My guest, Iggy Rosenberg, has worked his way from NightClubs in Buenos Aires, to Crew Chief on the biggest concert tours of our time. Then he flexed his creative muscles as a Lighting Designer in the concert and corporate worlds and now he is the Director of Business Development at Lightswitch a mega visual design firm. That is more than 27 years of work on LIVE SHOWS. In this episode, we talk about how Tour life has prepared us for Quarantine, and how Zoom is to Dance as Kindle is to a books.
Show Notes
Quick Links:
Transcript:
Intro: This is words that move me, the podcast where movers and shakers like you get the information and inspiration you need to navigate your creative career with clarity and confidence. I am your host, master mover, Dana Wilson, and if you’re someone that loves to learn, laugh and is looking to rewrite the starving artist story, then sit tight. But don’t stop moving because you’re in the right place.
Dana: Hello and welcome to episode 20. Thank you so much for being here. How are you feeling today? I am feeling appreciated. Yeah. Appreciated. I’ve been seeing new daily doers doing incredible things and I see some day oners that have been listening to the podcast since the very beginning that are well into their hundreds of daily doing, doing daily. I am so proud of you all and um, go back and listen to episode one if you have no clue what I’m talking about right now. Great. Also, just more broadly, thank you all for your messages, support, encouragement. I’m getting a lot of feedback via email and direct messages and tags on IG, so thank you for all of that love. I’m glad that you’re digging the pod. And if you are new here, welcome. I know that you’re going to find some grade a information and inspiration here, especially in this episode. I am jazzed about it, super confident that you’re going to dig this and I’m excited to get into it.
But first let’s talk wins. My win this week is that I’ve been wearing these um, blue blocker, like blue light blocking glasses and loving the way my eyeballs feel. Yes, that’s the thing that I consider is eyeball feel. Um, right out of the gate. This is definitely not a paid endorsement. I have no relationship with the makers of these glasses. Um, but I’m finding them super helpful and I thought that that would be a good one to share because light plays a huge part in this episode. Wink, wink, teaser, teaser. Um, so back to these weird blue blocker glasses. I want to first preface this by saying they’re not FDA regulated because they are not medicine. And there is honestly a lot of debate around whether or not they’re helpful or just hype. But the glasses I bought were only 17 bucks. So I figured I would just see for myself, see what I did there. See anyways, so I’ve been wearing them for about four days and um, honestly I’ve noticed some improvement by the end of each night. My eyes aren’t stinging, my head isn’t pounding and I’m getting to sleep super fast. Granted that could be for 100 other reasons. It very well could be a placebo effect, but for less than $20 I will take the sugar pill. If I think it’s working and it’s not causing me any harm, then who cares? So I have added these amazing to me glasses to our words that move me Amazon shopping list where you can find all of the other gadgets and gizmos and good reads that I mentioned here on the podcast and that Amazon shopping list can be found on the show notes to this episode, episode 20 on my website, theDanawilson.com So enjoy that. Oh, also a note, a word to the wise. I guess if you are editing photos or videos or working on anything where color is important, obviously make sure you check your work without the glasses on because they do change the way your screen looks pretty substantially. Okay, great. Lot of talk about glasses. Now you go, what’s your win? What’s going well in your world?
Killer. All right, congrats. Keep crushing it. Okay. This week my guest is Iggy Rosenberg, to put it very, very briefly. Iggy is illuminating. He got his start working in nightclubs in Buenos Aires. He’s from Argentina and has a great accent, unrelated. Then he worked as a roadie on big, big concert tours. Then he became a lighting designer and now he is the director of business at a major visual design firm called Lightswitch. Iggy has worked in just about every layer of live shows that there is and in this episode we peel back the layers and take a look at almost all of them. Without any further ado, here is my conversation with Iggy Rosenberg.
Thank you so much for being here on the podcast today. Welcome and really quickly introduce yourself.
Iggy: So my name is Iggy Rosenberg. I’m a lighting and production designer. I come from, I was born and raised in Argentina. I’m going to say this and I moved here in 2004, which seems incredible, uh, toured, for many, many years. Did a lot of rock and roll stuff, been around the world a few times. I’ve seen some really, really cool stuff. And then, uh, and then I made a break out of touring into the corporate world and I joined a design firm called, Lightswitch and last year I got promoted to director of business development. So I still design, uh, I still design a lot, I’ll never stop designing, but I’m, uh, I’m in charge of also finding clients and keeping clients and I’m finding new opportunities.
Incredible. Okay. So your experience and training and skill set goes like many, many layers deep, um, all sides of the entertainment business. I guess. And I’m so curious about all of it. Maybe let’s start with touring. How would you introduce, or how would you explain the role of a crew chief to somebody that, and that’s what, that’s what you were on the road. How would you explain that role to somebody who knows nothing about being on tour?
You know, you, you go, I think like any other job, you go through the levels, um, and you learn their systems and you learn how to build things. And then you go on the road and you’re the number five guy in a four man crew and you go up the positions and you keep learning. Yeah. Tours are an interesting beast and I think a lot of people maybe don’t realize that the actual touring party isn’t that big. Right? It takes a lot of people to build this. And the only way you can do this, especially with local labor, is to delegate. So you have a person that’s in charge of, like in my case, the lighting crew. And then we usually have like four or five people that work directly with me that they’re on the tour with us. Um, so we usually have someone that’s called it the Dimmer Tech. He’s in charge of all the power distribution, all the cables. Uh, we’ll usually have a couple of guys that specialize in moving lights and repairing them and hanging them. But you have to keep that crew working with their local labor. So all I do is I will bounce between them to make sure they have everything they need and trying to stay ahead a couple steps ahead of what their next job is. Um, and then communicate with the production side, you know, with the stage manager, with the local store, with the production manager. So you’re kind of in between, between production and, and the sort of logistical side. The on the day I’m the worker bees running around building the shell.
A lot more communication than I expected from that answer to be honest. Okay. So, um, I loaded out a couple of times. Um, yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, the choreographer for the tour that I was on insisted because I was a rookie. It was my first world tour with, um, JT. It was the future sex love show tour and the choreographer, Marty Kudelka, who I just had on the podcast said like, before this tour is over, you must, must load out. I had made friends with a couple of the carps by that point. So, uh, we did it. My, my best friend and I, Ava Bernstein on that tour, we load it out and it was a fully like four hour, the dirtiest my hands have ever been in my life at the end of that load out a beer and pizza had never tasted so good. It was, it was really hard work. So how much would you say of your time was split between the really hands on grunt work and then the communication? Like the delegation?
Uh, you know, there’s a, I like to be active. Uh, I was always a climber, so I was, I would go up and climb on the rigs. There is a moment, you know, I know nowadays, especially now that I’m a designer, I, I’m not really allowed to push stuff around, um, for insurance purposes. Uh, but I tell people I’ve, you seen me with a harness, like something’s gone terribly wrong. Like if I’m climbing somewhere, like, like I always had like one truss to build or two, but I couldn’t spend too much time in that because the more time I spent heads down looking at what I’m doing, I can’t look at the team. So you, I had something I would help, I would jump in wherever else needed help. Um, but most of it was you just, it was a giant spiral. You just keep going between the teams making sure. And a big thing is you’re just looking at the very big picture, right? Because the guys have their small picture and then the local stations have even smaller because they don’t know the tour. They just, that’s the first time they’ve seen it, that they, so you give them smaller bits to work on and then I have the bigger picture and then, you know, the stage manager has even bigger picture. So you kind of have to stay a few steps away from doing the groundwork. Uh, I do. And this is different shows and different tours at different mentalities where I came from, the crew chief, uh, would load and certify the trucks at the end, make sure that they were safe and they were loaded and you make the packs and you make sure because you have to load them in a way that makes sense on the way in. Um, so you, I would load all the trucks, uh, you know, most of the times or have someone help me with, you know, we could do multiple at a time, but that was the biggest sort of thing was dumping in the morning, making sure everything went to the right places, um, during the day, making sure that you, so you load in thinking about the load out. You can’t bury yourself cause then you’re, you know, you screw yourself in the end.
Cool. I love this. Um, Oh it’s making me miss tour life. I think it’s very odd, very ironic that tour life is kind of a perfect training for quarantine life. I say that it’s, I say that as ironic because obviously on tour you are almost constantly surrounded by other people. But being on the road taught me how to communicate from great distances. Right? Like I was keeping in touch with my fiance, now my husband, with my family, you know, you get real good at FaceTime and Skype. My last tour was before zoom was cool, but you get good at communicating with people that are far away. You get good at communicating in general. But also how to live with less. Like you have two suitcases and, and you don’t have the things that you quote need like my blue bottle coffee or my trader Joe’s weird items. Like you, you become far away from the things that you’re used to. And that is a reminder of how we can be resourceful and how we can live with less, which I think is a beautiful gift of this time. Um, but it also teaches you how to be adaptable and makes you cherish home, which is, which is something that we’re all, um, maybe getting a little sick of right now. But other than other than this like big picture muscle that you got really strong at, what are the other essential skills and mindsets that you took away from tour life?
You know, there’s well, in general tour life beyond my role and I’ve always been a big proponent of this and I’ve always talked to my clients about this and until this day, I’m a big believer that particularly the live entertainment industry, unlike any other industry in the world where you can call someone that in any other job is your direct competitor. Like, like I’ve had production managers had to go to their kids’ weddings and they’ve called another production manager to come fill in for a week. And I said, calling the CEO of your competitor company to let come fill in and know that in a week like you’re going to come back and the guy’s going to go, well there’s your show back again. And you know that it’s okay. We’re all friends. It’s a community that really lives and breathes upon the relationships and the friendships that you generate. We’re very lucky to consider, you know, our clients, our friends, we treat them with the same level of respect. And sometimes maybe you say the things that we tell friends and, but that is, that is a big sense of community because you are, you know, somebody told me once we had a wardrobe girl that was, it was her first tour. She came from TV and she’s like, you guys are always so angry. I’m like, well, will you see us doing a load? And I’m like, you have to understand there’s, there’s, there’s 90 people that Oh one their stuff to be in the same place at the same time. Yeah. It gets kind of tense, but after we’re done it’s like, Oh, let’s go have lunch, let’s go have lunch. And everybody’s fine. Like there is no animosity. I mean it does happen of course, but, but that sense of, of, of cooperation and community is like the best thing that comes out of that. And then probably the ability to panic last.
Ah, yes.
After, after you see enough things go wrong. Yeah. I tell people that because I used to be, I used to be a very angry roadie in the beginning of my career and then nothing happened. It just stopped. It was a very odd, like, there wasn’t like an enlightened, like nothing, you know? No, no sun beam came down and like shone on me. Uh, but now one of my things I say is like, you know, if the stage is on fire, yelling at the fire isn’t going to make it go away. Like you either let it burn or you go get the fire extinguisher. So you learn how not to panic. And nowadays it’s like, yeah, fuck it, let’s fix it or not fix it. But let’s, you know, everybody’s stopped yelling and running around. It’s okay.
It’s okay. Yes. That, that’s the other, um, quarantine prep. That life on tour has taught me when you’re working on really tight timelines and relatively high stakes circumstances, right? Like, you know, the doors are gonna open at seven o’clock and 70,000 people are going to come in here expecting to see this show and X isn’t working. Right. So we, we’ve gotten really good at responding to things.
Yeah. Like we’ve, we’ve had, uh, I had, I remember one of my first doors, uh, I don’t know why don’t exact, I don’t remember the whole thing. It was a while ago. Well we ended up with a bunch of smoke machine liquid on the stage. So the stage was I got a bit of a ice rink. It was either really cold or something. But yeah, I mean the dancers were like, we can’t do this anymore. So we had to go and spray Coke. And again, between numbers, like while the artist was speaking in the front, there was a bunch of guys behind like spraying Coke on the floor cause cause this is where like, you know, it’s, it’s impossible. It affects everyone.
That’s a really good example of responding to emergencies with creativity. And like I, the Coke, Coca Cola is an interesting tool. I’ve used it in classrooms as well as onstage. Um, I remember a show with JT that we did the Stade De France. Um, it was an, it’s an outdoor venue. It’s a soccer stadium and it was raining that day, which made for a really like Epic performance of Cry Me A River. Um, but it also was really, really dangerous. And I remember right before the show when it was just like misting our wardrobe, head of wardrobe started off sticking sandpaper on the bottom of our shoes, like double stick sandpaper. And I was like, I’ve never seen nor would I have ever thought of that. It was a great solution. So again, tour life, preparing you for real life, let’s get creative, let’s solve problems.
Tour life is ripe with opportunities to problem solve in a world where you’re doing the same show over and over, like sometimes hundreds of times. I’m continually continuously, continually, you know what constantly impressed at the number of things, even the number of new things that can go wrong. Another thing that’s unique to touring life as Iggy mentioned is that although it is a very competitive industry, there are so few people that get to do it and get to doing it really, really well. That when it comes to finding a substitute or a fill in of some sort, it’s not uncommon to ask your competitor to do that for you. Just imagine that for a second. So wild. It’s so wild to me. And that’s just the beginning of the, that is tour life. Iggy and I exchanged wild tour stories for quite a while, but you simply have to hear about who’s tour shut down a military airport. Want to take a guess if you guys correctly, I want to know that you guessed correctly. So send me a direct message, let me know words that move me podcast on Instagram. Okay, back we go.
I toured with Paul McCartney for a couple of years. I couldn’t really understand the apeal of the Beatles and stuff. I just, it wasn’t my generation. I wasn’t exposed to it until I did my tour and I was like, I get it. Like I get the a hundred thousand people in a stadium, you know, and it was just one of those monster shows where you get charted everywhere. It was amazing. Uh, but we, we saw some weird stuff in the tour and one of them we do literally, they shut down an airport because the radar, it was a military airport and their radar, every time they swung around would turn off and on all the video walls. And the promoter called the airport and the military captain or whatever, the guy in terms of the military airport went like, well, you know, we’ll turn it off if that’s the case. And it was, and we’re like, well, you know, it’s an airport, but we’ll have to figure out what to do with it. He goes, well, I don’t know. We’ll just, we’ll just turn it off. We’ll turn both of them off. Nuts!
That’s nuts. Holy smokes.
Its Paul Macartney, he gets away with it. You like, people will do whatever he needs to, you know.
Wow. The, the power, the power. Um, okay. So on the road as crew chief, uh, you got to know the artists. You got to know big audiences. You, you got to see shows like on the ground, and then you became a designer, sort of transitioned into the, the artistic side. Um, and you must have been up to your ears and software and tech and all sorts of things. I don’t even know come along with that profession. Um, could you actually explain the role and importance of a lighting designer for a live show?
Yeah. And it depends a bit. I mean, now the things are a bit more combined. Back then there was a very big distinction between rock and roll and corporate and TV. Now, you know, everything has a camera. We all carry a camera with us. So, so we kind of have to light for everything. Like the essence of design is a, it’s the most elegant solution to a problem. So the thing is you’d have to reframe what your problems are. And for me there’s always three. There’s an artistic problem of how do we make this look good? How do we make the artists look good? How, or my now we do a little corporate, you know, how do we keep the brand and the theme of the show, there’s been, you know, the producers design a show and we have to keep that going. Um, how do we make them look good on camera, on to a live audience? How are they comfortable on stage? There is a monetary problem, there’s always a budget. And how do we get the show with this amount of money? And that’s what a lot of our relationships with vendors come into play. Um, and then there’s a physical problem, which is I can design the biggest show in the world, all the money in the world. And if it doesn’t fit in the building or the building can hold the weight, then we go back to square one. So you have to balance all those, those three things. Um, some were in there and it’s not a problem, but it’s a thing you have to, there’s always also cooperation with other departments. You know, you have to talk to the video crew and make sure that, you know, our color temperature works with our cameras and talk to the sonic guy to know that he didn’t put a bunch of lights in front of a drape that’s gonna catch on fire. Like a lot of times the older guys have to, they have a much more physics approach to things, to the situation. So kind of with the software tells them the speakers have to go, they have to go an something in front of like the, like the lights up the guys, but we have to move around, you know, you move two inches that way and I moved two inches this way and maybe we can make it work. So yeah, it’s a lot of balancing but, but I think those are the three main areas that we tend to juggle. So heat and as an audience member at a show, you might have no idea that all of that had to be considered.
Oh, what else do you wish that people knew about what you do?
Yeah, yeah. I can probably tell you, you know, like without lighting, it’s just, it’s just radio. But, uh, no, I think there is, and then maybe depends on where you come from. Is, is that whatever we do is for their enjoyment. Uh, I’m a big believer, I started in nightclubs in Argentina. I’m a big believer that people should attend an event and not go see one. So I tend to like the audience a lot more cause I want them to be a part of like, I think especially corporate after you’re there for 12 hours looking at a guy on stage, you want your environmental react to it. Um, but at the end goal is to help our clients tell their story and help the audience enjoy what they’re seeing.
You talked a little bit about lighting for everything, um, in regards to TV or live or like a big stage show. Um, and then you referenced that being, because everybody now has a camera in their pocket. So has that made your job like exponentially difficult because things need to look good from all angles for all lenses? Like how do you even approach that task?
Maybe not exponentially. It’s just added another layer that we need to balance. Um, there’s always been, and this is very probably very, very, you know, on the nose because you do work with, you know, you work in the dance community and there’s always been this little rift right between the techs and the dancers and, um, Oh, you know, we liked dancers so they look good for example, but we also have to make sure that they can see and they know what’s happening on stage. And then we’ve had many arguments many times of like, I can’t see the Mark and If l light the mark, you look terrible and you know, and then, and then we, then we have that second layer of what the audience sees. And then, and then we had to add, like there’s always cameras and I imagine, but it was never a thing. But now that since they’re there and they’re all HD and the screens are incredible, well, we’re going to like, so I like, usually I light my artists, like they’re televised. Um, these iphones. They’re, they’re very forgiving, but we just don’t know. We don’t know if the CEO is up there doing his big speech, if he’s going to go backstage and watch it on a calibrated screen with a camera, the right angle, or if there’s an assistant that’s going to shoot the video that she showed in her iPhone, that from down here up his nose, you know, so it has to look good for everyone and people take these, they’re their memories. You know, nowadays, I mean, I don’t know if anyone goes back to look at it. I was scrolling through my photos and I was like, I can’t believe I still have these videos. I’ve never seen them. Um, but people have the intentions of good. I mean it’s, it’s part of our skillset to do it, so we should do it.
Incredible. Great answer. Thank you. I’m fascinated at the difference. You’ve highlighted a few between corporate versus concert events. Um, what are, what are some standouts? Like what are, as far as your angle of getting a job done
All right. Now this might come as a shock you, but I don’t spend much time at big corporate events. Even before the covid shut down. I was super interested to hear how, wow my wrist makes a snapping sound every time I twist it like this. The things you learn when you’re doing a podcast. Anyways, I was very interested to hear about how many factors a lighting designer has to take into consideration when they’re working for a big corporation. The audience, especially for example, a tour can blast an audience with light and lasers and strobes for an hour and a half and that’s fine. More or less, I mean, unless you’re pregnant or have other health conditions, but imagine being faced with that with like concert tour level lighting for eight hours a day for five days of a big conference or something. Oh wait, that’s basically Coachella. Okay, well imagine going to a yogurt land conference because if I went to a corporate event, it would be a yogurt land conference, but imagine a big yogurt studio event that was lit entirely red gross. Or imagine going to a big tech firms, new product reveal or a car reveal or something that’s lit. The way the play place at McDonald’s is lit. Very confusing, very not hot. So much respect to the lighting designers out there. Really consider that everything you see has been considered by someone else if they’re doing it right. That is okay. So now Iggy finds himself firmly on the business side of a business that is not so firm at all at the moment. Let’s hear Iggy’s take on the current state of live and in person events. From the business point of view.
Three months ago, we, my schedule was so packed that I was going to be home for, I think it was something like five days and a couple of months. Uh, and, and in 48 hours living 40 hours, we went from that to not having anything for six months. Um, so that was, I mean, besides the, the, the whipsaw that we got from that, um, you know, we, what we see, we, we were very lucky that we managed to transfer a couple of shows to virtual shows. So we, we broadcast them. So we kind of, in a week we had to turn the thing that was designed for a live audience into something that was designed to be shot with zoom. And it was, it was that probably the one of the first, um, in this new era of, of zoom broadcast events. Um, and it was a show for Hyundai uh, for a car reveal. Um, since then, yeah, that’s gonna be the next few months is going to be film green-screen corporate shows. Um, you know, a lot of our vendors have built entire streaming studios in their, in their warehouses. There’s been a lot of sudden appreciation for a set of the technology that I think even us, we just didn’t have like bandwidth and how do we get all this stuff into a computer and, and how do people see it and then like who can see it properly? How does the audio work and stuff a week go through scale that, you know, where the money, you know, as much bigger than, than, and the pressure is much larger. Mmm. You know, we still, we, we get pinged a few times a week about doing virtual events and we try to navigate our clients through it. Um, you know, and, and a lot of it has, the sense of cooperation between parties has been huge because everybody’s suffering at the same time. This isn’t like the TV guys suddenly have no work and we’re doing great. Or in the recession back in 2008 where the touring market kind of kicked off a bit because people couldn’t travel there. People just didn’t have money there. So they couldn’t travel. So then we’ll go see shows or touring kind of became these mega shows that we have now incorporated disappeared cause nobody had money. Uh, now just nobody has anything. Nobody can leave their house, nobody can get together. Nobody has money. So it’s, it’s stuff but, but you know, industries have to continue working. Um, people still have to sell things and people still develop products and um. It’s the right thing to do. We’ll continue to do virtual events and we think that in the future we’re going to have some sort of hybrid thing where there’s going to be 10 people in a room with everyone brought guests and there’s going to be 50 people in a room and there’s going to be a hundred. And it will slowly tip her up to like, I don’t think it will be in, in a month. They’re going to go, ah, everybody in that stadium, let’s go. Like it’s just not going to happen.
All right. I had to jump out here because Iggy mentioned something very interesting that I hadn’t really considered before this moment during the recession in 2008 I was coming off of my first tour with JT and I started working almost immediately for Cirque de Solei and some of you are going to hate me for saying this, but I’m saying this because it’s an interesting observation. I think it’s worth shining some light on, sorry, I can’t help myself. These puns. Anyways, I didn’t own a home at the time. I didn’t even have rent. I’d gotten rid of my apartment right before we started touring and then Cirque housed me in Montreal for a short period and then for another short stint in Vegas. And as a humble dancer and dance teacher, my humble bank account was more or less immune to the wiggles and wobbles of the needle in terms of America’s economy. That’s how it was at the time anyways. Okay. I’m totally speculating here and you could probably shoot a million holes in my theory and please bring it, but my guess is that tour’s did relatively well in 2008 because a people couldn’t afford to travel, so they were willing to save up and shell out for the big shows that traveled to them, especially the shows that scooped them up into another world, a world where they felt sexy and cool and rich and free from all of their worries and stuff. It’s not uncommon actually. I think people use entertainment, music, movies, concerts, comedy shows, other shows, wink, wink to buffer negative emotions. Yeah. That was me raising my hand. The office was my drug of choice several years ago. Man, those belly laughs and even tears really helped me ignore many of the negative emotions that I really should have been processing. So raise your hand if you’re spending more than average or more than a healthy amount of time buffering with Netflix these days. Yeah, entertainment, whatever the platform, whatever the mode of distribution will always survive. We’re like a cockroach. Okay, let’s file that under similes I will never use again. Okay. Back on track. Back to my theory. Part B of this is that I’ve noticed that most parents will make big, big sacrifices in order to preserve the quality of life for their children. So as a dance teacher whose bread and butter came from teaching kids between seven and 17 again, yes, I did see a bit of a change during 2008 but I was far from out of a job. People worked really, really hard to keep their kids in dance class to keep their kids around dance and art and entertainment because those are the things that bring us joy. Those are the things that enhance our quality of life. Our covid crisis circumstances are quite different in the sense that travel, AKA touring and training and entertainment industries like movies and amusement parks are among the hardest hit. But the silver lining and you know that I have a silver lining, is that entertainment is as good as immortal. As long as there are people, there will be stories to tell and as long as there are stories to tell, there will be dance and theater and jokes and film and so on and so on. Okay. So that is my theory. Like it or not. Let’s jump back in now and talk about the future of entertainment and stories, specifically books.
What I’m experiencing in dance in my work as a choreographer and as a teacher is affected in several different ways right now obviously, no, I’m not going on a tour at the moment. Um, and I’m also not going to any auditions at the moment and there aren’t, I know of a few, but there aren’t as many commercial opportunities. Um, I have heard of a few really interesting commercial shoots where production is, is delivering equipment to the homes of the talent and then the talent will shoot it themselves on whatever the camera, probably an iPhone or something, um, that they were sent. And then somebody from production will pick it back up when they’re done, sanitize it and get the data off of it and make, make a thing. So
Brilliant idea. Yeah, I’ve never heard of that.
I think there will be a lot of creative ways and like you mentioned a lot of ways that we get to work together to try to solve this problem and it’s all of our first time we are leveled and humbled by this unprecedented thing. But, um, the other area that I wanted to take a look at is this teaching for, for me and training for most professionals and for aspiring professionals is getting a huge punch in the face right now because most dance classes are not one-on-one. Most dance classes happen in person and in huge groups. So what we’re seeing, especially I think zoom is probably right, the most utilized zoom and Instagram live, um, for training right now for dancers. But, uh, on both of those audio lag and video quality are huge issues. I have basically no way of knowing that they see the right time. And timing is, is, is a big part of what we do. I won’t say that it, I won’t say that it’s everything, but it’s a big deal. Um, have you seen or do you have a futures glance at solutions to those types of problems?
No, it’s funny cause we, we talked about this and especially, you know, I still have a couple of dance classes was very obviously off sync I’m not obviously not a dancer. So if I can tell, you know, like it’s pretty obvious that it’s going to be pretty awkward for people to take that class if that happens. You know, we sync stuff constantly, uh, through video. Um, I think that this keeps growing. There will be a point and this may exist and I may just not be aware of it. Then maybe there must be a way that you can on the front side, sync up the sound.
Even when you are live, like at a concert stadium, what your eyes see is definitely different than what your ears hear, especially if you’re in the nosebleeds. So in a way, this isn’t a problem that’s exclusive to zoom
Sound sound guys have to take into consideration delay and fades or, yeah, constantly. I think that the problem where the internet comes in is that everybody has a different, it’s not a controlled environment as much as concerts. I’m not controlled, but everybody has different internet providers and speeds and qualities. Yeah. Well I’ve thought about it lately. I think that that’s going to become a thing. And again, it may exist. I may just not,
Speaking of it may exist. My husband and I watched minority report last night, which came out in 2008 but it takes place. The story takes place in 2050, something like 20, 50 something. So the, the distant but not unimaginable future. Um, and my husband and I like to joke, it had been a while since we’d seen it. It was not our first time watching it, but it had been awhile. We now are calling it acrylic report because all of the tech in that movie is made from Plexiglas. Um, and like not even that great looking, just like everything is acrylic hysterical. But, but there were some things that I think they really got right. For example, there’s this, like your irises get scanned and people are tracking your location and using your eye scan to target advertisements to you in a way that’s already happening. Right? Like my phone knows where I am and they know what I’m looking at and that information is being used to sell me things. Um, but one of the things that happened in this movie that, that particularly caught my eye, and I’m wondering if it is happening already, probably is, is this idea of nightclubs with individual pods where humans go in and have a virtual experience, whether it’s acting out some fantasy, be it awful or pleasurable, um, or something like I just want to go into a room and feel flattered for a second. I want people to tell me nice things about myself or I want to be the pop star for a change or, right. Um, now it doesn’t seem like that is all too far off. Do you know of things like that already happening?
Right. So speaking of the business, um, you mentioned that your firm Lightswitch is really committed to coming out of this. And by this I mean, um, Corona times, uh, coming out of it better than you went in. So you might not come out of it with more money, but you’ll come out of it with more skills. Um, how is your company and then how are you focused on that?
Well, you know, we were, we were kind of in a bit of a transition. We have, uh, we’ve, we’ve all used the same lighting system for, for a while now, uh, in the company, the new system, the new console came out, uh, right before this happened. Um, so I, you know, I just, I spent the last couple of weeks, you know, getting trained on it because I, you know, unfortunately I don’t have one, but, but there’s an offline version of pages in the computer. So I’ve been learning how to use it. Um, and a lot of it has been just talking to one another and Hey, what are you doing and how are things, and I met these, not necessarily a skillset of something technical, but keeping everybody grounded and, and you know, connected. And so a lot of, you know, happy hours and emails and keeping people at bridge and help with people with, you know, a lot of our, a lot of our people have, um, small companies, um, and they’ve been trying to get the loans that we have from the giant chain amongst lighting designers of, of, of, you know, my bank did this and my bank did that. And how did we get this protection loan? Um, I’ve been reading, I mean, I used to read a lot as a kid and then I stopped when I discovered the internet ruined me, but I moved a boomer myself. I didn’t know that I could, I could stay up late and watch TV so they didn’t have a problem. Uh, but I mean, I’ve been reading for graciously since this started. Um, which is good. I have a ton of books that I’ve always like half read, so I’ve been finishing them off. Um, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s just a lot out. There’s, there’s only so much we can do training wise, you know, online without the gear. But, you know, we’ve, I’ve been talking to a lot of manufacturers about, you know, stuff that they’re doing, um, helping them with their marketing. And a lot of them I’ve trained, I’ve changed their marketing from just advertisements and selling to, to teaching up and coming designers how to do stuff. So we’ve, we’ve done a couple of those and we’re going to continue doing them. Um, yeah, I mean, maybe we just come out of better people.
Um, I’m so glad that you brought up books. Uh, I was having a conversation with my husband before this interview and, um, he’s an engineer and an artist and many, many things. And, uh, one of his first projects, one of the things that made him, uh, famous is a book scanning machine. And this was years and years and years ago when, uh, digitization of books was really a hot topic for intellectual property reasons. And, um, he brought up a really great point, which was right now we’re digitizing our live product, which is my dancing, my classes and those things are becoming digital. So when people ask me, do you think this is going to kill classes? Do you think this is going to kill concerts? Like if people can have it in their living room at any time on demand, um, are they going to stop going to classes once classes are a thing again? Are they going to stop going to concerts once concerts are a thing again? And my answer to that, at least for now, yeah, is people still have books, right? People still touch books. People still read books. Yes, they became digital. Yes, that happened. But most of the people that I know and talk to still prefer the real thing. Um, they’re shareable. They are notated like you can write in numbers, there’s art to it and you can, and you can give them to one another. You can transfer them. You can like smell them.
Don’t get me wrong. I do have a Kindle and I read them. I can though, which came out of touring because when I started we didn’t have Kindles and I would have a suitcase full of books and books are heavy. Yeah. So, so we do have Kindles. Yeah. Books are great. It’s good to have. I love that. Horrible chill. Yeah. I think it’s, I think it’s a helpful analogy to think of for, for those of us that are looking at this with a, this doom and gloom a thought that, that this means the end of a certain thing. It definitely, definitely means a change. Yeah. We’re adaptable. I mean, if anything, humans are incredibly adaptable. Right. Um, and we like connection. You know, we’re not, we’re never not going to go and try and share a concert of music and our favorite band and the mindset that comes with it. Um, which is not the same if you’re going to living them by yourself. I mean, it happened. It may have to happen. Um, there, there may be a good side to this and how we reach people, how to communicate with people, but I think people will always want to go to a concert or a show and, and talk to other people in the hog and, and express their uniqueness and how they dress and that kind of stuff.
Yeah. Oh man, my dressing has gotten very unique for these last months. And by unique, I mean, Oh, I wear whatever in the heck I want and then I wear it for five days straight. Um, well thank you so much for sharing your insights, your expertise. I’m just, I’m floored and always very interested to talk to non dancers, but people that have had a similar experience, whether it’s on tour or in problem solving, which is what I believe this whole creative game is about. Very, very cool. Thank you very much, Iggy, for taking the time. Yeah, I’ll talk to you very soon, I hope. Bye.
Thought you were done. No. Now I’m here to remind you that all of the important people, places and things mentioned in this episode can be found on my website, the Dana wilson.com/podcast finally, and most importantly now you have a way to become a words that move me member, so kick fall changeover to patrion.com/w T M M podcast to learn more and join. All right, everybody now I’m really, really done. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll talk to you soon.
