TOD fees – inhouse AV company detail a fair approach

As a supplier with the largest number of in house venues in Canberra, we could not agree more that many in house suppliers practices in regards to TOD fees are far from what we would deem fair. We on the other hand have a VERY different approach. If an outside provider is coming into any…

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TOD fees

Russell Bennett from Microhire QLD sends this: Your AV Industry Needs You!!! ·         Imagine not being able to use your favoured and trusted AV company when doing events! ·         Imagine now , not having the right to choice your AV supplier on its merits – Price, Value or professionalism! ·         Imagine in a few years’…

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Bankwest kills iconic venue

Think long and hard about who you bank with. Bankwest fell over in the global financial crisis and was purchased by the CBA (Commonwealth Bank) for a low $2.1 billion. CBA then set about gutting the Bankwest loan book, calling in anything that they didn’t like. They had a commercial reason to do it: any…

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Sorry girls! Not wanted in tech production

It’s like something out of 1980 – todays contemporary production has females with clipboards, staffing security checkpoints, and sometimes managing something. Blokes are men and chicks are chicks – or chooks. At the FOH desk, monitor console, rigging lights and vision, and serving up the stage or the backline, it is an ole’ boys club.…

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Industry Safety Summit at ENTECH Melbourne July 19th 2pm

Live Performance Australia, CX and ETF, owners of ENTECH have called a National Summit to discuss safety issues relating to theatre and live events. This essential, bipartisan and free-to-attend meeting will bring together the live performance and events industry stakeholders, including venues, production suppliers, associations and service providers to discuss and ratify an agreeable pathway…

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LED screens and RF Interference

Re : Richard Cadena’s blurb on RF interference from LED screens (read post HERE) is timely. Australia, and in particular Sydney is having lots of problems with this lately. Only a few weeks ago, we had a routine visit from the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) technical guys at one of the transmitter sites…

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Safety is now cool

We were shellacked relentlessly in previous years whenever CX wrote of stage safety and associated dark arts. So the risky passing of a 12 page forensic report on the Indiana disaster of August 2011 in the May CX mag was eagerly monitored by the Facebook and CX Mail Monitor. Amazingly we received only direct praise…

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Prince Lighting errors – defined

This month’s CX carries a tale of lights done wrong, at least according to the writer. Unsure whether the lighting states we complained of were in the script, we emailed the lighting designer a draft, hoping to put the correct inflection. The show has been seen by a hundred thousand of us in Australia, and…

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CUA13: Some good, Some bad

MELBOURNE: Monday 28th May 2012 The proposed new entertainment training package (see previous blog) has some interesting components. Thankfully the Certificate IV has an ELECTIVE in soldering, but it is our informed guess no TAFE or college will put this unit into the qualification. Sadly the Certificate II and Certificate III remain in the province…

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CUA13 is firming up. New training package in formulation

MELBOURNE, MONDAY 28 MAY 2012 What is now the Entertainment Training Package CUE03 is headed towards CUA13, as the  IBSA (Innovation and Skills Australia) review winds through a NPRG (national project reference group) meeting today in Melbourne. The training package dictates the composition of industry training for some years to come, and sometimes these packages…

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Insecure. Who me?

By John Maizels Most people who work in the gigging industry are freelance.  That’s a polite way of saying not-employed-by-anyone-permanently.   Is this you?  Read on.   There are other terms, like “casual”, “part-time”, “itinerant”, “on-demand”, “self-employed” and sometimes “consultant” which can be a way of saying you’re not sure if you’re employed or not. At their…

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