Welcome to CRE8CON.
I am so excited you guys are all here.
I'm excited to be here.
Tonight is all about celebrating
the creative process.
Our final presentation a
bomb light show from
an amazing lighting designer.
He does such festivals as: Coachella,
Electric Daisy Carnival,
Ultra Worldwide, Lollapalooza.
I'd like to introduce to you James Castaneda
Hey guys, how you all doing tonight?
My name is James Castaneda
and I'm from L.A.
I was actually born five blocks from here.
My mom sitting right over there had
the pleasure of going through that.
What exactly there's a light lighting designer do?
A lighting designer basically
is responsible
for creating the
design of the show, as far
as the stage where the lights are going
and then programming those lights
to fit the mood of the show.
I got into this by basically
dropping out of college as
of wanting to be in a famous band
had a record label.
I was a bass player
and I dropped out of school
and a week later
my band broke up
and my parents took me back in.
So I did everything I could
to get to USC, got through that music
industry program there
and those guys saved my life.
No hate for UCLA I went there to actually,
before that.
But let me show you more what I do here.
This is me on The Chainsmokers tour
I'm controlling lights
and basically there are a million different parameters
that we have to work with,
with lights including color, positions.
We'll go through some looks here.
We basically are looking for symmetry in
our shows and I'm
trying to basically get all
the lights I can to look symmetrical
and awesome as possible.
But then if a beat drops
or something changes up,
maybe it's better to move the lights
around and I'll show you guys more about that later.
But I'm basically controlling the lights
a lot of the time live, on the fly.
I work for a lot of DJs that never want to play
the same set
and they change every 30 seconds.
It's really, really awesome
and to their credit they're doing more
than hitting play
and it's like riding a rollercoaster
going along with them.
These are some pictures from The Chainsmokers
at The Shrine.
I'm sure you guys have all been to a concert,
you may not really think about the lighting
element of what's going on
and we don't want you to think about it.
We just want you to immerse yourself in it
and enjoy it.
A lot of people put a lot of work into
designing these
and implementing them, building them.
It's a huge process and it's a privilege
for me to be able to walk into
a stage like this
and control lights
and dictate colors.
This is from EDC Vegas
that just happened.
I worked there with A- Trak and this is from
the Cosmic Meadow stage.
This is from Andre Beakmans from the art of light.
They're a great design company.
They put these renderings together
and then they turn them into a more
detailed schematics for plots
where the crew can build them
and then we take control of them
from there.
We work a lot in tight spaces
and in planes,
tour buses, shuttle vans,
on the floor in the airport,
or try to take a nap.
But usually a lot of times for what we do
we only have one computer,
we don't have multiple screens were moving
mobile-ly on the go.
Something that I had happen to me
as I was traveling: I had a six
hour flight and the tour manager told me "hey
by the way there's a typhoon in Singapore
and you're going to have to change
everything you planned out for our show."
So I worked the best I could
and when I'm doing my
lighting programming I'm switching between
renderings and drawings,
and schematics and numbers sheets, and a million
different things
and eventually if you are in an
airplane that have nothing to plug into
your laptop dies.
So I did what I could for 3 hours
and saved everything on the USB sick.
Pulled out a pen and paper
and finished the rest in an old fashioned way
and applied it as we landed in Singapore
in a shuttle van.
But basically it's really
important for me to have a computer
that is speedy
and basically is able to
handle multiple programs all at once, without it dying
and without it lagging.
And I'm going to segue this into
sharing with you guys
and give you guys a quick lesson
on how lighting design works and programming.
And we're going to have some fun
and interact together.
Not that you would teach a live audience to plan,
program, and execute a lighting show
in 20 minutes,
but you could.
This up here is
a drawing of Mack Sennett Studios.
So basically a local company Delicate Productions
sent me an overhead plot
that Mack Sennett Studios provided
for this CRE8CON event
and they said "James bring lights
and design something for
the audience here."
So I got an overhead plot of
schematics
and I basically got this picture
of the stage which is from where you guys are
facing me.
But I had to get deeper with it.
So what I decided
to do was I used my 3D
CAD software Vectorworks to
make a 3D rendering
of all of this and organize a lighting plot,
so that the crew that put all this together
were able to come in here
and make this work.
I work with a couple of
really awesome design guys that
have big massive PCs,
towers, kind of like you saw earlier
and I'm on my little 15 inch laptop
here that's mobile and portable.
And with the Optane Memory
I'm able to load up this program
quicker than they are.
It's really nice to be able to have this
technology in a small,
compact package.
What you're looking at here on my screen
is the picture that you saw earlier
of Mack Sennett Studios.
And then I drew a lighting
design for the lights that are above us.
So you'll see
over here these are the lights that are up above me.
I'm going to show you something
from a top plan that I made.
Drew all this in Vectorworks.
And we had,
we had an issue where right
here where I'm zooming in on where the the pipe
that's above you is unable to support so much weight
I was pushing it to the limit
trying to put too much stuff on it.
So a local company told me what the weight limits were
and we ended up moving some lights over
and now we're doing good
and there's not a pipe falling on top of me.
Which, I don't know if it's exciting for you,
but I'm happy to be here
with you all.
And then we transfer this over to another program
called MA 3D.
And also going to use grandMA2,
which is a lighting console
that we use to dictate
what we want the lights to do for us
and give them commands.
Right now this looks like
another language to y'all,
but really lighting is not as
complicated as you would
think when it comes to mathematics.
It's lines, geometry,
things that I actually relatively enjoyed growing up.
It's really awesome
and a combination of many different disciplines
coming together, including
creativity in art, math
and then just common sense and logic.
So this is MA 3D
and we have a dark stage right here.
Looks like there's a band
or a shadow of a band right there, we can't
see them.
So let's see if we can fix that.
Cool.
So here's lights that I'm controlling righ now.
If you look on the screen
ahead of you can see that there's lights
that are blinking back and forth.
Those exact lights that are blinking right now are corresponding
to these LED auras above me.
So let's say that I want to
light the band up
I can give a command to my console
and I can get light on the band.
But let's say the creative director or the manager of the band
is getting mad at me, because I'm
washing out the projector that's behind us.
I can get those lights back out to you guys. Okay.
So just showing
you that in this program
I can do a lot of work ahead of time before
I come on site.
And it's very process demanding as well.
I don't have the luxury of working
with this until I arrive somewhere
and sometimes I'll be in three different cities
in one week and on opposite sides of the country,
let alone the world.
So we do a lot of our work
just on the computer screen
and we're constantly switching back
and forth between
this visualizer program
and then going to my lighting console program
to control all this.
Lighting programming is basically taking lights,
giving them different commands
and storing different looks
in different
positions of the lights, colors and combinations thereof.
I've got all these lights above me selected right now and
we're going to make them
red right now.
So I have all these color presets that I've made
beforehand, but I can grab the lights
and I can make them
any kind of mix of color that I want.
We also are able to change the positions of the lights.
I could have them straight down.
I can have them way up high in the sky.
I can have them at you guys.
I can have them at you guys again, crossing into X's,
you can do a lot of cool little tricks.
I can also give them prism effects
which is what you see out of the lights.
We're basically taking all these different parameters
and mixing them together to make a show.
We've got our lights organized in different views,
we have all kinds of sheets of information
so that if one breaks or goes bad we
can tell what's going wrong.
We're basically just taking all of this information
and we're storing it to our show file.
The lights that are on right now that are white.
We're take them through, we're going to go through a effects generator
and we are going to put in a simple rainbow.
Now I'm going to be able to control how fast
the rainbow goes to you.
So when I activate this right now
there's a rainbow happening
and it's shooting through those lights.
So everybody that does EDM
likes these kinds of lights
and we'll be really chill with them,
but they really like
they really like strobe lights
and strobe lights make people get crazy.
I'm not one
to give anybody a seizure ever.
I think it's important to watch out for people's safety.
I want to use
this time as an opportunity
to incorporate you guys into the presentation here.
You guys hold your glowsticks up for me.
I see your glowsticks.
I love seeing these things and every time I see one
everyone is usually on...
having a really good time.
So I want you guys to have
I want you guys have
a really good time
with me here too.
So what I'm going to do for you all
is I'm going to go into playing you a couple of different tracks
and then I want you all to vote together
on what we're going to do.
So I've got
all this stuff running right now.
This computer is really awesome at actually navigating through.
You guys can basically keep all of your glowsticks down
down and then when you like a song you can bring it back up.
So this is our song 1.
If you guys want song 1 like the dubstep-y song.
Scoot through it a little bit here.
Song 1, go ahead and vote for song 1
and put it up for song 1.
Dubstep is your favorite? Okay.
Now I'm going to share song 2 with you guys again
song 2, I'll skip through it a little bit.
If you're European, but American tunes for everybody.
EDM is universal
it's all good music.
OK so that's our song 2.
And then we go back to our Trap
That's the most reaction
All right guys I'm going to fade down there
my guy John on the house lights
if you can go ahead
and bring me down
on the stage sorry.
That would be great.
Which one won?
Definitely the Trap.
You guys are good, you guys
are a very classy crowd,
but I'm proud of you.
I love it too and it gets me in the mood.
You're designing the light show now, right, from scratch?
This is not prepared.
This is not prepared or time coded so
let me get into it for you guys.
Thank you very much guys.
So dope. James Castaneda!
I want to say thank
you so much guys for having me.
y'all have been given glowsticks
and you're going to be able to use them
later if you play
with them. I will not be offended.
Nothing is distracting compared to
the usual stuff I deal
with in my line of work.