MICHAEL ISRAEL
Video Created By Sam Astuto Jr
Working for Michael Israel was nothing short of a challenge. When I was brought on to the team, there was 3 other employees. A secretary, a girl working in the warehouse and a girl doing graphic design. Over the course of the two and a half years I was working there, they all left the company for different reasons. And eventually I inherited all of their responsibilities.
Putting together a custom show performance was a very involved job. It required a level of organization that had to be perfect. Michael’s show required a lot of custom materials, that needed to be created from scratch. It was up to me to engineer a lot of these materials. And I even developed newer more advanced equipment that made the shows set up times and break down faster. Mr. Israel even brought an aluminum welder at one point so I could create light weight custom materials for set up. But this still doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I did for him.
In addition of creating all these custom materials, I was reasonable for putting together everything for each show, and shipping them to each location around the country. Every item had to be accounted for! Check lists and doing things in proper order was a must. I always had to make contact with everywhere our materials were being shipped to, making sure things were properly stored until we arrived.
At each show I would confirm all the details of our arrival. Where we would be staying, who I would be working with to help put the show together. I was required a head of time to set up rental for different equipment that was needed. Either from a business or working with an AV company that was also working the event. We did events that were held in stadiums, and some as small as a event tents in an outdoor area. I was normally assigned a team of volunteers from each organization we worked with to assist me putting everything together before the show. I was always working with a new team, and instructing them to what needed to get done.
Michael had custom music and lighting for each painting in his performance. Using different software I would edit music and write light shows for painting he performed. We also took video from each performance, which I had to edit after the show for promoting and marketing. There is just so much to include on the list of things I did on a dally bases for Mr. Israel.
I assembled all of his artwork frames, printed and coated large format prints of his artwork that was sold from shows, contacted customers and handled shipping, assembled and labeled all the shipment boxes….everything…. just everything I did for this man. And that’s not and exaggeration at all….