Houghton, Michigan - March 2017
Co-FOH Engineer/Stage Manager/Crew Chief
Keeweenawesome Fest is a yearly, two day, music festival put on Michigan Technological University's student run radio station: WMTU 91.9 FM Houghton. The entire festival is organized and run by students (with funding from the university's student government). The equipment typically consists of JBL VRX Line Arrays, JBL Dual-18" Subwoofers, Avid or Midas FOH console, and Yamaha or Midas Monitor console (and is rented from a local production company to give students experience with different gear than is available through the university). This year, additional VRX Line Arrays were placed on the edge of the stage and used as front fills.
My main position for the 2017 festival was Stage Manager.
The stage manager position was a new role that we were trying out at K-Fest. Historically, the Production Manager was single-handedly in charge of contacting bands, fulfilling riders, organizing crew, running changeovers and keeping track of everyone. We decided to move the duties of organizing the crew and running changeovers to a new position and chose that position to be stage manager.
Months prior to the start of the K-Fest 2017 load-in, I was emailing students to create an organized crew list (of designers, run-crew, and work-crew). I then created and logged crew-call sheets and crew-call hours during the load-in/setup process. Once the festival began, I was in charge of the run-crew (typically 3-4 students) for set changeovers to make sure each band was setup quickly and all band members had what they needed (this duty used to belong to the Monitor Engineer, but we shifted the responsibility to stage manager to streamline the sound check process).