About Rance
Rance Costa is a New Media consultant currently living in Hollywood, California USA.
He was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas on August 15, 1979 to Ron and Connie Costa. Until the age of three, Rance lived in Winslow, AR with his parents. Not long after, his father relocated the family to Daytona Beach, FL. Rance remained in Florida until 1989, when he and his family moved to Northglenn, CO. He attended the remainder of Elementary School at Leroy Drive Elementary school where he picked up the trombone for the first time in 5th grade.
He went on to attend Northglenn Junior High followed by Northglenn High School instead of Thornton High School because of Northglenn’s excellent music program. During his High School years, Rance learned many other instruments, including Trumpet, French Horn, Tuba, Euphonium and even the Tympani as he was the featured tympani performer for the 1997 World Champion Northglenn HS Percussion Theater. Rance’s senior year in high school consisted of one gym class, one English class, one math class and four different music ensembles, playing the tuba, french horn, tenor trombone and trumpet on a daily basis.
He dropped out of HS in 1997 after realizing that he was going to fail his final semester of bowling class. Yes, that’s right, bowling class; you see, Rance isn’t a morning person and the class was at 7am. He took his GED test and scored in the 98th percentile, ironically opening up the opportunity to attend Universities that had not accepted him previously based on his HS transcripts. From there he went on to study Music Education at the University of Northern Colorado under the tutelage of Buddy Baker, UNC’s resident trombone professor who only allowed Rance to play tenor and bass trombone.
Beginning in 1997, Rance also began participating in Drum and Bugle Corps with the Denver Blue Knights. He remained there throughout his college experience and beyond, participating for 4 seasons in a row. During these 4 seasons, Rance performed in over 115 competitions, 35 live performances, 15 educational clinics and appeared in 4 DCI World Championship Grand Finals competitions on Baritone, Mellophone and Contra-Bass bugle.
Rance began teaching instrumental music, movement and calisthenics while in college in 1998. He taught music and choreographed drill for marching bands, indoor percussion ensembles in 12 different Denver-area schools from 1998 until 2006, making him one of the most sought-after Denver-area adjudicators at that time. His groups performed at more than 50 local competitions, competed in 5 different states and appeared at the Bands of America Grand Nationals competition twice during his time. Rance also designed and programmed marching band shows, drills, and indoor percussion ensemble shows during this time, making him one of the most flexible talents in the space.
In 2004 Rance was invited to serve as brass staff on the world renown Troopers Drum and Bugle Corps. He remained on staff until the end of the season in 2005, when he moved to another corps, the Dubuque Colts. Rance served on brass staff with the Colts in 2006, 2007 and 2009.
In late 2006, Rance was approached by the Global Gaming League to become a professional commentator for video game competitions on television and the web. Rance relocated to Los Angeles, CA in October of 2006 to pursue his dream of traveling the world as a professional talent. During the remainder of 2006 and 2007 Rance appeared at 6 live gaming events across the country, and traveled internationally four times to China, Denmark, England and Germany to showcase international gaming talent on domestic and international television and web presentations. Rance’s commentary has been featured on CBS, DirecTV, CBC News, Gamestop TV, Giga-TV and G4 and seen by millions on the internet. It was during this experience Rance began to learn many production skills, finding a niche in operating Newtek’s ground breaking live video switching system, the Tricaster. Not limiting his scope to just talent work, Rance began to live direct and camera-op at events as well as serve as stage talent and emcee.
In 2007 Rance joined with Marcus Graham (djWHEAT), Hogan Carter and Mike Dettman to create the first daily internet TV show called Epileptic Gaming. Epileptic Gaming began as a podcast in 2003 with djWHEAT, and was picked up by the Global Gaming League to be presented in video form on their various properties. Rance served as co-host, live director and audio technician on this daily show, which aired for two hours every weekday from January of 2007 until November of 2007, tallying a whopping 140+ episodes comprised of over 250 hours of video content. Rance also appeared on the pilot of the now defunct TV show the Championship Gaming Series as a game commentator and in-game camera man.
In December of 2007 Rance was no longer with the ailing Global Gaming League and began to freelance in the LA area, providing New Media consultation services, productions services, photography services, graphic design and web design services to his clients. He travelled to three events in 2008 with Major League Gaming, acting as a field producer for web content. He spent much time with ArcoStream, a Content Delivery Network and works with them to this day. Rance also served as Content Director for WebRidesTV.com, an auto-centric video website. Rance presided over this property until March of 2009.
During the second half of 2009, Rance began to increase his freelance photography work, shooting layouts for Global Fitness Media, TheStream.tv and the World Cyber Games as well as the Drum Corps International tour. He also is hired frequently to operate Newtek’s Tricaster machine for clients around LA.
Today Rance works as a new media consultant and freelances out of Hollywood, CA where he experiments with cutting edge video and audio production techniques, photography, graphic design, web production and turntablism.
Rance is available as a freelance Photographer with his Canon 5D Mark II or as a freelance videographer with his Sony HVR-V1U camera.
