Just wondering if anyone has thoughts about doing all the lighting and video myself for a small concert tour (I have experience with both, but more lighting) or hiring a dedicated video person for the design? I like the idea of having an entire integrated design as my own, but I hear a lot of arguments about lighting guys not being projection designers, etc.

It’s often true that lighting guys are not projection designers and many try to dive into the projection discipline simply because they have access to lighting-company produced media servers and feel that that gives them the ability to do it all. Whereas those eye-candy tools are great they most certainly do not rewrite the rules of projection design and learning those rules on the job can have disastrous consequences for a career that you’ve worked long and hard to advance.

Personally, I’m a fan of taking full control of the entire design. That being said, there’s rarely any time that I do it all myself in terms of the technicalities. There will inevitably be separate lighting and video programmers and usually a separate content creation company. In many instances I insist that the video programmer also have the ability to make basic edits to the separately provided video content.

The real trick is to remember not to sell yourself short in getting compensated for that work. I say this not in being a greedy capitalist but rather in the vein of having proper resources to produce the final product. The concept of full design control often tends to fail in that some lighting designers try to take on the roll of projection designer as part of their fee. The overall design ends up suffering because those designers do one of two things. They either burn out because of the overwhelming workload that they didn’t expect or the overall design suffers greatly because they don’t have the proper budget to support the individual disciplines.

Doing both can be tough. Doing both really well can be downright hard. You need to make sure that you set yourself up for success by researching your product choices properly, clearly knowing their strengths and limitations, and making certain that all of your basis are covered in terms of support in both the design and implementation phases.

as a video designer, of course i’d have to say ‘you need a projection designer’ ;)

at the risk of being branded a ‘benedict arnold’, my objective answer would be that it really depends on the specific job. true, i don’t always love the video that lighting designers make… however, the total impact on stage may work just fine. e.g.- even when i recognize i’m seeing the same stock footage fire clip for the umpteenth time, probably most kids in the audience are just pumped to see the pyro on screen. i think we’re still in the early stages of the lighting/video convergence, so now may be the best time to try out your ideas for integrating the video and lights. imho, audiences will become increasingly discerning and there may be less freedom to experiment down the road. so, as long as you feel you can deliver projections that will thrill your audiences and client, it may be okay for this gig that ‘lighting guys aren’t projection designers’. hire a video operator or technician to assist if you don’t want to handle all the responsibility.

~benton-c

I’m “old school” and quite happy being just the lighting designer with hiring a video designer to work side-by-side. That being said, I see a new position emerging - that of the “visual designer”
A role which encompasses the lighting-static and moving-and the projection and other visual effects. This would mean not only knowing the ins-and-outs of color and programming but fundamentals of graphic and video composition and design. Quite a menu! If it is a small enough venue - go for it - We all cut our teeth on small venues where we had no idea what we were doing but eventually worked it out and even made some in-roads with the development of gear and consoles. Good Luck.