Messages

121

The Green Room / Re: Professional Ethics: Hearing about a job

« on: Jun 14, 2015, 04:21 pm »

What do you value more, the relationship or the gig?
How will you feel if you both wind up on the gig?
How will you feel if they turn around and do the same thing to you?
How will you deal with gossipy fallout that could affect others sharing future opportunities with you?

Personally I see this as comparable to stealing your friend's date. Sometimes you are the better person for the position but the timing is not really appropriate.

122

Self-Promotion / Re: Latest Project - starting a company - need your help!

« on: Jun 10, 2015, 05:30 pm »

Latest update from new company land:

- We're open! Yay!
- We were covered by ChicagoInno today. Also Yay!
- We're crowdfunding our remaining startup costs on Indiegogo. Not gonna do a top ad on here since we aren't a non-profit and I follow my own advertising rules, but we could use a little help if you feel so inclined. At this moment we're 25% of the way to our goal with about 3 weeks left.

Many thanks to those of you on my FB feed (who have probably heard enough about this by now) and to all of you who've been following the RentConfident saga.

123

Stage Management: Plays & Musicals / Re: Wardrobe Runsheet

« on: Jun 05, 2015, 09:55 am »

Maybe it's the people I worked with, but I never knew a dresser who wouldn't bite your head off if you tried to give them run sheets.

The furthest I ever had to go was to get a list of entrances and exits to the wardrobe crew. I would give them some basic paperwork, 95% blank space, so that they could write down the process they use for each individual change for the sake of documentation and crew replacement. But I would not dictate when and where every single piece of clothing had to be placed on or removed from individual bodies.

124

The Green Room / Re: ARTICLE: Arden Theatre Gala- dealing with the unexpected

« on: Jun 04, 2015, 06:48 pm »

Man that threw me back in time over a decade. Around this time of year in 2002 I dealt with a similar situation. I subsequently used the experience as a starter scenario for Student Stage Manager Challenge #2.

125

Self-Promotion / Re: Latest Project - starting a company - need your help!

« on: May 31, 2015, 05:50 pm »

Thank you!

VSM, if you need to make a stop in Chicago I'm happy to help you out anytime. That goes for the rest of you too.

Our attorney does a lot of work with agents who rep for pro athletes. He said our reports could be useful for finding good short term housing for out-of-town athletes and performers. If you guys know company managers who book seasonal talent, it might be worth passing us along to them.

126

Self-Promotion / Re: Latest Project - starting a company - need your help!

« on: May 29, 2015, 08:30 pm »

Quick update on this. After 9 months of development, the website for my new company is ready to launch. We open to the public this coming Monday, June 1. Press releases went out today so we've got a press preview version of the site up at RentConfident.com.

Stop by and check it out, and please spread the word if you know people who are looking for apartments or involved in the apartment industry!

127

The Hardline / Re: AEA Council Election 2015

« on: May 25, 2015, 10:21 pm »

Congrats to the latest SMNetwork member to join the ranks of the AEA Council, Ms. RuthNY!

128

Employment / Re: Needing A Fresh Set Of Eyes

« on: May 18, 2015, 06:50 pm »

And tactful. Thanks for reporting back!

129

Introductions / Re: Recent Graduate 2015

« on: May 09, 2015, 04:03 pm »

Welcome. I recommend posting some content throughout the site so potential hirers you're looking to attract see you as an active contributor and can learn what your personality and experiences have been.

130

The Green Room / Re: College student here!

« on: May 05, 2015, 12:04 am »

kaoleary1, we look forward to working to assist you over on the Homework Help board once you've done some work to contribute to the SMNetwork community.

In the meantime, if you're on a writing deadline and don't have time to make the requisite 5 posts to unlock Homework Help, I suggest you use the search function (upper right corner in the desktop version, upper left button in the mobile version) to search through our 15 years of archived discussions. We've covered the material you're looking for many times over. A quick search on the term "designers" turns up about 700 results for me.

You can use Citation Machine to generate proper attribution for any SMNetwork discussions you wish to quote in your paper.

If your paper is intended for publication, such as in a scholarly journal or trade publication, or for other commercial ("for money") reproduction including blogs with ad revenue streams, please obtain permission from the original poster of the text you wish to quote before including it.

Good luck with the paper. Post locked.

131

The Green Room / Time lapse of stadium conversion from hockey to basketball

« on: Apr 22, 2015, 04:12 am »

So I know sports aren't a main thing for a lot of you. For those of you who are unaware, Chicago currently has a basketball team (the Bulls) and a hockey team (the Blackhawks) in the respective season playoffs. The two teams both play home games at an arena called the United Center. The changeovers are rapid and thorough, with other events mixed in. At one point last month they had to do basketball -> hockey -> basketball -> rock concert -> basketball -> hockey in the span of a week.

Our local paper, the Chicago Tribune, recently posted this neat time lapse and explanation of how the United Center deck crew handles the 2 hour changeover from ice to wood and back again. I thought it might be of interest for those of you who are curious about "backstage" work in arenas.

http://graphics.chicagotribune.com/gamechangers/

132

The Green Room / Re: Employment after a Career as a Stage Manager

« on: Apr 20, 2015, 02:49 am »

I really enjoyed my time as an apartment agent and then as a real estate agent after leaving stage management. There's quite a bit the two have in common. Both require calm and even personalities, excellent time management skills, and an ability to deal with fussy people who think they are the center of the earth in high stress situations. Both require an ability to properly set the stage for persuasion. Both have non-traditional schedules, a constantly shifting group of people, and a feast or famine sort of income. In both cases, you're dealing with people when their masks are off.

There is very little difference between a showing and a show, it's just that the former is over far faster. Think 10 or more tiny improvised performances in a day instead of one or two big scripted ones.

However, as an agent the wages were far higher, the interaction with unpleasant people could be minimized in ways that I could control, and I got to rove about the city during daylight hours and poke about in other people's homes. In rental I was seeing anywhere from 40 to 80% of the first month's rent as take home, and in sales it was about 1.5% of the sale price of a house.

If you don't like the networking and self-promotion that comes with freelance theatre you will NOT enjoy real estate, as that aspect of it is constant. You need to keep in contact with your customers and set time aside every day for developing new leads. It isn't as much of a cutthroat hard sell as you see in "Glengarry Glen Ross" anymore, but you do still have to self-promote constantly. You will deal with a ton of rejection, both of you and your product. Real estate attracts a lot of politically & fiscally conservative folks, so if you can't stand being in a pro-life, right wing, gun-toting office you might want to look elsewhere.

There's also lots of support careers in the real estate industry that might serve. Mortage brokers & bankers, legal & paralegal, property management, condo association management, moving companies, home inspectors and title companies are all involved and share chunks of the stage management skillset.

133

Introductions / Re: Hey everyone

« on: Apr 16, 2015, 10:40 pm »

Welcome! Thanks for joining!

134

Employment / Re: Production photos on Website

« on: Apr 15, 2015, 10:54 pm »

Creating a marketing website is a lot like creating a theatre with scenery.

A western theatre with scenery is constructed so that every aspect implies and leads the audience towards suspending their disbelief and joining the cast in the world of the play. Certain elements - the box office, the programs, the seating and proscenium arch - are all expected elements that indicate "theatre" to a Western audience. Scenery, costumes and lighting all give the trained audience clues as to what world they will be visiting today. It's all selling the idea of the show to the viewers.

However, if you were doing theatre for a small tribe in an undeveloped country, where performance tended towards ritual and shamanistic practices, the "theatre" and "scenery" you would use might be quite different. To sell the show to this group, you'd have to alter the entire environment to suit their expectations.

When you're browsing the web, there are also clues you can find in the design that tell you instantly both the goal of the site and the target audience. Looking at the link I included above, there's an obvious difference between the one for the pizzeria at the top, the one with the watch in the middle, and the one at the bottom for Dreamworks. They all have similar elements, and they're all marketing something, but you know immediately from looking at them who they're trying to reach and the atmosphere they wish to convey. If you took all the text away from each of those sites you'd still be in the company's world.

The pizzeria uses warm tones and a layout that reminds you of a restaurant menu. The one with the watch uses neutral greys with a tiny poof of color to imply business and technology, and the bareness echoes the design of the watch itself. The one for the movie uses a bright color palette and a very busy screen to appeal to kids and capture the "zany" aspect of the cartoon.

In the case of a stage manager marketing website, who is your audience? PMs and Directors? What color palette clearly implies technical theatre to them? What images and layout will help to emphasize that you speak their language and can work with them? What would invite them into your stage management experience? If your site had no text at all, would they be able to get your point?

Another case in point is SMNetwork itself. It's got a very sparse design that I've deliberately kept quite consistent over the past decade or so. That's because my target audience prefers order and predictability. The blue is the default theme that comes with our forum software, but keeping it on the default was a deliberate choice. When I created new features (BTDT and the Internship Survey) I had to re-create the that "look" on the new pages. Blue is nice and calm. The boxes and rows are old-fashioned but reassuringly consistent. It isn't too fancy - also deliberate. For new visitors, encountering this site with its 15+ years of archives and roster of professionals is daunting enough without having to navigate a snooty interface.

135

Employment / Re: Production photos on Website

« on: Apr 15, 2015, 02:57 am »

There's two reasons to add images to a site: form and function. Looking at the SMNetwork site, you see examples of both. Your personal avatar serves a function - it lets visual learners quickly know who's speaking in a post. However, the medium blue gradient bars at the top and bottom of the posting area in the desktop version of the site (also images) serve no purpose except to give the eye a rest and spruce up the page a bit. Devs often refer to this stuff as the "chrome" of the site. Much like chrome on a car, it's pretty and shiny and utterly useless, but makes the output look like what the viewer expects.

As a stage manager you want to project that you have a sense of visual propriety and composition. You want to convey that you're organized and able to reproduce a certain aesthetic as specified by the design team. You are targeting people who are likely to hire you - artists who think visually. You need to appeal to them not only through your site's content (text) but also through its layout.

Unlike a designer you probably don't need to include images from your past productions as a portfolio per se. However, plain text sites are boring, look unprofessional, and do not adhere to the modern expectation of website design and aesthetic. It needs chrome, and more than just a background color and a few wingdings.

Take a look at this overview of current web design trends and see if you can spot which of the author's examples are using images for a function, and which are using them solely as decor.

Perhaps you include the production photos, but as faint watermark style backgrounds or closely cropped vignettes that zoom in on stage managerly details?