1. Featured Projects of James Dirks
Club Disney was a highly automated, indoor playground themed for Disney and specializing in
children's party's. The playground was filled with sensors, that kids would unknowingly trigger, that
set off all sorts of sounds and EFX to either delight or scare. They would gather for the party in an
automated theatre before being Wisk away to the party rooms. The party rooms featured a fiber optic
light show set to the happy birthday music. I worked on A/V and automation as a tech and then site
supervisor for 3 locations.
Hard Rock Café dominated my career for a few years. I started as a rack fabrication technician so, I
built and programmed the head end equipment for several new restaurants, then later, as Service
Manager at Island Systems and Design, I was responsible for a maintenance contract covering 96 sites
worldwide. Twice per year site visits provided a hectic travel schedule for me and my 6 team of
technicians.
The $400 million renovation of the grandstands was completed in 2016. The new audio video system
contains 3800 speakers and 1400 video monitors over 9/10th of a mile. My focus was on
programming, commissioning, and configuring the Grandstand PA through 4 major events during
construction.
Completed in 2015 the project was to upgrade the park wide audio system in Kennedy Space Center
Visitor's Complex to integrate with the newer entry gate system. All speakers, amplification and DSP
had to be replaced and the local network had to be reconfigured to handle the audio infrastructure.
My focus was engineering, programming, commissioning and training. This was a great example of
delivering exactly what the client wanted.
Caesars Palace West Convention Expansion included 2 floors of 25 combinable ballrooms rooms that
opened up into a space the size of a football field. The audio system featured over 500 inputs, the
ability to use any combination of rooms together, and presets for concert delays in any direction. This
system was a Crestron, Media Matrix and QSC Basis integration. My focus was on programming all A/V
systems. I have completed several other smaller projects for Caesars Palace since then, including
suites, bars, luxury pool cabanas and Venus Pool Club.
I worked on the ESPN themed restaurant / entertainment complexes in 7 major cities. The first was
the original build of Baltimore in 1998 through to the 2004 ‐ 2006 High Definition upgrades of 4 of the
sites. The feature of these spaces was the Ultimate Theatre, which provided the guests with a sports
viewing experience like no other. Over my years with this client my responsibilities included
everything from technician to project management to design and programming.