Laura Frank, a 30-year veteran of entertainment technology, has been bringing together video and projection professionals as part of frame:work since 2019.
Now she has launched an association, offering a home for pixel people and a mechanism for unglamorous but necessary change.
She spoke to Live Design about her weird love for organizing data under pressure and why it is important to recognize everyone in the discipline, not just the designer.
Live Design: What originally drew you to projection design and how did you train and get into the discipline?
Laura Frank: Honestly, projection design didn't draw me in at all. Media server programming did.
I came for the gear and stayed for the challenges. As a lighting programmer, I had strong opinions on show control and a weird love for organizing data under pressure. When media servers arrived in the early 2000s, that was clearly the next frontier. I had so much to learn about video. I was new to content creation, video distribution, all of it was new territory for me. I learned by doing, as the media server industry was just starting. Thanks to my DMX show control expertise, and media server programming being a new discipline, I was able to learn, adapt my skills and share them as the field of creative video production evolved. When I look at the complexity of video systems now in 2026 compared to what I started with, I am consistently humbled.
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LD: You have written books about the art and technology behind live pixels. What other resources do you recommend for people learning or refining their craft?
LF: I find the biggest issue is the amount of skills creative video production depends on: 3D modeling, networking, signal engineering, technical artistry, design platforms, coding, console programming and on and on. And then which particular platform should you dedicate yourself to learning? It can feel a little like playing the lottery.
Ultimately, follow the tools that you feel passionate about. You are going to have to be driven to spend an unreasonable amount of time with the platforms you work with, so it's best to be excited about the challenges they present. For me it was 3D modeling and delivering those models in a web browser. Media server programming supported my WebGL habit. Today the landscape looks different. For someone getting started now, I might encourage understanding coding basics or learning network skills.
The best learning resource is doing the work and being in a community with others doing that work professionally. Part of frame:work's mission is to be a bridge from skills acquisition to skills application.
LD: Your community, frame:work, has been running events and meetups since 2019 and you have just launched an association with a paid membership model. Why is an association needed now?
LF: A community that runs on goodwill has a ceiling, and we hit it.
frame:work has worked for seven years on volunteer time. That is a real achievement and it is also a real limit: everything depends on a small number of people staying willing, and the knowledge of how it all works lives in their heads rather than anywhere durable. An association is how you make something outlast the people who started it.
We didn't build frame:work for ourselves, we built it for the community it serves. Membership pays for the things volunteering cannot: the infrastructure, the programs, the new talent pipeline, the advocacy work that nobody has enough time to document. It also gives us a mandate. When you go to a client, a manufacturer, or a producer, supported by the knowledge base of an organization, you are speaking with the power of a community of people who chose to be represented, and that is different from speaking for an Instagram follower count.
The thing I would not want lost is that membership is not a subscription to a service. It is a statement that this work is a profession and the people doing it are professionals. For the senior end of our community it is closer to stewardship: investing in the health of a discipline that was good to them.
LD: What do you want to change about the discipline in the wider industry? Zac Borovay has talked about projection designers finally being accepted into the union, and other designers say producers and directors are gradually learning what to expect, although sometimes they still need educating. What do you hope will change now there is a professional association?
LF: Recognition is arriving for the designers, and that is genuinely good. What I want next is for it to reach the rest of the room.
Behind every projection design there is a screens producer, a media server programmer, a content engineer, a systems integrator. They are the ones who make the design survive contact with a real venue on a real schedule, and they are largely invisible in how this industry credits and pays people. The designer gets a name in the program. The person who kept it running at 2 am does not.
So the changes I would like are unglamorous. Job titles that are understood across the production industry. Day rates that reflect what the role actually carries. Credit conventions that acknowledge the technical roles. A shared vocabulary for career stages, so that "senior" is earned against something rather than negotiated case by case. And mentorship so the next generation can find a path through this rapidly changing technical environment.
LD: Where do you see projection and video technology evolving over the next 10 years? What technical developments are you particularly excited for?
LF: I am wary of ten-year predictions in a field where the tools turn over every six months.
I expect we'll see more interoperability. Getting our various systems to interact with each other gets easier every day. And the knowledge to write the scripts to connect two devices is just an LLM prompt away. I also hope we'll be 100% video over IP by then.
On AI in general, I would rather be useful than fashionable about it. It is already doing real work in content generation and in the unglamorous middle of the pipeline. Yet I think AI continues to show that while impressive in its capabilities, great design is human. But if you give me 1,000 files to track and organize and coordinate, that is definitely going to be AI assisted.
About Laura Frank
Laura Frank has worked in entertainment technology for more than thirty years, first as one of New York's most sought-after lighting programmers, with credits from David Bowie tours to Broadway's Spamalot, and then as a pioneering Screens Producer for events including the MTV Video Music Awards and The Game Awards. Laura is the Creator Advocate at Megapixel and the founder and Executive Director of frame:work, a 501(c)(3) professional society for the creative video community, which hosts its fourth annual conference, frame:work:london, in November 2026.
She has written two textbooks for Routledge:
- Screens Producing and Media Operations (Fall 2019)
- Real-Time Video Content for Virtual Production & Live Entertainment. (Winter 2023)