The Producer
Date: 01-03-2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info TeamUnited States |
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The hulks won't be the only ones making a Herculean effort at the Arnold Sports Festival. Live Technologies, a full-service production company providing sound, lights, video, set design and construction services, will put all those skills to work this week.
About 60 workers started Monday. By Sunday, many of them will have put in 90-plus hours building and operating the Columbus Convention Center stage, a gymnastics area, a cheerleading area, a gala and two massive sets at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. They'll also produce a webcast for Bodybuilding.com.
As vice president for rental/production, Shawn Loevenguth oversees all of this. On site at Vets, he explained what it's like to be in the eye of Schwarzenegger's storm.
For a weightlifting competition, you must need an extra-strong stage.
There's a center section of the stage, 16 by 16, that is literally layers of steel I-beams and about eight inches of plywood just stacked solid. They drop upwards of 4,000 pounds on it. They have one rock that weighs, I think, 590 pounds that they have to pick up and move, and they'll drop it on that stage. And on top of that they have sumo wrestling this year.
What other unique challenges does the event present?
We have a new one this year. On Friday morning they have a new amateur bodybuilding contest. That's 300 athletes that compete from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday, which is a day that we normally have to set up for Friday evening's show. So that's done at 3, and by 6 o'clock we completely change the stage and we do the Friday evening show. And then overnight we change that set out for the Saturday set.
And they're pretty extensive sets. It's not just a couple backdrops that fly in and fly out. They are large, theatrical-type sets.
It looks like the Grammys or something.
That's sort of the scale. We try to make it bigger than life. On this stage, we try to add a lot of theatrics to it.
The Expo stage, you're in the middle of an expo hall with the booths, the vendors there are doing business for whatever products they're selling, so you can't really do a lot of theatrical stuff there. So it's basically white light, video and cameras. But here, we get to play around and have a little fun with it.
How does the scope of this event compare to some of the others you do?
This event, as far as I know, is the biggest sporting event in the world. There are more athletes here than the Olympics. There's 130,000 to 150,000 people that go through just the Expo alone over the weekend.
We also handle large outdoor concerts. We cover the range from a small meeting room to a large concert or a religious event in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta or the Superdome in New Orleans. You pick any arena or stadium around the country—those types of events.
We do between 800 and 900 events a year. So if you think about that, every day there's three events going on.
And some days there are probably 15 events at once.
Many days. This Friday, besides the Arnold Classic, I have 15 other events that day alone.
This I consider to be a special event. We get to be a little theatrical with it. We get to write the scripts for it, we get to make video presentations for it. We get to do the graphics presentation for it. We basically help brand the weekend.
Or we'll do a concert at Germain Amphitheater, where if the band's not carrying production, we come in and do the sound and lighting for them. Or a corporate business meeting for Limited Brands. Or a fashion show, or a Christian festival outside in the summertime, or the Columbus Arts Festival.
It's really A to Z, which I think makes us as a company unique. There are a lot of companies that do so-called A/V work, but there aren't as many that will do just about anything and have specialties in all those areas.
