Art, Music, Dance, and Love: Internet2 Concert

Finally our biggest project of the semester took place on April 28, 2007 at Frederic Loewe Theatre in NYC. It was a concert to celebrate two important professors at NYU: Dr. Denu Ghezzo who was retiring from his long teaching career at the university and Dr. Ron Mazurek who passed away unexpectedly two days before the concert.

The concert was very beautiful and touching. Everyone participated in his or her best way and contributed to the success of the event. I learned many things that day as one of the camera crew, from taping all the cables down to the floor so that nobody would trip over them to setting a camera so that people would not be walking in front of it but behind it. I realized how much dedication and concentration it needed to set up the audio and visual system in the theatre. We were constantly running across and in and out of the theatre, trying to solve problems.

Yes, the biggest lesson I learned that day was that there would always be problems. But important thing is to go along with those problems, if they are unsolvable. The V Brick at UCI failed to work that day, preventing us from having the high speed I2 connection. Although we had to change our program and we could not have an interactive session between audiences in NYU and UCI, our effort to do the best we could then made the event still highly valuable. I believe that the audience enjoyed the improvisations very much.

I was in charge of interviewing people as they entered the theatre and documenting overall the event. I was paired up with Nicolle and I think we worked very well together that evening. When we started to interview, asking people how they knew Dr. Ghezzo and to share their memories, at first they were somewhat hesitant to be interviewed. However, when we started asking people to congratulate Dr. Ghezzo, they were more than happy to share their words with us. In the end we had about 2/3 of the audience in the video. During the concert, I focused on the audience to capture their response to the performances by walking around the theatre. It was incredible to know how involved the audience was to every single performance, and to realize how much energy it provided to the whole production. I suggested to Nicolle to go backstage to take closeup video of the performers from behind, remembering some documentation movies I've seen of stage productions, which I thought was very effective.

Yes, we were exhausted from being there since 9am and dealing with unfamiliar problems after problems, but our facial expressions were filled with proud and achievement. We were a team and no longer a bunch of aloof graduate students. All the music, art, and dance we had that night were empowered by people's strong love and appreciation for those two important professors.

After all of this, I think now I am an expert on setting up a camera as well as taping the cables down and removing the tape from cables!