Usually, I post photos that I have taken myself for Photo Friday. Today, however, I need to credit Lauren Barlow, Ximena Violante, and James Murphy in addition to myself for the photos. Honestly, we can’t remember who took what photos since they all got put into an event album. So, no single photo will be credited.
The calm before the storm. Our stage under worklight with our TEDx setup. Set design by James Murphy.
Alright, now for the topic! The photos for this week are from TEDxSwarthmore. For those of you not familiar with the TED talks, I recommend checking them out here. TEDxSwarthmore was an event held at Swarthmore College in March. (March was very busy for me which is why I haven’t posted since then 
) The topic for TEDxSwarthmore was “What Makes a Good Society?” The talks were all wonderful and all varied. The event was spear-headed by a small committee of students who did an excellent job not only with wrangling the event itself but also really evolving and learning what really goes in to pulling off such a large-scale and high-profile event. I came in the very last week approaching the event. My role was to run the stage and everything that was happening on the live end. I filled the role of Producer (for those of you in the corporate events world/sales meetings/etc) or Stage Manager (for those of you in the performing arts world). To date, I believe that this single event has been my favorite to run. I love thinking on my feet and this certainly allowed me to flex those feet-thinking muscles. Also, I got to meet many great people–the speakers, the video production company (TPS), and organizers of the event. And my performance at the event would have been horrible without the awesome team of my office mates at the LPAC (the managing director, Jim Murphy; lighting supervisor Josh Schulman; Audio engineer-Scott Burgess, technical director/foh supervisor for the day-Tom Snyder, and my rock star students-especially Ximena Violante and Lauren Barlow).
The area I was running the show from, facing the Live stream monitor. The whole event was being Live Streamed.
My view. That pile of papers was all of my notes for the event, in order. Directly above that you can see the PowerPoint land…this is where Murph operated the PowerPoint for the speakers who did not want to operate it themselves. To the left of the PowerPoint setup you can see through onto the stage.
One of the speakers, Amy, rehearsing her talk during the lunchbreak.
View from backstage of one of the a cappella groups from Swarthmore College, Chaverim, performing.
Actor Steven Lang giving his talk.
A student playing the piano during one of the performance sections of the event. Set and lighting by James Murphy.
Murph as PowerPoint operator during the event.
- The O makes a perfect frame! This is one of the rockstar students, Lauren Barlow posing after the event.
That’s me either being ridiculous and snarky or discussing strike (the breakdown of the event) with Lauren.
Birds eye view of people chatting onstage after the successful event.
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