 Welcome to CREATE.COM. 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. She does such festivals as Coachella, Electric Daisy Carnival, Ultra Worldwide, Lollapalooza. I'd like to introduce to you, James Castaneda. Hey guys, how are you all doing tonight? My name is James Castaneda and I'm from LA. I was actually born five blocks from here. My mom is sitting right over there. I had the pleasure of going through that. What exactly does a lighting designer do? A lighting designer basically is responsible for creating the design of a 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 I wanted 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 into USC, got through that music industry program there and those guys saved my life. No hate for UCLA, I went there too, 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 as 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 times 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 and it's really, really awesome and to their credit they're doing more than hitting play on the roller coaster going along with them. These are some pictures from the Chainsmokers at the Shrine and 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 of Vegas that just happened. Worked there with A-Track and this is from the Cosmic Meadow stage. This is from Andre Beekmans from the Art of Light. They're a great design company. They put these renderings together and then they turn them into more detailed schematics or 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 fans on the floor in the airport as we're trying 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, we're moving mobily on the go. Something that had happened to me as I was traveling throughout a six-hour flight, my tour manager told me, hey, by the way, there's a typhoon in Singapore and you're going to have to change everything you've 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 numbersheets and a million different things and eventually if you are in an airplane and have nothing to plug into, your laptop dies. So I did what I could for three hours and saved everything on a USB stick, 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 Max and its studios so basically local company Delicate Productions sent me an overhead plot that Max and its studios provided for this CreateCon 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 Max Senate 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. You drew all this in Vectorworks and we had an issue where right here where I'm zooming in on were the pipe that's above me was unable to support so much weight and I was pushing it to the limit trying to put too much stuff on it. So 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 MA3D and also going to use Grandma 2 which is a lighting console where we want the lights to do for us and give them commands. Right now this looks like another language to you 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 and art math and then just common sense and logic. This is MA3D and we have a dark stage right here. Looks like there's a band or a shadow of a band right there but we can't see them. So let's see if we can fix that. Cool. So here's lights that I'm controlling right now. If you look on the screen ahead of you 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. 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. 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 and I don't have the luxury of working with this but sometimes I'll be 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 in 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 you're storing different looks and different positions of the lights, colors and combinations that I'm aware of. 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 can have them straight down, I can weigh up high in the sky I can have them at you guys I can have them at you guys again crossing and you can do a lot of cool little tricks. I can also give them a prism effect 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 and we're basically just taking all this information and we're storing it to our show file. The lights that are on right now that are white we're going to take them through we're going to go to an effects generator and we are going to put in simple rainbow. 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. Everybody that does EDM likes these kinds of lights and we'll be really chill with them but 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 glow sticks up for me I see your glow sticks 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 to 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 glow sticks down and then when you like a song you can bring it back up so this is our song one if you guys want song one like the dubstep-y song scoot through it a little bit here it's a song one go ahead and vote for song one or put it up if you want song one dubstep is your favorite okay this is the one you want the lighting show for you gotta put your finger now I'm going to share song two with you guys again song two I'll skip through it a little bit to your European it's American two it's for everybody EDM is universal okay it's all good music you guys can totally dance you can do this make sure it's good awesome okay so that's our song two see that and then we go back to our trap if you like trap that's the most reaction that's really awesome oh nobody likes trap alright guys I'm going to fade down for you there my god John on the house lights if you can go ahead and bring me down on the stage that would be great so which one would definitely the trap you guys 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 a 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