Italy - A workshop and selections for a lighting contest for budding lighting designers were held on 7 and 8 July at Clay Paky. Those chosen will perform their shows during Tones on the Stones, the well-known theatre and music festival that takes place in the marble and granite quarries of Val d'Ossola from 17 to 20 July.

The Tones on the Stones production team brought a well-trained group of thirty-five candidate lighting designers, of which only six passed the selections and secured a place at the final evening. Among those present and the members of the jury were the well-known lighting designer Giancarlo Toscani, the Tones on the Stones lighting designer Nevio Cavina, the event organization manager Tobia Piazza and Clay Paky's lighting designer Marco Zucchinali.

The two days at Clay Paky were very busy and were marked by a course for the budding lighting designers on contr

UK - CBeebies TV show Swashbuckle is back for a new series. The idea is for the audience to join Gem and her teams of Swashbucklers as they try to win her jewels back from the naughty pirates - Captain Cook, Line and Sinker.

Aimed for children who are at a key developmental stage, the show includes games, songs, stories, learning and lots of fun.

This bright and colourful set, which includes it's very own pirate ship (and real life parrot), is seriously big budget!

Lit by LD Lee Allen, it was 'all hands on deck' from Richard Martin Lighting (RML) who 'shipped' VL3000 Spots, VL1000TS, Stage Zoom 1200's and Alpha Wash 1200's up to Dock 10 Studios in Salford where Swashbuckle is currently being filmed.

(Jim Evans)

Denmark - Light and water have always made for an excellent mix; dynamic light and water even more so. At Fredericia Sportscenter in central Denmark, Elation's high-powered ELAR EXTQW Flood HP LED Par fixture is being used to colour wash the facility's 50m-long swimming pool in a variety of colour looks from every-day white light to colourful dynamic mood lighting. Twenty-four of the IP65-rated fixtures, supplied by SoundstoreXL.com, work from beneath the water line behind small windows on the sides of the pool.

Fredericia Sportscenter is a multi-use facility that serves sport, culture and the business community with an assortment of activities in the heart of Denmark. With sports halls, stadium, training areas, meeting rooms, bowling alley, café and more, the Sportscenter's recently upgraded swimming pool area is one of the more popular attractions.

A feature of the po

UK - Chilfest 2014 - the three day music extravaganza staged in the picturesque Hertfordshire, UK countryside, and produced by leading production industry technical solution specialist Universal Event Productions (UEP) - was another resounding success.

Company founder Steve Butcher maintains a cutting edge inventory of lighting, sound and video equipment, which he showcases at this event, and several months ago he invested substantially in SGM's SP-6 SixPack pixel blinders, XC-5 RGB colour strobes and P-5 wash lights. These were deployed in production lighting designer Simon Maddison's imaginative concept, along with four of SGM's award-winning high powered G-Spot profiles.

The latter were placed on the PA wings either side of stage to boost low level front lighting across the crowd - which also served as a great atmosphere builder. As one of the most exposed fixtures, its IP6

UK - The PLASA Foundation has announced the formation of Behind the Scenes UK to provide financial assistance to entertainment technology professionals, or their immediate family, who are seriously ill or injured. Grants may be used for basic living costs, some medical related expenses, transportation, retraining, or funerals. Since issuing its first grant in the spring of 2006, Behind the Scenes in North America has provided almost half a million dollars to our colleagues in need. These grants have brought help and hope to these individuals during some of their darkest hours.

Behind the Scenes has a very wide remit. Anyone is eligible for assistance who has earned their living in the industry for at least five years, whether behind the curtain, behind the camera, on the road, or working for companies that manufacture or supply entertainment technology products and services. The

USA - Everyone knows that the focus of Nevada hotels is on gambling, right? That is, of course, unless that establishment is the new Whitney Peak Hotel in Reno. The absence of gaming may be unusual in a Nevada hotel, but then again, how many luxury boutique hotels feature the 164-foot-tall exterior climbing wall and interior climbing boulders found at Whitney Peak?

Occupying a building that once housed the iconic Fitzgerald's Hotel and Casino, a Reno landmark, Whitney Peak is the result of an extensive, carefully planned and well-executed renovation that relied heavily on lighting throughout the facility to create a transformative and memorable experience for guests.

The spacious first floor that been occupied by slot machines and table games when the site was Fitzgerald's, now houses Heritage, a farm-to-table restaurant that features locally sourced food and is inspired by Re

Mexico - Elation Professional's Mexican partner, ADIMSA, has supplied Elation LED lighting fixtures to Inbursa Aquarium (Acuario Inbursa) in Mexico City, fulfilling product specification, on-site supervision, and lighting fixture programming duties for the world-class aquarium in collaboration with lighting designer Cynthia Ortiz.

Owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, Inbursa features 230 species of sea life across 11,500sq.ft of space and is one of the largest aquariums in the world. Officially opened in June of this year, the building consists of four levels, all but one underground. The tour begins at the lowest floor, which represents the bottom of the sea with pirate ship and sharks, and ascends through coral reef and a manta ray pool to the Beach and Rainforest, culminating on the ground floor at one of the venue's main attractions, the Penguinarium.

Lighting designe

Italy - The first Radio Italia Live concert was held in 2012 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Radio Italia. On that occasion, the well-known radio station organized the show in Piazza Duomo in Milan for the first time. An amazing 150,000 plus people turned out for the event, which was broadcast live on Radio Italia and Video Italia and repeated on Italia 1.

Since then, the organisation has decided to turn the Radio Italia Live concert into a regular event at the beginning of Milan's summer calendar, and today it is one of the few public showcases for Italian music with top-ranking performers. In 2014, Biagio Antonacci, Laura Pausini, Elisa, Negramaro, Edoardo Bennato, Emma, Claudio Baglioni and Alex Britti were on stage.

Giancarlo Toscani, who was in charge of the lighting design, graphic design and art direction, explained reports, "The first to the third years were

UK - Lighting and visuals rental specialist HSL supplied equipment for a bold, vibrant interactive lighting installation work, Control t'force, created by lighting designer James Bawn, that illuminated the 330m high Emley Moor Mast in west Yorkshire UK, which is the tallest freestanding structure in the UK, an iconic local landmark and the main UHF transmitter for most of the county.

Specially commissioned by TG Events on behalf of Kirklees Council as part of Hypervelocity, the five-day grand final of the 100-day 2014 Yorkshire Festival, the Control t'force project which ran over two evenings, also celebrated the start of the 2014 Tour de France cycle race in Yorkshire.

James has been involved in some previous architectural lighting projects for the council and when his ideas for lighting the Emley Moor broadcast transmitting station mast (currently owned

Australia - The Academy nightclub in Canberra, Australia is benefiting from a new Robe moving light installation which was supplied by locally based Elite Sound & Light and is designed to ensure that their popular EDM club nights and visiting live artists can enjoy the very best lighting and visual experiences.

Elite's Darren Russell was asked to propose a design and his primary concern was to spec fixtures that would give the flexibility and variety of effects needed for long periods of operation, that would enable the club to have a completely different look and feel according to its programme that night.

The Academy is the largest club in Canberra and is right in the heart of the city. It has an 800 capacity main room and the 150 capacity Candy Bar upstairs, which features a glass wall along one entire side offering a commanding view of the main club dancefloor.

The Robe

UK - PRG Nocturne which provides LED video and projection support to the concert touring, festival, and corporate event markets, has expanded its operations in the UK.

"We are now heading into our fourth year with PRG," says Bob Brigham, president of PRG Nocturne. "One of the deciding factors in joining the PRG team was our dream to expand into the UK/European markets. The expansion of our UK operation allows us to fully support the rapidly growing demand with an experienced team of people and quality gear that our customers expect of PRG Nocturne US and UK."

In 2014, the UK operation has supported numerous tours and festival appearances including The Eagles, Katy Perry, Metallica, Skrillex, Franz Ferdinand, Bastille, Linkin Park, and The Rolling Stones. They have also worked with a roster of corporate clients which included 3D projection mapping for the la

India - The foundation Universal Brotherhood has chosen SGM's G-Spot LED moving head for its Sant Nirankari Mission Fountain of Worship in India.

Lawrence Ryan of Eagle Eye Studios was tasked with designing and programming a show control interface for the beautiful fountain in Delhi known as the Fountain of Oneness.

The idea behind this unique architectural structure originates from the Guru himself as a symbol of people from different religions, cultures and languages coming together in one place. The structure is made up of adults and children holding hands in a circular formation, so large that the audience can walk around or through the fountain.

As a centrepiece, a huge sphere represents the world, denoting worldwide unity. Great care has gone into making it structurally sound, with the key focus being the huge weight of the structure and strong winds in the area

Australia - The poet W.B. Yeats once described the vast skies as "the heavens' embroidered cloths". Taking its title from Yeats' vision, Vivid Festival's Heaven's Cloth created a canopy of light, colour and sound - thanks to Arup MAS.

The installation was an active and porous ceiling that displayed projected light via LED RGB architectural luminaires to create intricate colour change effects based on the theory of complementary colours. Enriching the piece was a soundscape composed using synchronised harmonious musical intervals.

"The circle of fifths - which depicts all 12 tones and musical key signatures graphically in the form of a circle - is like the musical analogy of the colour wheel," explained Christopher Sims, Arup's acoustic and theatre consultant. "Just as complementary colours are visually harmonious, the musical interval of a fifth is mat

USA - Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas presented its lighting designer Christopher Lose with the ultimate challenge: find a strong and stable fixture that could be hung at the pool-side stage all year round. Chris' answer quickly resulted in an order for 10 G-Spot LED moving heads for movement, beam versatility and patterns and four Q-7 RGBW for wash and strobing.

Chris explains, "The Pool Stage is a treacherous environment for lighting gear. It is an outdoor stage in Las Vegas. The temperature reaches 120 degrees [Fahrenheit - equal to 50 degrees Celsius] in the summer and below freezing in the winter. Las Vegas rarely rains but when it does it comes without notice. There is no time for crew to be dropping lighting fixtures on short notice. We needed 10 spare fixtures to service our 10 previous moving lights and I was looking for a fixture that we could hang all year

UK - ETC's UK dealers have now installed over 28,000 Sensor power control channels across central London, making ETC the most popular choice in the capital. If all the modules were stacked on top of one another, they would reach 980m, making them significantly taller than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa - practically Lilliputian at just 820m - whose nightly strobe light shows are controlled by an ETC Congo control system.

The latest recipient of Sensor is the Prince Edward Theatre on Old Compton Street. The theatre's dimmers were last updated in 1993, and were due for renewal in time for the hit production of Miss Saigon. In keeping with other theatres in the Delfont Mackintosh group, which The Prince Edward is part of, five ETC Sensor3 power-control racks fitted with 240 modules, including ThruPower modules, were specified and installed. That gives a

UK - Lighting specialist White Light has recently supplied production solutions for the George Benson 2014 UK Tour. The Grammy Award winning artist performed some of his greatest hits including Give Me the Night and Turn Your Love Around during the tour which visited venues across the UK during June of 2014. The tour made stops in Glasgow, Manchester, London and Bournemouth.

White Light provided a complete lighting package for the tour, which was designed by LD Simon Tutchener. He described his approach to lighting the tour:

"I wanted to include a lot of colour and texture into the lighting. This was my third George Benson tour, so I was able to incorporate my previous experience and knowledge into this tour and have some fun with it."

The lighting rig is based around a core of Martin Professional fixtures - namely the MAC Viper Profile - while also i

UK - Lighting designer Steven Bewley is using a primarily Clay Paky rig to light renowned trip-hop trio London Grammar during the band's current UK tour.

The delicate lighting design created by the Newcastle-based designer weaves the band's haunting music into a web of theatrical glamour and is already earning itself industry praise.

"The brief from the band was that they wanted every song to look different," explains Bewley. "So the creative concept for the lighting design came from the idea of merging looks from a TV show, a stage show and a gig. We wanted to create a real mix - there's some old-style lighting mixed with video as well some new styles layered with some cutting edge LED technology."

During the past six months Bewley has worked with the band on their UK and American tours, deciding to change up the rig during this current UK tour by specif

Italy - Superstar singer / songwriter Vasco Rossi staged seven stadium shows in Rome and Milan this summer playing to over 400,000 fans, complete with a lightshow to match the occasion designed by his long term LD, Giovanni Pinna.

Pinna used 68 Robe Robin LEDBeam 100s which were used as specials and for highlighting the ebullient audiences that flocked to see Rossi whose controversial and hugely successful career has spanned four decades, spawned 27 albums and several spats with authority. He is one of the great Italian showmen who is passionate about his performances and famous for his live interaction and very strong bonds with the crowds when onstage.

For these shows Pinna took the set design by Gioforma based on the album artwork as his starting point for lighting. The stage was custom designed for the show and he crammed every available centimetre with lighting fixtures -

Future-proof Theatre - The Chichister Festival, one of the largest theatres in southern England has officially reopened after a £22m revamp. The first play in the main 1,300-seat auditorium is a new production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, starring Rupert Everett as Salieri and Joshua McGuire as Mozart. Artistic director Jonathan Church said the theatre had been "future-proofed" for audiences for the next 50 years. "This building wasn't built by a politician or the Arts Council," Church said. "It was built by local people - and that engagement has been what enabled us to celebrate 50 years."

Change Of Plan - Microsoft's plan to compete with Netflix and Amazon by producing its own TV shows has come to an early end, as the firm announces 18,000 job cuts. Xbox Entertainment Studio will close by the end of the year, Xbox chief Phil Spe

UK - Sonisphere Festival made a triumphant return to the UK in July, celebrating 40 years of rock music at Knebworth Park. Co-headlining the Bohemia stage, alternative metal band Therapy? played their 1995 classic album Infernal Love, accompanied by a stunning light show featuring a selection of fixtures from Chauvet Professional and trussing structures from TRUSST, backed by Chauvet.

Lighting designer Pete Davies prepared an impactful yet compact, tour-friendly package, primed for easy transportation across Europe for a series of festivals. Low-energy LED fixtures were the natural choice for both Davies and the band, keen to minimise their carbon footprint, without compromising the quality of the audience experience.

The creative solution incorporated eight TRUSST truss uprights, in a combination of 1m and 2m lengths, each with a Chauvet DJ SlimPAR QUAD 6 IRC at its ba

China - PR Lighting's initial brief when planning its new LED Studio 3205D was to develop a fixture purpose-designed for lighting up large scale automobile shows around the world. But with its inherent power, derived from a single 500W LED source, coupled with a stable colour temperature and high CRI, its high specification makes it applicable to any large-scale application - particularly TV studios, theatre, commercial and multi-functional situations.

In addition to its two available colour temperatures it also boasts enviable energy levels, with luminous flux measurements of 9000 lumens (43°) and 17500 lumens (71°), with its CRI of 90 further enhancing the vivid colours.

The LED Studio 3205D contains a 0-100% linearly adjustable DMX dimmer, linear motorised zoom and electronic strobe, with flexible beam angle from 43°-71° further boosting its versatility.

H

Europe - The Rolling Stones have just finished the European section of their 14 On Fire tour with another spectacular lighting design by Patrick Woodroffe of Woodroffe Basset Design (WBD) which included 54 Robe Robin Pointes amongst 200 plus other moving lights.

The 54 Pointes - the first to be incorporated into a design for the band and the first time that Woodroffe has used Pointes on a major concert touring show - were provided by award winning UK lighting rental company, Neg Earth.

They were located on 12 sections of HUD truss running upstage / downstage either side of the massive stage.

The Pointes were used extensively thought the show to create high impact washes, gobo looks and big beam effects shooting right out into the audience.

WBD's design associate Terry Cook explains that the team particularly liked the brightness, the linear prism, the zoom and the a

USA - Little Big Town is hitting the road with a bigger production than ever before with new technology provided by Bandit Lites. Bandit added the Ayrton Magicpanel-R to its ever expanding inventory, providing its clients with the latest technological advances to give audience members a brilliant show.

The Magicpanel-R is comprised of a 6x6 matrix that boasts continuous double rotation on two axes while generating clearly defined beams. Each fixture offers 11500 lumen and a centre beam intensity of 1,350,000 candela, but only consumes 450 watts. The result is a stunning look twice the size of a 45mm optic with 30 percent less power consumption.

Lighting designer (and recently nominated CMA SRO lighting director of the year) Chris Shrom is utilizing 28 Magicpanel-R panels on Little Big Town's summer tour in a four column, seven row set up that can be adjusted on gripple ladders

USA - American alternative rock band Third Eye Blind (3eb) is taking its Festival Tour to venues across America, and Clay Paky's A.leda B-EYE K20 LED-based moving lights are hitting the road with them.

3eb's production and lighting designer Mitchell Schellenger, of I Like Lights in Denver, created a look for the band that echoes the sunset set times of some of their gigs. "The band doesn't always have a headline slot, and when that happens they don't have the luxury of performing in complete darkness," Schellenger explains. "So we decided to mimic the look of sunset with warm pretty light on stage. To do that we needed really bright fixtures."

Enter Clay Paky B-EYEs, which Schellenger had read about and seen in video clips. "I wanted to get my hands on them - they looked really awesome," he recalls. 4Wall Entertainment Lighting's Nashville office

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