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14 March 2016

For the first time, they specified Robe's BMFL Spot fixtures, 22 of which are being supplied by the tour's lighting vendor, Theatrical Media Services (TMS) from Omaha, Nebraska.

The band is well known for their long annual summer tours and sets featuring involved improvisations of their songs - always played differently - accompanied by eye-catching visuals and lightshows, an aesthetic that has been carefully crafted by Fenton since he started working with the band in the early 1990s.

Fenton and Aaron developed the design together, often drawing on architecture and art for inspiration as they build a visual stage concept.

This is the

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14 March 2016

In light of the above and after 17 years as PLASA's chief executive officer, Matthew Griffiths has decided that now is the right time to step aside which would help kick start and facilitate a fresh set of ideas and approaches needed for the next chapter in PLASA's dev

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14 March 2016

The power of original painting created in real-time and projected onto stunning architecture accompanied by live music is a special collaboration between projection artist Ross Ashton, virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie and acclaimed visual artist and painter Maria Rud.

The location for this magical outdoor experience - Venue 316 of the Fringe Festival - is the quadrangle at George Herriot's School. The high impact art is being projected onto the side wall, of the beautiful 17th century chapel - which becomes part of the world renowned Festival, famous for showcasing new, innovative and thought-provoking works.

Says Ross, "We are extremely excited to be performing at the Fringe and exceptionally

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14 March 2016

Renzo Arbore has always loved jazz and Neapolitan music classics. For the release of ... e pensare che dovevo fare il dentista... (...and to think I was supposed to become a dentist...), he is leading his Orchestra Italiana, with his voice, clarinet and boundless charm, on a new summer tour that culminates on 7 September in Milan.

Gazebo Giallo (Arbore's management company) turned to Paco Toscano to interpret the atmospheres of Arbore's music with lights. "I joined the production team that organize

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14 March 2016

Mario Held, system engineer for Rental Pro Austria worked with FOH engineer Andreas Putz to design a Geo S12 line array that would provide balanced and transparent sound reinforcement appropriate for the classical performance, featuring the 200-piece orchestra, numerous solo singers and a choir of 300.

"The venue, like many big halls of this size, has some problem frequencies in the sub and bass area," says Held. "Rental Pro Austria has nearly all the varieties of Nexo subs in its inventory, but I decided to use four RS15 subs per side

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14 March 2016

The tour, in support of alt-J's second album, This Is All Yours, visited a variety of indoor and outdoor venues around the US including a show at Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

The video design, created by Jeremy Lechterman and Jackson Gallagher from FragmentNine, uses horizontal rows of LED, interspaced with gaps which can be used with lighting.

At the O2 show, XL Video supplied a solution using their regular touring frames, and special brackets.

"For the US tour design, the designers wanted to reduce the size of spaces between the LED rows," said XL's US touring projects director, Gareth Jeanne. "As our touring frames have

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14 March 2016

The Jubilee Sailing Trust brings together disabled and able bodied crew members, accepting all degrees of disability including wheelchair users, visually or hearing impaired, stroke victims and more recently regularly welcoming Help for Heroes military veterans.

Having recently updated the general audio broadcast systems on the Lord Nelson ship, a similar upgrade is about to occur with Tenacious on its return to port. Using a number of Cloud paging microphones, with automatic messaging functionality, the audio broadcast system is an essential tool for keeping ships' crews informed of daily routines and emergency situations

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14 March 2016

"We wanted to create a 3D experience for the audience," agrees lighting designer Paul Normandale, "And bring some of the video content to life, blurring the lines between screen and reality. We went to Specialz as they did such a great job on the last tour and this mechanical, visual, yet tourable challenge is very much their area of expertise."

To this end, Specialz was charged with creating a huge 3m diameter reflector, a set of bespoke dollies pre-rigged with Sharpys and last but cer

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14 March 2016

Following the success of the BBC phenomenon that is The Great British Bake Off, Jo Brand has been welcoming a panel of guests each week to enjoy cake related discussion.

Filmed with Love Productions in front of a live audience at The London Studios, An Extra Slice reflects on the week's baking, with guest interviews with departing contestants, behind the scenes clips and a selection of audience based cake related triumphs and disasters.

To help lighten up the serving, Aurora has provided LD Oli Richards with an array of Martin Auras and Viper Performances which are kept fresh by moving light operator David Francis and tech Simon Willet.

The show features a number of set practical pendants which have added an atmospheric h

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14 March 2016

The play has opened in Windsor and will begin its UK tour next week, visiting venues in Leeds, Brighton, Richmond, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Norwich, Cheltenham, Woking, Milton Keynes and Cardiff.

Starring television's Ian Kelsey and Patrick Robinson, The Shawshank Redemption tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a man serving a life sentence in the notorious Shawshank prison. Realising he cannot survive life behind bars, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with prison fixer Red and soon begins to hatch a plan

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14 March 2016

To ensure everything possible was done to guarantee the safety of the structure, Colin Luke,senior project manager at Oswestry-based Load Cell Rental, was asked to supply a way of monitoring the stage weights during the build.

Following conversations with the event organisers, Load Cell Rental supplied a 20 cell BroadWeigh system. Colin said, "Following a spate of high profile events where temporary stages have collapsed, it was vital to leave no stone unturned in order to ensure the concert made the headlines for only the right reasons. No respectable concert organiser can afford to ignore the loadings on temporary structures and the BroadWeigh system is the perfect tool for the job."

The BroadWeigh load monitor

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14 March 2016

It was one of the issues that had to be considered when Jands Venue Engineering (JVE) and event AV services provider, Staging Connections, put their skills together to engineer a faster, safer and more efficient staging management system for the hotel. One of the biggest challenges faced by JVE and Staging Connections was the installation - it had to fit in with existing hotel commitments, to make sure all the rooms involved were empty, and it couldn't be done at night, with the risk guests could be woken by the drilling.

Working in fav

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14 March 2016

Paul Allott, commercial director of AMP Events commented, "We're delighted to confirm that the Festival Supplier Awards will return in January 2016 and that they will be held in London. The feedback from the inaugural awards was tremendous, everyone had a great evening and really enjoyed being part of the event. We want to build on that success and we firmly believe that bringing the industry together at the beginning of the year is a great way to achieve this.

"The festival industry in the UK continues to develop and has a much broader remit than music alone - food, sport, hobbies and culture all pl

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14 March 2016

The Woodroffe Bassett Design rig called on a plethora of high-output discharge lamp moving fixtures, as well as a wide assortment of blinders, video panels and other fixtures to create an explosive lighting display that flooded even the largest venue with visual delights.

A batten fixture that measures 39.3" (998 M) can easily be swallowed by this lighting Goliath. However, that clearly - and colourfully -- wasn't the case with the COLORado Batten 144 Tour from Chauvet Professional. A dozen of the RGBWA LED linear fixtures were used in the rig for the iconic metal band

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14 March 2016

The experience gained from daily rental work enabled them to undertake installations, while as a distributor "we have an input from the great technical support engineers of the manufacturers", according to owner Priit Kivimägi.

Among their suppliers is Powersoft, with whom they started working a little over a year ago, after placing an order for K Series amplifiers. They have gone further and invested in the Italian company's new X Series platform.

Kivimagi explains out how the relationship developed. "We had used another premier amplifier brand for a long time but had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison. Powersoft's wide model range covered our needs better a

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14 March 2016

Posthumous Hit - Cilla Black landed her first ever number one album, with her Very Best Of comp

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14 March 2016

Visitors traverse the meadow via sunken pathways so that they experience the bees' natural environment at head-height, and end up in the 14 metre high abstract beehive structure which hosts a multi-sensory immersive experience. TiMax propels a constantly changing composition of music and bee sounds around

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14 March 2016

For the impressive stage setup, no less than 100 x SixPacks blinders and 50 x P-5 wash lights from SGM were integrated into the light design. Lighting designer, Sebastian Pachciarek, explains that he chose the P-5s due to their many advantages such as powerfulness and viewing angle. He used the SixPacks as wall LEDs, and for this purpose, he particularly emphasizes the ease of combining a large amount of fixtures. He then adds, "The fact that both types of fixtures are IP65-rated was quite important - especially for concerts under the cloud." He adds that both the P-5s and SixPacks performed flawlessly.

Pachci

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14 March 2016

Under the title 'Grown in Britain & Northern Ireland', the UK's response is a stand-out Pavilion, designed by award-winning British artist Wolfgang Buttress. Inspired by pollination and by scientific research developed to monitor the health of beehives by physicist and bee expert Dr. Martin Bencsik, the UK Pavilion highlights the crucial role of pollination in our food supply, drawing attention to issues such as food security and biodiversity.

The UK Pavilion has been developed around th

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14 March 2016

SenovvA, an American-based design and management group specialising in the entertainment, special event, architectural-construction and media services industries, was tasked with the design and integration of this one-of-a-kind multimedia project.

Bill Sage, SenovvA Account Executive for the project, explains: "We worked with the Rockwell Architectural Group in New York and Bergman Walls and Associates in Las Vegas. They came up with this immersion concept for the Vista Lounge that makes you feel like you're at the top of a skyscraper looking out of the windows down at panoramic skylines of cities like Dubai,

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14 March 2016

This included 24 x XS1200 Spot; 6 x XL1200 Spot; 40 x XR 200 Beam; 16 x XR 230; 4 x XR 330 and 40 pieces from the XLED Series. All were suspended from the lighting grid to create a dynamic visual right around the stadium.

According to lighting designer Dinusha (Chanaka) Perera these were ideal for TV with their fast response and quiet operation. Having successfully undergone camera tests for colour temperature etc they met all technical requirements.

While the powerful XS and XL Spot have become established fixtures in inven

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14 March 2016

As the home of UW-Stout's men's and women's basketball, gymnastics and volleyball teams, the arena is primarily used for athletics, but it's also the site of the campus' annual commencement ceremonies and required an audio system to provide high intelligibility and even coverage regardless of whether the venue is set up for games, competitions, practice sessions, or commencement.

"The old system was installed roughly 25-years ago," says Lori Anda, Director, Recreation and Sports Complexes at UW-Stout, "but it wasn't efficient for events that weren't athletics. The speaker cluster was above the centre of the court so dur

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14 March 2016

This was a milestone for the festival and Patrick Demoustier explains the reasoning behind making such a fundamental change. "We had talked a lot about moving Rock Werchter's house system from analogue to digital consoles and how we were going to do it," he says. "We didn't want to take any risks; if it went wrong and the experience was bad, our reputation would be bad too.

"We decided we could only do it using DiGiCo

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14 March 2016

Originally created by Freddie Fellowes on his family's 6000-acre farm in Huntingdon, the festival has grown from a single stage, with a few thousand people, to around 32,000 spread over at least 15 stages.

This eclectic music and arts event surrounds a river and a lake (bearing a different eye popping sculpture each year) - and this year featured for the first time a Martin Audio MLA system on its premier stage (The Great Stage) - courtesy of Capital Sound.

Capital were introduced to the event five years ago to mitigate the site's historic sound problems and worked again alongside environmental sound specialists, CBA. The