VISTA — Fans of Americana music piled into Petco Park on a cold December evening for the Wild Horses Festival, headlined by Mumford & Sons.
The team behind the scenes recognized the opportunity to facilitate communal experiences and ensured the sights and sounds of the night reached those fans.
“Tonight when Mumford goes on and the crowd goes wild, I’ll still get goosebumps. And I’ll still be terrified that something’s gonna go wrong, but I also know the team’s team’s great. They’ll figure it out,” said Steven Evans, chief executive officer and founder of Show Imaging. “How many people get to say, ‘I’m going to work tonight to make 40,000 people happy?’”
Show Imaging, based in Vista with offices in Montana and Florida, facilitates a wide range of large-scale live experiences, from music festivals such as Wild Horses, Under the Big Sky, and Proper to events with large production components, including Comic-Con and college graduations.
Since 2015, Show Imaging has also helped produce the popular biannual electronic music festival, MMXXV Spring CRSSD Festival, at Waterfront Park in downtown San Diego.
Madison Wells, director of show services, said there are “different challenges every time we do a show,” including taking “obscure puzzle pieces and finding how they fit together.” Sometimes that means running the entire event; other times, it means working with a range of stakeholders.
“We are much more interested in the big picture than providing gear,” Wells said.
The stage at Petco Park for the Dec. 26 show was built on temporary flooring installed over the baseball surface used for a WWE event earlier in the month. As crews prepared for the show days earlier, part of the temporary flooring was removed to allow ballplayers to work on their offseason throwing programs in the right-field corner.
Wells said other venue-specific accommodations must be made whenever Show Imaging works with Petco Park. The outfield pitch clock had to be removed to install a stage ramp, while batting cages and luxury boxes were converted into dressing rooms and green rooms for the artists.
After Wild Horses, Show Imaging then had a few days to convert the stadium, Gallagher Square and a nearby parking lot into a five-stage electronic dance music festival called Proper.
Now in the third year of the tandem shows, Mark Lopez, chief experience officer, said that experience has helped.
“Logistically our crew is very familiar with this venue,” Lopez said. “It’s helpful to know what our client wants.”
He said different shows involve different clients, including venues, promoters, artists and sometimes municipalities.
“We produce temporary events that are at different venues that we build uniquely every single time with a timeline we can’t control for something that happens for a short window that doesn’t happen again,” Lopez said. “For me, being from North County, that’s cool to have a unique company that does cool events nationwide in Vista.”
Show Imaging’s origins could be summed up in an axiom from “Dirty Harry”: “A man has got to know his limitations.” Evans said he found himself drawn to acting while attending Oak Middle School in Los Alamitos.
“I was not very good,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not a dancer, I’m not a singer. And so I started doing more of the tech.”
Evans pursued that passion while a student at UC San Diego, including producing a show for the then-sitting president, the annual graduation ceremony and the Sun God Festival on campus.
Evans said he enjoys providing the opportunity “to have collective joy in a time where that’s not what everybody gets to do.”
The live event production business grew slowly from there until he founded Show Imaging, which now includes a large warehouse in Vista and more than 200 employees nationwide. He said he still feels a deep tie to San Diego and to creating memorable experiences that reflect the local vibe.
“We’ve been able to build a really interesting, imperfect company that I think represents what San Diego stands for,” Evans said. “I think that companies like us and some of the other companies – even though we’re friendly competitors – we kind of just help each other out, and I want us all to succeed, because it’s great. It’s a great city.”
