Italy - Vasco Rossi is currently engaged in his summer Live Kom 15 stadium tour which is completely sold out, and will see the legendary singer play to nearly 1m fans, with another stunning lighting and show design by his long term LD, Giovanni Pinna.

This year Giovanni has incorporated 34 Robe BMFL Blades and 16 BMFL Spots into the design, which are the work-horse spot fixtures of the tour. He has also deployed 100 of Robe's LEDBeam 100s which are dotted around the back wall of the main set. One of Italy's leading designers, he has been using Robe products in his work for some years, but this is the first full-on project for which he has specified BMFL Spots.

Giovanni worked closely with Claudio Santucci and Florian Boje from set design company Gioforma who produced the imposing industrial stage set constructed from aluminium and fabricated by Rome based rental company BOTW,

UK - HOG Factor, the lighting design and programming competition for HOG4 Consoles, is to enjoy its second UK outing at the PRO Show at the NEC Birmingham on Sunday 13 September.

HOG Factor, an initiative from European Master Distributor AED Distribution in partnership with High End Systems, is coming back to the UK. The competition was first held at PLASA 2014, then most recently toured to Germany for ProLight+Sound Frankfurt.

The competition is open to young students currently enrolled in a full-time UK Entertainment technology related education course, or working at the starting level in a UK lighting rental production house. There will be six teams, each with two members, competing against each other. In advance they will be presented with a lighting rig comprising High End Systems Luminaires along with a set piece of music. Teams have to design a lighting show using the l

UK - The Mentalists opened at the Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End this week. Written by Richard Bean, the award-winning writer of the international hit One Man, Two Guvnors, the play stars The Office co-creator Steven Merchant in his West End debut alongside Steffan Rhodri, best known for his role as Dave Coaches in Gavin and Stacey.

After providing the lighting equipment for the Wyndham's Theatre's previous show American Buffalo, White Light makes an immediate return to the venue to supply the lighting support for the new production.

Rich Mence, production electrician on the show, states, "For The Mentalists, I worked alongside David Plater, the lighting designer, who wanted to create a very naturalistic feel. As the play takes place during different times of the day, we had to reflect this on what was a static set."<

UK - Technical theatre student Bradley Allen has used an Avolites Titan Mobile armed with the new Titan V9 operating system to light a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at Colchester Institute.

This production saw Extended Diploma Acting students perform Shakespeare's famed romantic comedy, following events surrounding the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta.

Allen, now in his second year of study, chose Avolites from a number of console manufacturers, controlling a lighting rig including 24 dimmers, four Robe Colorwash 575XTs, two Robe Colorspot 575s, and both Chauvet and Visage LED parcans from the Titan Mobile console.

"The brief for the lighting was that it should look timeless," says Allen. "The lighting process needed to be smooth and not cause issues. I felt Titan offered the most useful features for me."

The network conn

UK - The team at Daktronics have been determined to direct their power as a collective towards raising money for charity. The hard-wired crew will represent the company by taking part in the Morrisons Great Newham London Run, at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on Sunday, 19 July 2015.

The eleven-strong team is comprised of six Daktronics' UK employees and the support of five family members. The money they raise will be donated to Paul's Place (paulsplace.org.uk), a Bristol-based charity that supports and facilitates physically disabled adults.

The team is closely aligned with the site of the run, as the route takes in all the iconic London 2012 Olympic Games legacy venues, including the Lee Valley VeloPark into which Daktronics has installed four Daktronics LED video displays, each measuring 18.10sq.m , in preparation for the 2016 UCI Track Cycling World Championships.

The disp

The Netherlands - Robert Juliat's Aramis and Lancelot long-throw models have been out in full force in the Netherlands for two of the country's most exuberant parties.

Lighting designer Martin Beekhuizen used no less than 16 RJ Aramis 2500W followspots on Amsterdam's biggest party night of the year as huge audiences flooded into the Amsterdam Arena for the 11th Toppers in Concert extravaganza.

Billed as 'the singalong festival of the year', the annual event filled the massive arena - home of Amsterdam's Ajax football team - for five nights at the end of May 2015. Audiences of over 70,000 people per night - dressed in white with 'a colourful touch of summer' - sang along with Dutch superstars, Gerard Joling, Jeroen van der Boom and Rene Froger, and special guest stars Danny de Munk, Edzillia Rombley, Andre and Roxanne Hazes, David Bisbal and Village People, at this bright, bold

UK - The Knight of Illumination Awards (KOI) 2015 has announced the main sponsors of this year's prestigious event.

The Awards, which celebrate the creative talents of international lighting and digital content designers working in the UK in the sectors of TV, Theatre and Concert Touring and Events, is delighted to welcome industry heavyweights: OSRAM, Ambersphere Solutions, MA Lighting, Hawthorn, Robert Juliat, Ayrton and XL Video, who have generously supported the Awards for several years running (some since its inaugural year). Alongside them are FIX8Group and Light Initiative, who are new to the event. The ceremony will take place at East London's Troxy club on Sunday 4 October.

"We are very proud to be sponsors of the KOI Awards. It is an amazing ceremony which last year we were very happy to attend," says Valére Huart-Gyors, Ayrton. "Seeing the most

China - For years, the Hong Kong government has emphasised the need to support local arts and cultural heritage. As part of that effort, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCD) is building a new performing arts complex, the Xiqu Centre, which is expected to be completed in 2017. The complex will house the Tea House Theatre, a 200-seat venue for Chinese opera - with an emphasis on Cantonese opera - that will help increase public interest in the art form.

To prepare for the opening of the Xiqu Centre, the WKCD and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts are working together on a number of experimental shows being staged at the Academy, where they can test the staging, seating and equipment. ETC LED luminaires feature prominently in the programme, which is being used to shed a new light on the classic operas.

Lighting designer Billy Chan integrates western stage ligh

USA - Ayrton MagicDot-R made its US debut with Bruno Mars at Rock In Rio Las Vegas in May. Lighting designer Cory FitzGerald of Seven Design Works used a configuration of 184 of the new fixtures on the singer's closing performance at this year's festival which was hosted for the first time in the US. FitzGerald's design also featured an array of 128 Ayrton IntelliPix-R panels deployed as fascias fronting the stage-wide risers that backed Mars and his band.

FitzGerald has used Ayrton fixtures on several shows for Mars, including New Year shows at The Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas and NBC's Saturday Night Live. FitzGerald's lighting for Mars' one-off Rock in Rio set, however, was an evolution of his designs for the singer's previous shows. "I wanted to create a similar visual vibe to the SNL show but was looking for something very specific that would bring an almost retro lo

USA - Chroma-Q Color Force 12 multi-purpose LED fixtures were recently specified by lighting sales and production company, E2i Design for an ambitious show at Michigan's Brighton High School.

The school's musical theatre troupe was the first in the state to perform the spectacular Tony Award-winning new musical, Nice Work If You Can Get It.

E2i Design's Josh Holowicki passionately supports the school's theatre in a number of ways - as vice chairman of the board of directors, as volunteer technical director and scenic designer, and as producer. As the technical director, he's responsible for all audio, video and lighting.

"We recently redesigned the entire lighting system in the theatre, investing in 36 Color Force 12 units for the house rig," says Josh. "We use them for cyc lighting as well as general stage washes, and without a doubt they are a spectac

Sweden - For the 2015 Sweden Rock Festival, production manager Pelle Aberg selected a Meyer Sound Leo linear large-scale sound reinforcement system for the main stage to support headliners such as Judas Priest, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Slash, and Toto. The system provided the crew with excellent coverage control, while eliminating the need for delay towers.

"I talked to many sound engineers that I trust about our options, and I decided to go all the way on our biggest stage with Leo," says Aberg. "We have very strict limits on sound outside the festival grounds, with fines for any breaches, so we needed a system that could effectively cover large areas at high levels, but with precise control. The LEO system achieved this goal - I could hear clear, powerful music all the way to the back of the huge crowd."

Main hangs for the Festival Stage were 15 Leo-M

UK - The Animation degrees at Staffordshire University are regarded as some of the most prestigious courses in the UK - in fact it is the only UK university to offer a degree in Stop Motion Animation & Puppet Making.

With facilities that are second to none and with close industry ties including the famous puppet makers Mackinnon & Saunders and Aardman Animation, the Stop Motion Animation degree course is extremely popular with students wishing to pursue a career in stop motion animation.

But while the department boasts first class facilities and equipment which enable students to get real hands on experience, Manoubi Ben Lamri, the university's specialist technical instructor for animation, had one issue he wanted to solve - how to de-clutter the small studio spaces and enable the students to move more freely around their sets.

Following a chance meeting with Doughty Enginee

Romania - Showline SL NITRO 510C strobes have made their debut on the third edition of Electric Castle, Romania's biggest music festival, becoming the first LED strobes to be used on the event in its short history.

The award-winning dance festival takes place in Banffy Castle, a 14th century monument in the Romanian village of Bontida. Twenty-two of the powerful Showline strobes, supplied by ASC Systems, were an integral part of the main stage rig, where such big name acts as The Prodigy, Rudimental and Fat Boy Slim performed.

"We've been suppliers to the festival since its first year," says ASC Systems' Raluca Dumitru. "This year several of the lighting designers asked for LED strobes in their brief and so we chose to invest in the SL NITRO 510C. We were confident in our decision on account of Philips' fantastic reputation for high quality entertainment lightin

UK - Now in its 37th year, the Heritage Events Leeds Castle Concerts are considered the premier event of their kind in the Kent Summer calendar and this year's show proved no exception with over 12,000 visitors taking to the lawns of the castle.

Working with lighting designer Theo Cox, Aurora supplied lighting, rigging and crew to the production to create an on stage lighting spectacular to complement the existing installation at the beautiful medieval venue.

Keeping the power requirement low and the green credentials high, a variety of LED products were deployed including Martin MAC Aura and MAC Quantum Wash to add colour and movement to performances by The Definitive Rat Pack, who kicked off the show with a touch of Vegas, followed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by John Rigby.

The low power approach was augmented by generator provider Midas who ran Biodeies

USA - Every year since its founding in 2006, Life in Color, the world's largest paint party, can be counted on for three things: drawing huge crowds (last year over 600,000 turned out around the world for the paint-drenching fun), featuring EDM's biggest names like Calvin Harris and Steve Aoki, and coming up with some of the most wildly creative show themes on the festival circuit. The 2015 Life in Color Big Bang World Tour is no exception. The crowds have been thick, the artists like Dillon Francis and Bingo Players have been big, and the highly original theme breaks the mould into a million colourful pieces.

The tour's "Big Bang" name says it all. So does its tag line The Creation of Color. Asking the big question, "How did colour come to be?" the tour is built around a story line of the world's colour being imperilled only to be rescue

UK - Following a successful event at last year's festival, XL Video, working with technical producer, Nick Diacre, has once again produced a significant achievement in 180? live mapping for Shangri-La's Heaven Stage at the Glastonbury festival 2015.

The Heaven structure was built organically by Andrew Cross and his team, onsite at the festival, only a few days before the event, and the construction is different every year.

The wide, wooden structure consists of 419 tessellated triangles, which were mapped using photogrammetry and stitched into two composites - one a 2D map and a second 3D model.

XL's technical team, led by Christian Dickens, collaborated closely with Nick Diacre, and together they selected XL Video's Avolites Ai media servers for the project. Their plan was to explore Ai's abilities and to test its live mapping skills on an organic structure. In addition, th

UK - The current Take That Live 2015 tour, promoting the band's seventh studio album, III, is the sixth major tour for which Brilliant Stages has constructed bespoke staging for the eternal boy band since the company first built a stage set for the band in 1994.

The main elements of Brilliant Stages' construction comprise a main stage with apron and artistic performer staircases, a multi-level band stage backed by a series of nine box lifts, an upper stage with an integral service lift, and a forestage with piano lift, all of which connect to a runway which loops out into the arena to a B-stage.

As usual, Take That are delivering a full-on production, this time with a high degree of theatricality and a large number of performers in support of the main artists. The consequence is a set which demands as much activity below stage as on-stage - a major feature which Brillia

Time Flies - Live Aid was staged 30 years ago yesterday. On 13 July 1985, 75 different acts performed live for about 170,000 people in London and Philadelphia. An estimated 1.5 billion people in 110 countries watched it via a live television stream from 13 satellites. More than 40 nations also held telethons for African famine relief during the broadcast.

In our current digital age, these numbers may seem quaint, but in 1985, there was no World Wide Web, no email, no live blogging and no Twitter. Most people still listened to music by listening to the radio or playing vinyl records and cassette tapes; compact discs only became widely available this same year.

The event was a spectacular success, though not without its problems. Satellite links between London and Philadelphia failed several times. But in an ultimate triumph of technology and good will, the event raised more tha

India - Barco hosted its entertainment & corporate partner event in India on 25 and 26 June. Over 70 business partners gathered in Goa to get an overviews of the latest developments in entertainment and corporate visualization.

The Radisson Blu Resort Goa Cavelossim Beach traded its holiday atmosphere for one of hi-tech visualization and industry-leading projection. Throughout an action-packed two-day event, Barco offered its local business partners a series of workshops and hands-on product demos. "Staying abreast in a fast-evolving industry is not always easy," says Mandar Gupte, Barco E&C sales director. "Hence we took this opportunity to give our business partners a comprehensive overview of recent trends and new product launches."

Barco along with High End Systems turned the venue into a blank canvas onto which several of its newest solutions could shi

UK - Colour Sound Experiment supplied lighting - including over 300 moving lights - to the four principal stages at new UK festival Wild Life, together with their new high definition proprietary 7 mm LED screen for one stage. The weekend line-up was presented by two of the country's leading electronic artists - Disclosure and Rudimental - both also main stage headliners.

The event was staged over two days at Shoreham Airport in Sussex near Brighton, and enjoyed - together with excellent weather - by capacity crowds of 35,000 music fans each day.

Colour Sound won a competitive quote to supply the four main stages of the event which was organised and promoted by SJM. Haydn 'H' Cruickshank comments, "It's always really exciting to be involved in something fresh, new and different and we were delighted to be working on this one. It was a great chance to put the new screen thr

UK - Star Events continues its campaign to make stage construction safer with the introduction of a tool-free handrail for the downstage edge of festival/event performance platforms.

Developed with an industry specialist and trialled during 2014, Star Events' handrail has had an immediate impact at sites this summer, clipping in and out of adapted sockets on performance stages, simply and quickly.

Rookie Manning, Health & Safety advisor to SJM Concerts at Summer in the City, Manchester, comments, "Star Events' system provides an excellent solution during build and strike phases of a production and I cannot see any reason why it shouldn't be used at all future events.

"The handrail can be erected or removed by two crew in a matter of minutes and having seen a number of people fall from stages over the last 16 years, I will have no hesitation in recommending it to cl

Germany - Some 90,000 people descended on Rock am Ring in Mendig in western Germany last month for the festival's 30th anniversary in a new location. Attendances hit record levels to see headline acts Slipknot, Foo Fighters, Motorhead and In Flames amongst others. With over 150 bands playing over three days, festival-goers were spoilt for choice.

Southside, which took place in Tuttlingen in southern Germany, featured over 100 bands but with a distinctly more "alternative pop/rock" flavour. This time, around 60,000 fans turned out over three days to enjoy the music and a mix of sunshine and rain. DirectOut was on hand for the duration of both festivals to ensure seamless audio transmission from the stage to OB van for regional public broadcaster SWR.

DirectOut product manager Christian Müller was on site to assist SWR engineer Björn Lautenschlager throughout the two

Australia - Vivid Sydney is the largest festival of light, music and ideas in the Southern Hemisphere and this year, Pyrmont's harbourside has been transformed into a buzzing multi-sensory, engaging zone where you control the entertainment.

The precinct features a number of interactive installations including Mission Control which gives the public the opportunity to create their own two-minute light show. Once you've selected your music track, you then get to play with forty-four Clay Paky Sharpys and ten Mythos fixtures positioned on The Star building and Sky Terrace.

Control, housed in a glass booth located in the park opposite The Star, consists of a large 60 inch touch screen controller with selectable colour, movement and effects.

"There's also a Leap Motion Controller, which is an infra-red detector that allows you to control the intensity of the lights by

UK - Blackpool Council has announced the appointment of WarPro as specialist contractors for the town's new Illuminations project.

As announced in January, the resort's world famous illuminations display will this year be enhanced this year following a £2m cash boost from the Coastal Communities Fund.

With a further £420,000 being contributed by Blackpool Council contributing and public arts body LeftCoast, the £2.42m 'LightPool' project will give a new lease of life to the flagship attraction by enhancing the display and creating new exciting new light shows, events and features across the town centre.

New state-of-the-art signage will be included at key sites, guiding people around town and leading them to the different installations and new Illuminations 'ambassadors' will also be employed, supplemented by additional volunteers, to improve the visitors'

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