Obviously not. Yet excellence is what each of us strive for in the way we judge competency, credibility and, indeed, our own performance.
The International Guild of Live Show Producers was created in 2012 by a group of live show professionals with the goal to support, educate and accredit the working producers and support teams of the live show and event industries.
In an increasingly competitive field, facing a myriad of challenges encompassing the economy, breaking technologies, unions and work forces, rapidly evolving technical skills, escalating client and audience expectations, legal rights and obligations and practical matters like insurance, wages and safety, what weight should we assign to standards of excellence?
The LSP will, year in and year out, advocate for excellence within our profession. But we will look to you, the working producers who spend the days and weeks of each year, planning and executing an extraordinarily wide array of live shows and events, to help zero in on what excellence means. We will look to you to define for us what you see as excellence, and to join us in sharing those observations and experiences.
With this first post on our blog, we introduce the LSP Event Debrief. Call it LSP-ED, and think of the "ED" as short for EDucation. At first, LSP-EDs will appear here as columns dedicated to sharing our observations about achieving excellence in our profession. As our collective experiences evolve, we will expand our platform to include interviews and client observations, and extend our debriefings into other areas of quantifying the cause and effect of notable live show production.
We believe that standards of excellence evolve from a community of dedicated and driven professionals. A working community, through discussion, debate, analysis and reflection, can see a picture larger and more detailed than any of us can hope to achieve within our own arena of achievement.
Through an organization of like-minded members and interested professionals, the LSP will pool the experiences and opinions of a diverse network of live show producers that has never before found a common meeting place or a focused voice.
We urge you to join in the conversation. The door to this blog is not only open, it has been taken off the hinges. Through an already present array of online forums, LSP provides our members with multiple platforms to interact and network. The LSP blog will be unique in that we are inviting the entire event and live show community to actively participate, letting your presence be felt by commenting below each of our posts.
What are your standards of show excellence?
We'll be sharing your stories and ours, with the expectations that as quickly as we establish our measurements, one of you will find new ways to exceed them.
Thanks for dropping in. For more information about the LSP and our members you can follow this link: www.LiveShowProducers.org.
Jeff Rabouin
Executive Creative Director, LSP
Very thought provoking opening salvo. Excellence can, at times, be a subjective matter. However, it's likely that many - if not all - event and show producers bring a high level of excellence and expectation to their craft, often going above and beyond their agreed upon rates to deliver quality on behalf of the client.
ReplyDeleteEven the most celebrated and experienced in our field still have to fight to get and keep work while continuing to innovate and be tick-tight with the budget.
Developing high standards is both a learned and environmental process. I know that I've benefited greatly by my environment - being lucky enough to work with some amazing creative executives and technical wizards who manage to find ways to produce magic at every turn, even in the shortest of deadlines and challenging budgetary constraints.
There is a great and vast tradition in the various industries in and around live production. It will be fascinating to see how this segment of the entertainment world evolves - both in success for the clients and sponsors as well as the audience experience.