From Cable Chaos to Creative Confidence: How Freelance Lighting Operator Helena Clason Built Her Career on CRMX
For many freelancers in live entertainment, the first years can feel like survival mode: taking whatever jobs come, wrestling with unfamiliar gear, and hoping nothing breaks at the wrong time. For Helena Clason, a 25 year old German, now working as Lighting Operator based in London, those same years have also been about building confidence. And, perhaps unexpectedly, much of that confidence has come from a small black and green box: Stardust.
From Audio Student to Lighting Operator
Helena’s path into the industry wasn’t planned. At university she studied audio for film, but a part-time job at a holiday park introduced her to programming lights. She quickly discovered she preferred the immediacy of live lighting to sitting in an edit suite.
After graduating, she joined a corporate AV company in London, where she finally got her hands on professional gear and learned not only how to program but also how to rig, patch, and troubleshoot. It was also there that she encountered LumenRadio technology for the first time. The company had invested in four Stardust and four Aurora units, and since no one else seemed particularly interested in lighting, Helena became the one to figure them out. That freedom to experiment proved decisive: “I figured out how to link the Aurora and the Stardust, and I didn’t have to run cable anymore. That got me really excited.”
Cutting the Cable – and Building Trust
The excitement wasn’t just about saving time. It was about reliability. In her early days she had relied on Art7 dongles or long DMX runs, both of which were prone to headaches. With CRMX, setup was simple, pairing was instant, and – most importantly – the signal held.
“With Stardust you just press link and it goes boom – it works,” she recalls. The contrast was so sharp that she began to deploy the units on every job she could. Instead of dragging 50 meters of cable through conference halls, she would drop a Stardust under a truss of profiles, link it to an Aurora, and be ready to go.
When Wireless Saves the Show
One moment cemented her trust in CRMX. During a late-night corporate event, her console died at 11pm. The show was scheduled for the following morning, and the panic was immediate. But she had a Stardust in the rig. By connecting it directly to her laptop, she controlled the entire show without waiting for a replacement desk. “It saved me,” she says simply. For a freelancer, those are the moments that define whether you get called back – or not.
Owning the Gear, Owning the Future
When Helena left her full-time role to go freelance in 2024, one of her first investments was a Stardust of her own. “If I was still full-time, I’d never have been able to buy one. But freelancing gave me that option. Now I can invest in my career, not just get through the month.”
She also struck a clever arrangement with a rental house: when she isn’t using her Stardust, they hire it out to film and TV productions. That keeps her gear working, generates income, and means she’s indirectly part of jobs even when she’s not on site. It also reflects a bigger truth: while many live event companies are still slow to adopt wireless, the film industry has already made it standard. “On film jobs, everything’s wireless,” she says. “They don’t want sparkies running cables during takes. Battery and CRMX just makes sense.”
Corporate, Touring, and Film – Three Different Worlds
That difference is something Helena notices often. In corporate events, wireless is increasingly requested for aesthetic reasons – clients don’t want visible cables, and uplighters like Astera have become ubiquitous. In touring, stock is still dominated by older wired fixtures, even though many new units ship with wireless built in. And in film and TV, wireless is no longer a question at all.
CRMX’s broad compatibility has been particularly useful in mixed environments: Helena has used Stardust with both Ayrton Rivales running W-DMX and Asteras with CRMX across different jobs. “That’s what I love – it’s not limited. I can connect different brands and protocols with one box. It just makes life easier.”
Overcoming Skepticism – One Job at a Time
Of course, adoption isn’t universal. She still encounters project managers who don’t understand what CRMX is, or who are wary because of bad experiences with earlier wireless systems. Sometimes she pushes back, asking to add Stardust to a job simply to make life easier for the crew. And more often than not, the skeptics are converted. “The couple of times I’ve convinced people to use it, they’ve said afterwards: this is so much easier, why didn’t we do this before?” It’s a slow cultural shift, but Helena represents a younger generation for whom wireless isn’t a risk – it’s the default.
Young, Female, and Driving Change
Being young in the industry carries other challenges. Helena is often the youngest person on site, and usually one of very few women. That means she sometimes feels she has to prove herself twice over. “I can see it on people’s faces when I walk in – they’re thinking, why is she here? Do you know how to plug this in?” she says.
At one event she was repeatedly blocked from accessing her lights by security, who assumed she was hospitality staff despite her crew pass. Yet she also sees her presence as important. “I’ve had 16- or 17-year-old girls come up to me after shows and say, you’re the only woman I see here – how do I get into the industry? Just being there makes a difference.”
For her, driving wireless adoption and breaking industry stereotypes go hand in hand: showing that there’s more than one way to run a show – and more than one type of person who belongs in the booth.
Looking Ahead – Bigger Stages, Bigger Creativity
Helena’s ambitions are clear: she wants to move further into live music and touring, where she can design, busk, and create directly to music. Her dream projects are shows like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, productions where the scale and creativity are as impressive as the performance itself. But whether she’s in a ballroom, a brick tunnel, or an arena, one thing won’t change: she’ll be running it wireless.
Conclusion – Confidence Through Reliability
Helena Clason’s journey is a reminder of why reliable wireless matters. For her, CRMX has removed cables, solved emergencies, simplified setups, and given her the freedom to take on bigger challenges with confidence. Discovering Stardust early in her career wasn’t just convenient, it set a new standard for how she works.
For the next generation of lighting professionals, that standard is clear: if you want reliability without compromise, you go wireless.
