This website has a number of sections such as blog, a gallery of my graphic and theatre work and anything else i feel like throwing up.
About me:
My viewpoint on life is do as much as possible in the little time we have and so far here's what i can do to a high level of competence. There is a page(or will be soon!) for each section on this site:
I recently designed a website for my Brothers emerging photography talent, it's nothing hugely special but incorporates a gallery and of course blogging features. He gets work with car sports photography so there’s heaps of sweet car shots.
Have a squiz at http://jmedia.net.au
This year Hawker College and their arts, dance and music departments collaborated to put together a full evening of artistic talent. The evening began with a few showcasing dance items, then the fashion class modeled their works, fifteen pieces in total with accompanying ‘introductory to the brand’ video projections.
After this part of the show there was a half hour interval where the schools Jazz band setup on stage, this gave the audience the opportunity to tour the students major art and graphic design exhibits that had been setup in the Drama room, and the art gallery under appropriate lighting.
I was contracted in to tech manage the show and make sure it all ran smoothly, during the show I ran audio, a simple matter of juggling a few CDs with dance tracks.
Pre-show there was half a day of rehearsals for the dance students and models to get the hang of what they were doing, during their rehearsal the two person crew, myself and a year twelve student, ran the cues as per their need.
During some free time that week I added to the lighting rig, tidying up the rig from the schools last productions to the standard rig I designed. I also added 240v par cans in to the rig and some extra Fresnel’s for a clean white wash up the center of the stage for the model ‘cat walk’. If budget or time had been permitting I would have rigged parallel lighting bars for a much fuller and tighter light pool.
Lighting
Sound
JBL in-house system
The show itself wasn’t very tasking, I operated sound and projector blanking while my other operator ran lighting and cued the video clips for the fashion parades. It had to flow smoothly from the MCs to the video, fade up lighting at the end for the fashion models, then fade down as they left the stage back to MCs.
Every Semester Hawker College have two moderation concerts for their music classes assessment by third party musicians not associated with the school. The first evening is traditionally performances by the Classical class, then at least five numbers by the Jazz band, each piece highlights solo’s by the different students. The second evening is for the contemporary class, consisting of mostly bands of three members to five members, however some solo pieces or duets are often heard too.
This school semester I was contracted in to organize, tech rehearse and run these two shows so they ran smoothly as the previous semester was not so good. It also gave the students a nice big end of year performance for the year twelve leavers to remember. I pulled some strings and brought in some extra equipment from a good mate of mine Adrian Rytir from FX Group as well as some front of house audio equipment from Eclipse Lighting and Sound, whom I work for.
Before I go any further I’ll just quickly list all the equipment we had involved:
Lighting
Sound
For this production the lighting wasn’t as important, Sound was a much higher importance due to the students being assessed, however in saying that Adrian brought in some of his gear to test around with and get a better feel for his Sunlite software – added to the overall show greatly!
A Typical Student
I have done these moderation concerts before with the in-house equipment – never enough – and have found learnt that musicians generally don’t know a thing any further than 2 meters from them. What I’m implying is they have no clue of the real sound out in the audience, that they are not balanced and too loud. Taking this as experience I had words to each band that came on during the rehearsal as to how it should work, that I am mixing them front of house, that as long as they hear themselves fine as a band – it’ll all be ok. With the exception of the Jazz band (although the guitarist was more of a rock guitarist and still turned up too loud), all guitarists were too loud and drummers found the need to bash their kits. I respect some of the pieces called for this, they sounded great respectively.
Learning by Hearing
It was a big learning curve operating for this concert as I prefer Lighting, but as Sound is still very unknown to me I thought a school production was a very good place to experiment and get the feel for things. I prepped myself a week or two before by reading articles on sound mixing, proper use of compressors and equalization. While this still didn’t prepare me completely, I am pretty sure I had the hang of it at more than a basic level by the end.
Towards the end of 2007 I was contracted to design and build a simplistic website for Canberra, ACT, Animal Liberation. The site includes a shop, media posts and the potential for a collective blog.
I personally like their logo, however I did not design it myself, just the rest of the site.
