Charlie Talks about His Career in Sound And Lighting

Charlie >> My name’s Charlie Prouse, I’m the assistant technical manager here at The Arches. My job in the Arches is to manage the technical team, which involves taking any event which is happening in the Arches and making sure the technicians know what they’re doing for each event, so everything runs smoothly. I left school in fourth year, and I was a printer for a number of years. Then I started dj-ing, which was my route into this industry so from that point I went to college and did an HND so while I was learning at college I had an opportunity to learn hands-on as well, so I was quite lucky that way. In this job I had no prior knowledge of how a theatre worked, although I had the technical knowledge of sound and a lot of the lighting stuff I’d never set up a theatre show, I didn’t know how it worked, I didn’t know how the lighting worked for theatre and to a certain extent how a lot of the sound stuff was based. Seeing a blank space in the morning, and then by the time the gig or whatever is starting it’s a completely transformed space, just seeing the show develop from nothing into something really good is really rewarding. You really have to keep learning in this job because you have to know what’s going on with the up to date trends. The technology especially is moving so fast, if you don’t keep up to date you’ll quickly get left behind. I think to get into this you obviously need some sort of training, and I think it’s really important to get some sort of work experience. You have to keep on at it, it’s not going to happen overnight. One of the best routes in is just to ask to go along and watch what’s going on in a venue, and if you keep going back they might start going, “well, you can maybe do this or that”, which might not be technical-based but it at least gets you in to maybe get a foot in the door, which is the main thing.