at the theater inside the Plaza casino in downtown Las Vegas.  We were able to get a little tour of backstage and the gear they used before meeting with Louie. After the initial meeting Louie went to record a podcast segment with a guest he brought in. Meanwhile, we had setup our equipment and were just on standby until he finished.

When he came to shoot, he had a good idea of what he was going to say and gave us a couple of takes to work with. We got about 7 takes we could work with and from there we just had to pick one. Louie also gave us a copy of some of his pictures we could use in the commercial, which pop up during it.

When going into editing, it wasn't too hard to find a take that was good, I had a few problems with the audio though. The A/C was very prominent so I used a high pass filter to get rid of most of it. Also, there were times where Louie would be louder in some parts of his dialog but that was easily fixed with adjusting the gain at certain parts. The last thing I added was the music as the background. I wanted the commercial to have like a lighthearted feel and I think that the music makes it come off as exactly that.

Overall, the project was easy and a great opportunity to work with someone who is recognizable and has a name and reputation.