The Stool

I remember getting my first magazine subscription when I started in production, I poured over the pages and read about all the audio and video products, case studies, industry news…etc. Thumbing to the lighting section, I drooled over all the lighting products that were featured that month like a kid looking through the toy store window at Christmas. I would learn manufactures and fixture names like they were players on a professional sports team. I would cut out stage designs that I liked from those magazines and pin them up at my desk, almost like some sort of stage design goals that I wanted to achieve. When it came to lighting, I wanted to be the best, know the most, and have all the ideas. My stool was either on the stage, behind a console, or in front of a screen learning, testing, ruminating, experimenting, thinking and soaking up every bit of information I could. The stool is discipline. The stool represents years of investment into the craft, countless late night programming sessions to get the looks just right, infinite rabbit trails into the pros and cons of certain fixtures, hundreds of hours of reading user manuals and watching thousands of tutorial videos. It doesn't really matter how comfortable the stool may be, there will no doubt be a time when that is the most uncomfortable spot to be in, but the discipline of staying on the stool almost always pays off. There is a grit that is needed to push through the mental roadblocks, ignore the desire to give up on a particular software, and dig deeper into the user manual to figure out why something is not working. The stool is often the epicenter of creativity disguised as seemingly aimless reading and investigating, get comfortable in the stool, it is important.