E-mail is a great work tool, and at this point in time, I cannot even imagine doing business in a world without the service. After all, what would one do without the solicitations to enlarge their manhood or to please every woman by lasting longer in bed? Fortunately, just like every other guy who gets these wonderful offers, I am not in need of what these artful entrepreneurs are selling. Therefore, these e-mails get deleted and sent to my computer's hard drive trash bin, along with every additional piece of digital junk that filters through my spam protector.
The truth is that after many years of having an e-mail account, I have become quite adept at scanning my "In box" and discerning between the junk and the real mail. I have become so good, in fact, that I almost deleted an e-mail titled "Hiring Interpreters for Corporate Events."
The Language Barrier
The title intrigued me, so I opened the email and read it. It was not overly helpful, so I sent it to cyber hell, but not before it made me think how much easier it might be to have an interpreter in monitor world. This interpreter would be especially useful for a monitor engineer during any foreign cultural festival when each of the multiple acts take the stage and, in their native language, begin to shout out their personal monitor requirements. After pondering the situation for longer than needed, I realized that the majority of foreign acts, when coming to U.S. soil, either speak English better than most of the local crew or have at least one person in their entourage who can do the interpreting for them. Therefore, with my attention diverted, I recognized that the real language barrier is between the actual corporate clients and the production company.
Most regional, non-touring audio companies are not dealing with standard procedure on a day-to-day basis. By this I mean we are not going into clubs, sheds or coliseums and dealing with a production coordinator who understands the proper protocol or terminology of our business. We are dealing, for the most part, with clients who have no understanding of audio, video, lighting, staging or what it really entails to produce an event for their marketing campaign or corporate party. Usually, the individual in charge of making said event happen is a marketing manager, a public relations person or the top accountant for the company. They are way out of their league and under severe pressure to create a perfect event, which is exactly why they are calling a production company such as yours or mine.
These clients will get multiple bids from different companies and, unless they are from a government organization, they will not necessarily accept the lowest bid offered. Often they do just the opposite and take the higher bid, not because the equipment is better or that the technicians are better but because there is someone understanding their desires and needs and is able to interpret their vision into a reality that they can readily understand. So now, instead of bearing the title of "Production manager," I am finally seeing my true calling as a "production interpreter." The production interpreter is the same as being a babysitter or hand-holder, but I prefer the ring of it, production interpreter.
A Disparity in Price
The understanding of my new title has been a while in the making, but it really hit home when I recently sent one of my engineers on a walk through. In many ways, what he described was a very straightforward production of a band in a small, high-end boutique. There was nothing wrong with his site survey, and I have perfect faith in his ability to know what's needed for any given event. Based upon this knowledge, I gave the client a quote for audio, lighting, staging and band gear. The client, who I have worked with in the past, called me up and told me that she would prefer to work with me on the event rather than the other producers who gave her quotes, but since there was such a disparity in price between my quote and theirs, she would prefer if I would come meet her for a second-walk through. I assumed that the cost of my quote was more than she wanted to spend on the event, and I let her know that there wasn't much fat to trim. She surprised me by letting me know that my quote was about a third of the price of other two quotes she received. Ain't life strange?
I went to meet with her in her very chic downtown office, and she explained that all the fashion executives from the corporate office would be flying in from Italy for the Fashion Week event. Everything, as with most fashion events, needed to be perfect. She did not need, nor want to hear about, my Avid VENUE Profile with its BNC snake. She also did not want to hear about my L-Acoustics 108 going from 20Hz to 20kHz. She didn't need to know signal flow, or about my great plug-ins, or that I may need to delay some speakers. She could care less about condenser microphones, cardioids microphones or ribbon microphones. NL4 or EP4 connectors mean nothing to her, and Sennheiser G2 personal monitors or Clair 12AM wedges are gibberish that only we understand. It's our language! What she needed is reassurance that I could do the whole event and make it look fabulous and sound great without seeing the lighting console, audio board or the shlubs who would be working the event.
Translation, Please
She also required diagrams, and I needed to make sure my lighting director could fly his four lights and send his cable run along her exposed wood beams. I brought him in the next day for a quick look, and he assured me that with the use of wood clamps, the downstage lighting plot (all four lights) would be fine. I told the client the plan, and she beseeched me for a drawing. Where would the lights hang from? How low would they hang? Could the beam support the weight of the lights? Would we be drilling into the ceiling? What is a wood clamp? She posed this last question to my "Rock ‘n' Roll" LD, and with exasperation in his voice, he answered, "It's a wood clamp!" He may as well have said, "It's a wood clamp, you idiot; everybody knows what that means. It clamps to the wood, it will hold the lights up, moron."
My moment as interpreter had come, and I quickly jumped in to explain to the client the technical phrase, "wood clamp." She is a fashion marketer; she has no reference point for 2-way speakers, 3-way systems, Ohm's law, delay stacks, snake and feeder run, plug-ins or frequency response. She doesn't know a Source 4 PAR from a Martin MAC 250 or an Avolite console from a Leprecon console; nor does she care.
I explained to her that my LD only speaks "Technical," and does not know her language. She just wanted to know that the show will look great, sound great and would photograph well enough so that all her bosses would be proud of what she had produced. Thus, in my best fashion accent, I translated from technical language and explained to her exactly what a wood clamp is and what it would do.
I put her at ease, and I made detailed diagrams to translate from tech speak to fashion comprehension, and I finally realized that my compensation as production manager/technician is only a mere pittance to the pay I might receive as an production interpreter.
