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Bumbershoot's Production Department: Seriously Hardcore
Here at Bumbershoot, we’re in high gear preparing for the Festival. It’s a bustling hive of activity as we cross our t’s to put on one of the biggest music and arts festivals around. And one of the busiest teams around is made of Bumbershoot’s industrious production department. I was recently able to sit in on one of their meetings, and dear holiness they are some busy folks. Their meeting agenda alone was longer than one of Battles’ guitar solos. These people are no joke.
Now it’s no secret that the marketing department deals in more abstract mediums (the internet, etc), so it was jarring for me to come into a meeting and hear advanced and extended discussions about zipties and fences and all kind of actual things. Then I noticed everyone in production is more buff than me, because obviously they are lifting fences and building stages while I am blogging about them lifting fences and building stages. They’re building the fences you’re all going to pour through on your way in to go see Neko Case and These Arms Are Snakes. And those performances will be on stages built by the production department. So far it’s production department-1, Evan-0.
Being the smart guy I am, I decided to wait until the busiest part of the year to ask them to join me for my blisteringly popular InternView series. This idea turned out to be one of my rare misses. As you can probably already guess, they were way WAY too focused on their tasks at hand to sit down and schedule something so, I took to the streets (halls). This is how the InternView, “man on the street-style” went:
(Lee, Production Coordinator, is walking quickly past en route to the copy machine…)
Evan: “Hey Lee, what’s your favorite part of Bumbershoot?”
Lee: “Hey Evan! I love this week when we get to see the entire year’s planning all come together, (now further away) and I really like golf…. (now out of earshot).”
Lee walks fast.
After some research, as it turns out, she is not a fan of golf, but rather, the super awesome golf carts that the production team gets to drive around the Seattle Center grounds.
The closest I get to the super-cool world of Production is getting to wear a 2-way radio during the Festival, and responding to questions like “Evan, What’s your ‘20’?” Radio lingo is way cooler than my blog jargon (like “links” and “lolz”... hey, that makes me want to write a book about blogging called “Links And Lolz: The Truth About Blogging.” Dibs on that title!).
They also have their own motto. Maybe if my department were more productive (HAHA!) we would have one too, but as it stands, only Production does, and it reads as follows: “Production… because you can’t talk about it forever.” And they actually back that up. Did you know that they’re on the Seattle Center grounds preparing for the Festival two weeks in advance? Did you know they’re there for another week afterwards taking everything down? That is seriously hardcore. Seriously.
In summation, Production builds, manages, and creates the physical Festival that we all love. I don’t know if you’ve tried putting on any music festivals lately, but from my experience this summer, I’ve learned that it’s a pretty involved process. We’re just lucky to have an amazing production department, because otherwise I might be out there lugging fences around Seattle Center, and nobody wants to see that.
posted August 21 '08 at 11:15PM by Evan in internview, production
Discussion — Add to it
Commenting is closed for this article.
dna said…
Hey-
Plural of medium is media.
I enjoy your blog!
dna
on Aug 22, 11:11 AM
becca said…
As a former “native” of Seattle , all I can say about Bumbershoot is that it is SOOOOO NOT what it used to be. I live in Hawaii now anyway. It’s just to bad it tanked! LOL. Rebecca-
on Aug 22, 08:24 PM