You ever think about the sheer volume of tech that goes into the entertainment industry? If you haven’t, you should; it’s quite mind-boggling.
Now, when I say “the entertainment industry,” I don’t just mean movies. Of course movies involve a metric butt-load of camera work and editing equipment, not to mention lights and practical effects. But films aren’t shown live, so things don’t have to be quite so meticulous. That’s not the case with live entertainment like concerts or television shows with studio audiences.
At a pop concert, for example, there’s always lots of lights and, occasionally, some on-stage effects like sparklers or confetti, right? But the performer on stage has no control over that stuff, they’re just there to perform. The crew at these shows needs to perfectly calibrate all of the effects so that they can activate at precise moments of the performance to punctuate the song. Some of this can be automated with a bit of programming, but if the performer messes up or starts ad-libbing, the whole schedule is thrown out of whack. In these times, the crew needs to manually work the effects based on a rehearsed script. Any effects you see on a stage could be the result of either a pre-programmed action from a computer or a dude behind the curtain pushing a bunch of buttons in rapid succession.
If you’ve never thought about the tech behind the scenes of entertainment, that’s probably because those crews do such a good job. But man, what an intense job it is.
