About Brandon D. Anderson
Brandon Anderson first became involved in video as a child. With an old tube video camera and some friends, he directed numerous "Star Trek" battle scenes in his living room. As time went on, he experimented with models on strings and black cloth backgrounds. Though none of these scenes survived, they were the earliest manifestations of his love of video.
In the sixth grade Brandon used his video skills to do an in-camera report on the Titanic using pictures from a book and voice over narration. The difficulty of getting the project done this way made Brandon interested in editing technology. In the seventh grade, Brandon purchased a $300 MJPEG video editing card and started learning how to edit and do effects. For a project on the environment, Brandon used a blue screen to place the discussion panel in front of the Earth.
Meanwhile, Brandon played the violin in the school orchestra. When the orchestra got permission to use the Band's recording equipment, Brandon was asked to set help set up and run the equipment. In the process, Brandon learned about audio recording. Thanks to the internet, Brandon learned as much as he could about audio and electrical theory.
By the eighth grade, Brandon was putting his skills to use by editing sequences of videos to a demo recording of the songs the orchestra played. The video was then played back live. At this time Brandon learned how difficult it is to do things like this live, as the pace of the live performance was slower than the recording, forcing him to pause before the last clip. By this point it became clear that Brandon was more interested in tech than performance, so he decided to leave orchestra behind.
Pursuing his interest in video, Brandon applied for and was accepted into Communications Arts High School, a local magnet school on the campus of a much larger 5A high school. In order to fill elective requirements, Brandon looked for classes that were related to video. Failing to find any, he decided that Theatre was the next best choice.
As one of 120 freshmen at Communications Arts, Brandon found his new school far more challenging than his old one. Used to getting all As in middle school, the Bs he got his first semester forced him to work harder and develop better study habits.
Brandon also became involved in his theatre class. At the beginning of the year, his instructor required all students to fill out questionnaires about previous skills and experience. Finding the acting exercises ridiculous and childish, Brandon jumped at the opportunity to help with tech. He helped build the set, and come the duet acting scenes, helped run sound when his partner was too ill to perform. When Northside ISD repairmen came to determine why some of the mic ports "didn't work," Brandon deduced that they may be plugged into a console upstairs. He proceeded to turn on the console and confirmed that they were functional. He then used the project of mapping which port is which as an excuse to get out of many acting games.
Come the second semester of his Freshman year, Brandon's grades were improving. As he adjusted to the new environment, he found it easier to maintain As again, and used his free time to become more active in theatre. Because of his video skills, he was "drafted" to record auditions for the University Interscholastic League One-Act-Play competition auditions. On the last day, he was then drafted to run sound for UIL. In thus, he became the first Freshman UIL crew member under that teacher.
His second year proved to improve Brandon's stature within the school and within Theatre. For one, he was finally in a video production class (required for all Sophomores at that time) and was busy making videos with his group members. In this class, Brandon found that the best work comes from collaborating with others. The videos this group produced were technically superior to those produced by the other groups, and most are available for viewing in the "High School" section "Narrative Video."
Meanwhile, Brandon became sound designer for Hamlet, as well as being forced to act in the role of the Player King. Brandon was also in charge of training new students to use the sound and lighting consoles. This year Brandon Became more interested in lighting and became more involved in the design process. Come UIL, Brandon had become in charge of technical aspects of lighting (essentially master electrician) after the previous ME quit. With the previous lighting designer graduating and his apprentice having quit, Brandon became the new lighting designer by the time school awards were to be held.
In order to hang and focus in time for the school awards, Brandon recruited a good friend who had become interested in theatre. The two of them managed to get the lights set up for the event in time, which was no small task on a dead-hung system. That summer the school hosted a workshop for incoming freshmen. Running low on lamps, Brandon designed a simpler plot for a show based on "Beauty and the Beast." For this, the whole plot was re-hung in two nights! Again, his friend was invaluable in accomplishing this.
For the first semester of his Sophomore year, Brandon was in Theatre II, which, unfortunately left him vulnerable to be cast as Sir Andrew Augacheak in "Twelfth Night." In addition to his acting responsibilities, Brandon maintained his role as lighting designer and lighting crew chief.. At the same time, the final project from the year before in video production which Brandon's team had intended to finish editing that year had been deleted, and none of them felt like starting from scratch on it. The class had been moved from second to third year, meaning that particular group of students took it twice. As a result, Brandon got to make different types of projects. The class also moved from SVHS cameras to digital8 cameras. The first project was supposed to be a documentary, but, having a bunch of clowns in the group, we did a mockumentary instead. Then when it came time do a narrative piece, our group couldn't agree on a concept, so we were handed a project that needed to be done: a documentary on a retiring teacher. Shortly into the project, Brandon had to leave for another event...
The Educational Theatre Association has a theatre honor society called the International Thespian Society. Every year, the Texas chapter has a convention in a select city, usually hours away. Less than a week after Twelfth Night closed, Brandon was on his way with his troop to this convention. While there, he found out that the union guy who was supposed to run the console was double booked, so he volunteered to take over the console. Though he had not had much experience on the console itself, Brandon had spent many hours converting cues using the offline editor for the previous year's UIL. He labeled the console and there were no major mishaps while he was at the console. During the four days of the event, Brandon got about eight total hours of sleep.
The next semester, Brandon and another tech traveled to Austin to be on honor crew for state UIL. This was an interesting experience, and the two of them impressed the locals.
At the begriming of his senior year, Brandon was the stage manager of the first production: "Romeo and Juliet." This production became delayed after Brandon helped pitch an accepted marathon show for that year's convention: "Sam Shepard's Melodrama Play." In order to make the show interesting, Brandon purchased some trees, truss, and oil wheel light, and built some PAR38 cans out of coffee cans (affectionately named CoffeePars). In order to tour a whole rock band in a manner that could be set up and struck in the required time frame (10 minute setup, 7 minute strike), Brandon designed a portable, cheep sound cart. Unfortunately the builder decided to change the design from 1x4s with 1/4 ply to 3/4 ply all around, adding unnecessary weight and creating shifting problems. Soon after deployment, a castor broke. It was then replaced with a better one, which broke shortly after. It now lives in one place in the catwalk of the new blackbox.
At the Texas ITS convention that year, Brandon also earned a $1000 tech scholarship from ITS and finished out the conference working on honor crew (which was far more fun than sitting in a hallway talking).
Finally things were back on track for Romeo and Juliet. The show was pushed back to a January opening, so there was Christmas break to do the tech and rehearse. At this point a serious question had come up: what about UIL? The crew was critically short on time, so whatever they did had to be done fast. They decided to do a shorter version of Romeo and Juliet (which was hard, since the teacher hated to cut anything). They abstracted the set, and proceeded from there. Brandon also added music for scene changes (since there really weren't many obvious breaks). Since one of our tech crew was there to help change costumes, Brandon was left alone in the booth to run over 100 light and sound cues, many of which were simultaneous, and SM at the same time. In the end, however, the judge thought that Tybalt should be more like a cat, and that was the end of that.
Finally came senior projects. Rather than do his own show, Brandon opted to technical direct all of them. This wasn't an easy task. He also decided that he would not run either console during the show, instead teaching students to do it. This made the teacher extremely nervous, since tech had to be perfect or she was not at all happy. His faith in his students was rewarded and, other than a single sound miscue and a design issue (the director never included curtain changes in the design process), the shows went well.
For that year's awards, Brandon chose to magically appear from behind the curtain, take his award, walk across the stage, and then exit behind the curtain, cross over, and go at it again (5 times). For those who were not familiar with stage trickery, this was an amazing feat of magic. Brandon found it more pleasant to sit backstage and talk with his friends in the booth over headset than sit in the house quietly and stand in line.
Of course a lot more happened in his stay in high school. There were concerts he ran, variety shows, district events, and more. However, high school ended, and Brandon headed off to the University of Texas at Austin.
Brandon headed off to the university to live in a dorm for the first year, mostly out of lack of interest in apartment hunting. There he found the most difficult part of life was living with a roommate. Despite some roommate issues, Brandon managed to get a lot done that first year. Brandon Entered as a freshman, but was a sophomore by his second semester. His first semester he became involved with local organizations and engineered a couple of variety rock concerts. Though he had left theatre behind to pursue a degree in Radio-Television-Film, he used his experience and skills to help out various groups and organizations. By the end of his second semester, Brandon was an upper division Junior. That summer he moved into an apartment and took more classes to keep up his feverish pace (and finish his Spanish requirements). The next year he became involved in the automated lighting class, and then became employed as a lighting technical for the Performance Arts Center. That summer he again took classes, and the next year he took a studio production class geared towards three-camera shoots and live event recording. Having completed this rather demanding course, Brandon continued on to single-camera productions under the same instructor. Between these two classes, Brandon and his classmates managed to produce eleven narratives and three field recordings (the narratives are available in the corresponding section).
In May, 2006 Brandon graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Radio, Television, Film, a certificate in Elements of Computer Science, and a GPA of over 3.9. At the suggestion of the RTF video engineer, Brandon applied to Ford Audio-Video, an AV installation company based out of OKC. He started working there as an installation technician and worked his way to Project Engineer. He now specializes in lighting design and control system programming.