Blake is a production designer and manager with 15 years’ experience in the live events industry. With bases in Australia and the UK, his team works on an average of 450 events annually – in a normal year!
Blake studied at WAAPA, then moved to Miami before touring North America. Key clients have included The Really Useful Group, Live Nation, TEG Live, VenuesWest, Frontier Touring, PRG North America, Megatix, West Australian Ballet and Fringe World Festival.
Blake heads up Granston Productions in Perth, WA. His talented team delivers high-quality production in Australia using global, leading event technology.
What would you normally be doing this time of year?
I would have recently returned from a tour in North America and Europe. Here in Perth, it would be our usual winter season of corporate, concert and theatre work. And we’d be in design meetings preparing for the summer.
What’s a fairly normal day at the moment for you?
I have been seeing a lot of the inside of my house. It’s been a balance between enjoying time at home with family and friends and trying to hold our place as a company inside a hollowed-out industry. There are a lot of design concepts flying out the door without build dates attached to them. I’ve been plotting shows that are happening outside of WA from an MA/Hippotizer on my dining room table.
Are you learning anything to improve your skills set?
Yes, I have been upskilling with the latest Green Hippo courses, playing around a lot with more streamlined processes to integrate kinetic architecture, and learning new techniques to increase the quality of our original AV content.
What bad habits have you slipped into?
I don’t know how to handle not being busy. It’s felt like a 14-year chapter of madness screeched to a halt. My bad habit has been not letting myself enjoy the forced downtime. But I have been getting much better at it. There has been lots of cooking and Call Of Duty gunfire in the house these past few months.
How are you coping financially?
Not great, I’m running at about 6% of our normal income/workload from this time last year. The priority since March has been getting our rent paid and keeping our production team afloat. It’s a rough industry to have fallen out from under us when it really takes 100% dedication to be successful in it.
When do you think live entertainment will return and in what format?
It’s a reactive time with little to no certainty. Our local industry has been adapting and recreating itself these past few weeks. It’s coming down to a few promoters in WA focusing on creating experience-driven events for their patrons rather than depending on an artist’s brand to get people in the door. This has given us the opportunity to design stages that we normally wouldn’t have the scope to execute in Perth with different considerations such as how things will look over a live stream.
Do you have any words of encouragement?
Things may have changed in regards to the form production takes, but our industry’s technical creativity still has a place. The “struggling artist” is not a new storyline for the Australian arts industry. We adapt and we find a way. I haven’t met someone successful in this industry who can’t kick ass in another one until we find our new place.
What makes you happy at the moment?
It’s been really great to be able to spend more time with my partner and family. Our new Covid kitten Harry has given me an extra reason to get vertical each day.
