It’s a family affair. It’s more like the NOW Productions family than the NOW Productions crew. It’s a dedicated group, but there’s very little struggle–people work at their own pace, chat and joke in a beautiful balance of work and play.

The truck is unloaded, cases and equipment fill the Sheraton ballroom floor.

The “cable-babes” (of both genders) meet at the start to review the set-up.

A few of the more able-brained are dedicated to wiring. Photos of last year’s set-up and intricate wiring diagrams guide the crew.

Godfather Phil Danza makes sure we’re well fed–one of the crew is assigned to taking food orders (usually a very patient crew member like Robbie Uniacke, or Angel Gibson, or Clea Rose). Greg Fritz oversees the technical set-up and works to all hours making sure it all works just right.

It’s a 2-3 day process of laying down thousands of feet of cable, setting up loads of equipment, wiring it all together, creating the stage, checking, tweaking the audio and video output to achieve excellence, and taping down the cables.

At the end, we have a fully functioning sound and video experience for Conference in the Sheraton Universal Hotel’s Grand Ballroom (plus an overflow room too).