ProSoundWeb: One of the most rewarding things about working corporate and special events is the diversity in the kinds of work I get to do. It’s not uncommon to jump from a small sales conference to a swanky fundraising gala to a high-end product launch all within the span of a couple of weeks.
4 comments:
Corporate events are something I am pretty interested in shifting my focus towards. I like the fact that I would be working on such a diverse spectrum of projects, and that it is often similarly paced to theater. I find it exciting that the information available and order of the process is different every time. I agree with the author that sometimes it may seem like overkill to do all of this prep for smaller events, but that it is necessary and helpful to do it anyways. Having a personal process that is set in stone to a degree is really helpful when working in a more fluid situation. You have to create order in a state of chaos. Not relying on a manager to create that structure is something that I feel like a lot of people do not consider. Having multiple stopgaps, like the author says, makes it so that a discrepancy that slips by the project manager can be caught by someone else.
I think that this was a great expose on a management adjacent position that a lot of times we see theatre managers come from or end up leaving theatre to go to these types of jobs. I personally don’t think that I would enjoy this type of job as a career but the intricacies of the job are really intriguing to me and I would love to be able to shadow someone taking on this role, especially for a big corporate event just to really get a feel for how it works in the moment. This article does a good job of breaking that information down though and explaining what the person does to get ready and make sure they are the most prepared that they can be to do the job efficiently. I love that a lot of the language that this person uses when describing her job is something that you would find a project manager or production manager using to describe what they do and how they prep for a show, especially if they are the PM at a theatre that brings shows in.
This was a neat article. One because of its ties to the corporate world. I have not really delved into anything corporate but I don’t think I would be opposed to managing it. For one the pay is usually better. It also is a great way to remind oneself that the world is bigger than the stage and the perspective of the world around us. It also reminds me that all the world is a performance, at the end of the day, it is the people who tech the performance that helps the world turn around and continue to grow. The second reason I liked this article was the perspective to the sound world. I’ve taken two sound classes in my life and have worked cue lab and a mixing board once. Sound is complicated and blows my mind scientifically. I always admire anyone who can work in the sound world and understand all the science and math behind it. The fact that this guy can take napkin drawings and small lists of needs and succeed in bringing people together and their vision to life is really cool.
I think that it is pretty cool to see the steps that the author takes pre-production to create a show because a lot of times professionals who have done this stuff for a long time will skip steps in their explanations. It is not even intentional either, they just do not even need to think about the steps of the process because they have done it so many times that it has become second nature to them. This can lead to students and newer people in the industry getting confused and/or skipping steps because they were not told about them and did not know any better. However, this article has what seems to be a good list of step by step descriptions of the process that the author follows when he starts working on a show, along with the reasoning behind each step. It was interesting to read about someone’s process.
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