Hi.
My name is Izzy Olgaard.
Thank you for coming.
I'm a senior Film Studies and Studio Art double major,
and today I will be presenting on my internship
that I had this summer.
I was a lighting production intern
for BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn!, which is based in Brooklyn.
BRIC, the company, is a media arts company,
and they provide different venues for people
to express their art throughout the neighborhood.
Celebrate was based in Prospect Park,
and we had 25 different shows.
I worked 10 weeks.
I averaged about 50 hours per week--
sometimes longer, sometimes much shorter.
It just depended on the week--
the shows.
So we had Lila Downs, which was an amazing performer,
and then Sylvan Esso was one of our benefit concerts.
We had six benefit concerts that we
had to pay for the rest of the free concerts that we had.
And then this was a scrim, which is what they have behind--
something like this, and it was from another performance
from The Shins.
My housing-- I lived in NYU housing, which
was really convenient because their application is really
easy to go through, and since I got
my internship at the last minute,
it was a very easy process.
And I lived on Broadway and Tenth,
so I had this gorgeous view of this church, which
I wanted to go to, but I never ended up going.
[LAUGHTER]
I also was on their eight meal plan, which they actually make
you do, which is kind of odd.
It was helpful, but I also--
it was hard for me to use all the meals because
of my strange festival hours.
I also had a 35-minute commute to work every day,
but they did provide me with a Metro card
through the internship.
It was very nice.
So my responsibilities were to help with cleanup
from the night before.
We usually had to sweep and mop the stage.
And then I also helped sometimes when it would rain a lot
and we would have flooding or different water
technical difficulties.
So sometimes, the roof would kind of collect water,
and so I would go up and push the water--
[LAUGHTER]
--from the top, which was really fun.
[LAUGHTER]
I also helped with loading, which
meant loading in the equipment from different bands.
Sometimes there would be a lot of equipment,
and sometimes there would be very little.
One of my coworkers told me last year
that they had The Lumineers come,
and they had two 18-wheelers come, packed full of stuff,
so it really depends on the band and how much equipment they
want to have.
I also help with focus, which means going up into the truss--
and this is me up there--
and then my boss is down here, directing over comm,
and he would tell me where to point the lights to light up
the band for that evening.
I also operated follow spot, which meant the follow spot--
during the shows, I would follow the artist around.
I would be up in here, because we
had three different follow spots,
and so it would just depend on the night.
Sometimes it would be very boring
and we'd have like one violinist-- like go in.
[LAUGHTER]
But then other times-- like Chronixx
came, and he was very active and ran around the stage
everywhere and went into the pit,
and so I had to follow him wherever he went,
which was really exciting.
[LAUGHTER]
I also would help with load-in afterwards, which
meant taking down everything that we had set up that day
and loading it out.
So this took either a couple hours
or maybe like 20 minutes--
it all depended.
We had a 10:30 curfew, which meant
you could not have any more sound on the stage
after 10:30 PM.
So that means that you're finishing the show early,
but that doesn't mean you finish your shift early.
Sometimes I would get home at like 2:00 or 3:00
in the morning.
[LAUGHTER]
And I think my roommates probably though I was
doing something weird, but--
[LAUGHTER]
So this is just an example of what I did.
So we set this up, so this is like in the light.
These are on metal frames, and then
the lights are on the metal frames,
and so I helped build these things.
This was for Sylvan Esso.
The sound is kind of weird, but it's
more about the lighting, which is what I did.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So this would be going on during the show, and we would have--
[END PLAYBACK]
--a person at front of house, which is sitting
like here in the crowd, and they would be controlling the lights
during the show.
So this is what I helped make.
And then, let's see.
Oh, yeah.
So this is my group that I worked with this summer.
We had one day where we just decided to have a photo shoot,
and after a show we just set up lights
to make it look, you know, cinematic and theatrical,
and we just had a silly photo shoot.
And so I learned in life that technical production
is very similar in all different industries.
So what I want to do mainly is work in the film industry
after I graduate, and so working in the performing arts
is actually very similar.
So I thought maybe that I wouldn't
learn as much as I wanted to for what
I wanted to do after I graduate, but I actually
learned a lot of very minimal things,
but they were all very helpful.
I also learned that most of the people
that I worked with work freelance,
so they work from job to job.
They have Celebrate as maybe their--
we called it "summer camp," almost, where every summer, we
would just come back and have fun working the festival,
but they also find jobs throughout the year.
And they say that it's pretty easy to find jobs in New York.
I also learned that if you work hard,
even if you don't know what you're really doing--
[LAUGHTER]
--in the job, you still can fool people by your hard work.
So I really--
[LAUGHTER]
--coming to this, I had no idea what I was doing,
and I fooled a lot of people by just going with the flow,
learning fast and on my feet, because the performing arts
industry is very fast-paced, and they want everything done
at a certain time very quickly.
And then this is just a cute video
from one of the last shows.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
These kids were like 3 feet tall,
and they had these humongous drums,
and they were really, really cute.
Aww.
[LAUGHTER]
They were really cute.
[END PLAYBACK]
So that's it.
[APPLAUSE]