Lights, Cameras, PPECS

By Patrick Bohn, November 13, 2025

Christian deBrigard ’07 ensures students in the Park School have the equipment needed to excel.

Christian deBrigard ’07 (left) working with students at a Steadicam workshop.

(Photo by Giovanni Santacroce)

Throughout the semester, a visit to Park Portable Equipment Center and Services (PPECS), located on the first floor of the Roy H. Park School of Communications, might evoke the feeling of a bustling airport.

All day, students move in and out, packing up equipment onto carts and pushing it out down the halls of Park, or outside to waiting cars.

At the center of all this movement is Christian deBrigard ’07, who, as the portable media production equipment manager, is in charge of making calm of the chaos: keeping things organized and ensuring students have the necessary equipment to produce their projects. Each semester, deBrigard and colleague Ryan Berryann, who is the PPECS and facilities manager, oversee more than 1,500 separate checkouts of gear and see upwards of 20,000 pieces of equipment come and go.

Much of the equipment is, as deBrigard often mentions, “industry standard.” Whether it’s SONY FX30 Digital Cinema cameras, Manfrotto Fluid Head tripods, Sennheiser ME66 Shotgun mics, or custom intro light kits with Bluetooth-controllable Nanlite FS-60B Bi-color Studio Spotlight LEDs and Mini Reflectors, Fresnel and Softbox attachments, if you’re looking for it, deBrigard almost certainly has it.

DeBrigard, who worked at PPECS as a student, now works with vendors and ensures that much of the equipment available to students is "industry standard." (Photo by Giovanni Santacroce)

Putting together the right package is a process that is different for every student, based on the assignment and their individual skills. DeBrigard’s expertise in giving students exactly what they need has been honed not just over his eight years at PPECS, but also in earlier career stops as a guitar salesman at music stores in Ithaca and Los Angeles.

“In sales, there’s this mentality that you always have to show people your best—or most expensive—piece of equipment,” he said. “But it’s really about listening to the customer and figuring what they need.

“Here at PPECS, often students just want the ‘best’ camera we have, but I’ll start asking them questions about what they’re trying to do and end up recommending a different one,” deBrigard continues. “Whether it’s guitars or cameras, my goal is to position people so that the equipment isn’t holding them back but instead bringing things out of them.”

This sort of back-and-forth requires an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest developments, gleaned from industry publications and vendors. DeBrigard is also quick to credit students, who he says, “are hip to the trends.” And when he talks about equipment, you can hear the excitement and pride in his voice when he shares that the gear available to students taking Introduction to Journalism is the same kind used in professional production settings.

“I love new equipment, because I love the potential of it,” he said. “The quest to get it, learn about it, see it being used by the students, and ultimately seeing the potential of both the student and the equipment being realized.”

“My goal is to position people so that the equipment isn’t holding them back but instead bringing things out of them.”

Christian deBrigard ’07, portable media production equipment manager

DeBrigard’s passion for production began in high school and, prior to the advent of digital editing, when he started making music videos by combining his favorite songs with VHS movies to create a hybrid music video/movie trailer. (His favorite? Putting the song “Du Hast” by the band Rammstein over clips of The Matrix).

While growing up in Southern New Jersey, deBrigard spent plenty of time in Ithaca, thanks to his older brother John, who graduated from IC in 2003 with a sound recording technology degree.

Christian would frequently come up to visit and attend Chili Fest, or a classical guitarist festival put on by Pablo Cohen, professor of music performance at IC. But despite a love of music—he also played in countless bands growing up—Christian took a different path from his brother when it came time to pick a course of study.

Want to learn more about the equipment available to students in the Roy H. Park School of Communications? Let Christian deBrigard ’07, IC's portable media production equipment manager, walk you through some of the state-of-the-art camera, lighting, and sound gear you can find at the Park Portable Equipment Center and Services (PPECS).

“I didn’t want my homework to be music,” he said. “I chose instead to focus on something that complemented it and picked television-radio, with a video production concentration.”

Speaking of complementary, deBrigard also used that word to describe his choice of minor—cultural anthropology—which he said paired nicely with his major on “the path of natural inquisition.”

“I loved the idea that the more you understand other people’s orbits the larger yours becomes,” he said.

He worked at PPECS as a student, leading to what would become a full circle moment years later, and after graduating, went to Los Angeles to try and start a career in video and media production. Finding only day work, he got his first salesman job at Hollywood Guitar, which he credited with teaching him the skills needed to match customers to equipment.

“We have state-of-the-art equipment here at Ithaca College. But the magic we have is making the equipment work for everyone.”

Christian deBrigard ’07

Moving back to Ithaca in 2009 “because that’s what I associated with home,” he briefly went back to school to study digital electronics and worked at McNeil Music before enrolling in nursing school at TC3 from 2014 to 2015, seeing it as a path to supporting his family, which by that point included his young son.

“When my son was born, he wasn’t breathing, and when you experience something like that you appreciate the people who guide you through it,” he said. “What drew me to the profession was helping others.”

Ultimately, deBrigard realized he wasn’t a personality fit for the field, so he pivoted again, this time into social work. He worked for Family & Children Service of Ithaca while shooting weddings and music videos on the side. Still unsure of what he wanted to do, he started looking at job openings at IC.

“There was a broadcast engineer [position] opening, so I called my old boss at PPECS, Phillip Wacker-Hoeflin and told him I wanted to start a career,” deBrigard said. “He told me that the job wasn’t a great fit for me, but that he was going to retire in a few months, and he thought that position would be a more natural fit.”

Putting his name in the hat, deBrigard laughed that he “bought a suit, and cut my hair and covered up my tattoos” ahead of his interview.

He got the job, and since then, he’s been a mainstay at PPECS, where the dress code means the suit can stay in the closet and the tattoos can come back. Through it all, deBrigard has kept his passion for helping people reach their potential.

“We have state-of-the-art equipment here at Ithaca College,” he said. “But the magic we have is making the equipment work for everyone.”