I walked into our shop last Monday morning and one of our employees, Colton Frost, told me we needed to go do a site survey that morning for an event. He immediately had my attention. Shows have been a scarce commodity since March of 2020 and the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Just to give a brief background of our situation, I will tell you that I am the owner of BP Lighting Sound & Video LLC in San Antonio, Texas. We are a production company that does sound, lighting and video for concerts, special events and installations. In March of 2020 we started getting calls to cancel shows due to Covid-19. This all happened during one of our busiest seasons of the year, right before SXSW in Austin, Fiesta and the Spurs in San Antonio, and was devastating to our company. Within the week we had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars due to canceled shows. Two weeks later we had to temporarily close our doors and furlough our employees. We were closed, except for a few small installations that we were able to safely continue.

Thankfully our government passed the PPP assistance program that allowed all of our employees, but not our faithful regular subcontractors, to return to work on June 1, 2020. Unfortunately that assistance has run out and gigs are still very rare. As of 2 weeks ago we have had to scale back to having employees only work 20 hours a week in an attempt to remain open until events return to some semblance of normal.

Now back to where I started…We called Sean Sergeant the operations manager of LD Systems in San Antonio to get details for the gig Colton told me about. Sean told us about the Red Alert campaign, and its goal to light buildings red all across our nation (and other nations), to alert the public and our government to our dire situation in the event and production industry. We have been devastated by the shutdown of events, clubs, convention centers, and concerts in our country. People who work in those industries are suffering and companies are going out of business. The cry is, “WE NEED HELP!”

Sean asked if we would be willing to light the north and south “Eye Brows” of the Alamodome red to help with the Red Alert campaign. For free! I said, “Sure. When is this going to happen?”. “Tomorrow”, Sean said! After I laughed, Colton and I jumped in the car and rushed down to the Dome to brain storm a plan with Sean for the event.

Immediately after our walk through, we called Texas Scenic to see if they would donate some red gel so we could utilize some of the existing white LED fixtures the Dome already had lighting some of the building. Steve from Texas Scenic did not hesitate. He said, “Come on by. We will have them ready for you.” After that we started calling employees, friends and even some clients to see if they were willing to volunteer to help with this event. We also placed a call to MEGA Systems to see if they would be able to help the cause by donating use of some of their light fixtures for the event. Without thinking twice our representative, Isabel, and the owners Miguel, Elio, Guillermo and Arturo told us to come over and they would hook us up.

After renting a truck, (we returned our lease trucks when we closed down for Covid), we picked up the lights from MEGA, loaded up cables, consoles and lights from our shop and headed down to the Dome.

This is where the fun began. Loading the gear in at the dock and getting it to the 5th floor of the Dome…no problem. Carrying all of the gear up two more flights of stairs to get it to the roof…problem! This is where the help we got from volunteers was huge! I want to thank every one of you that helped with that. I know my 57-year-old back was feeling it after the first few trips up and down the stairs carrying heavy equipment. Once we got the gear on the roof, it felt like business as usual. We started doing what we do…set up lights, run power, run DMX, program lights. It helped us feel some return to normalcy.

The following day was easy. We came in on Tuesday, September 1, and turned the lights on from 9pm until midnight to join our comrades in other venues, cities, states and countries to hopefully remind our leaders that we, as an industry, need help. We are the people you don’t always remember exist, until you have a technical problem or you need something done for a show. We exist behind the scenes. Normally we are ok with that, but now we are reminding you that we are here. We cannot continue to survive without work. Without work we go the way of the dinosaur and with us goes the equipment and expertise that helps make events a success.

What I want to point out that makes me feel great about our production community is that multiple competitive companies jumped in to help this cause. Yes, we have fair competition with each other, but that competition was not present on this day. It was a collective effort to help OUR industry and people exist. I do not want other companies to go out of business so that mine will benefit. We cross rent equipment from each other all the time and sometimes even help each other with gigs when we get in a bind or need the particular skill that another company possesses. They are my friends. I saw that spirit of help and community during this Red Alert event, and I applaud all of you that participated and donated time, labor and materials to bring it to fruition.

To all my production friends, clients and other struggling business owners…Hang in there! I pray that help is on the way.

Special thanks to: (I apologize to anyone I may have forgotten!)
Sean Sargeant, LD Systems, Colton Frost, Alex Schielke, Matt Rathmell, The Alamodome, MEGA Systems Inc., Texas Scenic Co., Matt Medellin, Sam Tovar, Adrian Hernández, Eric Lee, Jacob Gardiner, Dorian Gomez, Sara Redford, Jason Olivarri, David Zepeda, Nathan Key & Brent Fields.

GEAR:
6 Mega Systems Arc 90 LED
4 Mega Systems Tilt Bots (these things are stupid bright!)
1 High End Systems Solaframe 3000 (courtesy of LD Systems)
8 Mega Systems O Beam (these were also stupid bright! We hit the tower in red about 4,000 feet away and it still popped. Nice!)
1 High End Systems Road Hog
1 High End Systems Full Boar
Bunch O cables
1 Defibrillator (for use after the stair carry)