USA - Those fans lucky enough to see horror-punk pioneers Misfits on their sporadic 2019 US tour not only get to see a band that literally invented an entire genre in 1977 - they also get to check out a plethora of “rad tricks” from the lighting and video toolbox of lighting director and designer Jon Eddy, who is serving up his visual magic on an Avolites Arena console. One of the stops on Misfits’ limited tour included headlining Psycho Las Vegas, a three-day music extravaganza held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, that featured acts ranging from Electric Wizard and Opeth to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, in addition to Lodi, New Jersey’s favourite punks. Eddy was the LD and designer for the entire festival, where he not only spec’d the rig and did the overall design but was the console jockey for all of the acts - more than 60 total - who were n
USA - ADJ has announced the immediate availability of its Allegro Z6 motorized linear fixture with zoom. It features six individually controllable 30W quad colour 4-in-1 LEDs; each LED offers a lifespan of approximately 30,000 hours, effectively preventing the need for lamp replacement even if the fixture is used extensively for many years, says the company. The unit also features a motorized zoom function, allowing the angle of the six independent light beams to vary between 4°-32°. In addition, the bar on which the LED apertures are mounted is fitted with motorized tilt movement, while the precision motors allow for 16-bit smooth sweeping motion. Rounding out the Allegro Z6’s feature set, the unit also offers variable speed strobe and pulse effects, flicker free LEDs suitable for filming (1200Hz PWM frequency) and 16-bit dimming. In addition, the unit f
Philippines - Claypaky fixtures have been working on an array of high-profile projects in Manila, Philippines. RSL (Rhythm Sound & Light Trading Corp.), which offers sound, lighting, video and rigging equipment to a wide range of entertainment and corporate clients, finds Claypaky lighting to be a popular choice among lighting designers. “RSL owe its longevity in the business to the dedicated Men and Women working for the company and of course, the equipment we use,” says Neil B. Centeno, project manager of RSL. “With options increasing at a rapid pace, we have to adopt and be smart in our equipment choices. Equipment has to have class while being rugged, be refined while being tough, durable and most of all, be reasonably priced. Lopie Guzman, vice-president of RSL points out that most lighting designers go for C
UK - White Light has recently supplied the lighting equipment for REDD, a new dance show at the Barbican Theatre. Devised by the Olivier Award-winning hip-hop partnership Boy Blue, REDD is a piece of dance surrounding the five stages of grief. Told through the movements of nine dancers, it offers an introspective journey into loss and examines how we are affected by those irreversible moments in our lives. It features a lighting design by Charlie Morgan Jones. Jones comments: “REDD is a beautiful show which takes its audience on an unforgettable emotional journey. In terms of lighting, it’s an interesting piece as there is no actual set! With that in mind, my main brief was to create the five distinct ‘worlds’ of grief - the solitude of depression, the featureless denial, the sharpness of anger, the bold bargaining and the bright
USA - With its 400 lighting fixtures and video panels, the 103-universe main stage rig at this year’s Made in America festival packed an intense punch. That was very fitting, given that it was located at the foot of the “Rocky Steps” outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But like the famous underdog pugilist, the “Rocky Stage” rig drew its power from something other than size. “This was our boldest rig yet, but ironically we used a little less gear overall this year than in the past,” says Patrick Dierson of The Activity, who oversaw production on this, and two of the festival’s other stages. “It’s never about the amount of gear you have, but what you do with it.” What Dierson and his team “did” with their gear package, which included 68 Chauvet Professional COLORado Solo Batten fixtures supplied by 4Wall Entertainment, was creat
USA - High End Systems has announced the latest upgrade to the Hog 4 lighting console range, OS v3.13. Hog 4 OS v3.13 contains improvements to the infrastructure of Hog 4, including a more robust handling of the command line and other internal processes. It also includes new additions to the Plots feature, including new plot objects like groups, palettes and lists, including text in the plot, more options for handling images and shapes, align to grid, and more. Sarah Clausen, console product manager, comments: “This release brings users some great new tools they can use in their plots, making them even more useful. In addition, we have brought back the ability to use multiple MIDI inputs on a system. Happy Hogging!” (LSi Online)
UK - GoboPlus.com and its sister companies FollowSpotPlus.com, CutColourPlus and Inluster enjoyed a very successful PLASA 2019, showing off the latest products in its range. The company presented the Rosco Image Spot Mini. A scaled-down, weatherproof version of the Rosco Image Spot, Image Spot Mini is a compact 13W LED gobo projector with a 1,050lm output, three colour temperatures (3000K, 5500K and UV) and a weight of 1kg (2.2lb). Image Spot Mini offers a choice of three interchangeable lenses (11°, 17° and 25°) and promises crisp, clean image projection across its flat field for a distance of up to 8m. Available in black, silver and white, Rosco Image Spot Mini comes with an onboard manual dimmer and a range of optional accessories including an iris and framing shutter. Rosco Image Spot Mini is ideal for projecting with GoboPlus.com’s extremely high resolut
UK - Lighting control manufacturer Zero 88 enjoyed a busy PLASA Show 2019 at Olympia in London. The company’s new RigSwitch remote controlled switching system received its UK tradeshow debut and a host of other practical power, data and control solutions were presented. RigSwitch is a customizable range of switching cabinets from 12 to 96 relays per cabinet, with four pre-designed options to cover the most regularly requested combinations. All relays feature power-on, DMX control and remote switching, using anything from a simple contact to a network of engraved keypads and touchscreens. Each channel has an MCB as standard, with additional options of RCBO, ELCB and AFP (Arc Fault Protection) for installations requiring further protection. The product is designed for anything from entry level installations right up to the most complex multi-level projects and is affor
UK - Robert Juliat has emerged from an “extremely successful” PLASA 2019 with its exclusive UK distributor, Ambersphere Solutions, where it continued to celebrate its Centenary Year with new products. The French manufacturer presented the Maestro server for SpotMe, developed in collaboration with tracking specialists, zactrack, extends the capabilities of RJ’s award-winning SpotMe, the bespoke 3D position-tracking system for followspots, by enabling it to operate with any DMX lighting control console. SpotMe has functioned with the PosiStageNet open protocol which is run by only a limited number of consoles, but with the Maestro extension, a designer can take control from any DMX console. The lighting console, even the simplest DMX model, retains the pan and tilt control and gets, in return, additional DMX channels to modulate the tracking parameters calculated and man
Vietnam - Ba Sao Investment Co., Ltd recently installed a Harman Professional Solutions networked audio, video, light and control solution at Van Lang University to deliver pristine sound and alluring lighting for performances, presentations and events. Founded in 1995, Van Lang University is one of the first and most distinguished private universities in Vietnam. With three sprawling facilities across Ho Chi Minh City, Van Lang University offers an array of educational amenities, including an expansive technology center, a smart library and a world-class concert hall. In order to provide exceptional sound and lighting for events in the concert hall, Van Lang University hired Vietnam's premier AV distributor, Ba Sao Investment Co., Ltd to install an AV solution. After surveying the location, Ba Sao Investment assembled a comprehensive Harman Professional Solutions
USA - When Juan Ocampo sets up a festival rig one of his primary goals is to make it versatile enough to accommodate the varying styles of different visiting LDs. True to this philosophy, he designed the rig at this year’s Winnetka Music Festival to be as flexible as possible, selecting Chauvet Professional Rogue R2 Wash and Strike 4 fixtures, in part because they can play so many different roles well. However, shortly before the festival started Ocampo learned that most of the 28 bands performing at the event wouldn’t be traveling with LDs. Instead of relying on the rig to work with various individual styles, he and his team would have drawn on its versatility to create unique looks for the different acts themselves. “Initially, the biggest challenge I had was to make sure that the lights were positioned and placed in a way that would make the visiting LDs hap
USA - Indie singer-songwriter Mitski has endeared her to a growing fan base. She followed up a successful 2018 tour with a 2019 spring outing that also saw the artist playing summer dates before wrapping up in September with two New York shows at Summer Stage in Central Park. Lighting design for the Be the Cowboy tour was by John Foresman, who employed an Elation rig of Platinum HFX moving heads and SixPar 200 colour-changing PAR lights to complement the emotive singer’s lyrically rich songs. Lighting supply was by Pisgah AVL of North Carolina. Mitski’s songs are played along melodic lines that can vary in tempo, with carefully choreographed movement key part of the show. Foresman describes his design as dynamic with a lot of energy during the high points and still calmness during the quieter points of the set. The design, he says, was focused around the ch
Europe - Iconic German hard rock band Rammstein have been on the road again as part of the European Stadium tour, a visual and sonic extravaganza of lighting, video and pyro effects. Roland Greil from Woodroffe Bassett Design (WBD) created the lighting design together with Patrick Woodroffe and specified 56 Robe BMFL WashBeams, 12 BMFL Follow Spot LTs (long throws) and six LEDBeam 150 moving lights - among many others - for this tour. WBD was contracted to produce and coordinate the tour’s production design including lighting, set and video design plus technical integration. The lighting was a collaboration between Roland and Patrick Woodroffe who is also the show designer. Florian Wieder and Cuno von Hahn looked after the set design, and Jeremy Lloyd from Wonder Works directed the technical aspects of the design and integration. The band are also very
USA - City Theatrical’s Multiverse wireless DMX/RDM technology is currently being used to provide DMX data for the windmill and carousel lighting features at Historic Hudson Valley’s The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. After 10 years of working on The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, the lighting design team from Jay Woods Design chose Multiverse wireless DMX for its ability to broadcast multiple universes of DMX data across an open field to receivers that are in constant motion. With an anticipated total audience of 170,000+, the Multiverse wireless DMX system was also an ideal solution for its ability to have a small radio footprint despite transmitting in a crowded radio spectrum. “With the Multiverse Transmitter, we were able to focus on setting up and talking to a single device, as opposed to setting
USA - Summer’s not over yet, at least not for country singer-songwriter Thomas Rhett who continues his headlining Very Hot Summer tour of North America. A large complement of Claypaky Mythos 2 and Scenius Unico lighting fixtures is accompanying the tour, which is in support of Rhett’s fourth studio album, Center Point Road. The tour kicked off in Montreal last April and will conclude in Nashville in October. New York City’s Fireplay is serving as the lighting and production designers for the Very Hot Summer tour with Upstaging, the lighting vendor. “We’ve worked with TR for about five years as his shows keep expanding and growing,” notes Nick Whitehouse, co-founder of Fireplay. “This tour is based on a concept we all developed together. Looks progress throughout the show and are different for each song so there are lots of cues an
The Netherlands - Lichtwerk (Light works) is a Netherlands-based technical production company which works closely with a wide selection of lighting and visual designers, particularly for theatre shows, tours and corporate events. The company recently invested in Robe’s fantastic T1 Profile LED moving light, which is designed for theatre, touring and TV. Jacco Pattist founded the company in 1995, and his association with Robe goes back to the very early days when the Czech manufacturer was still an OEM supplier. Once Robe was launched in 2002, Lichtwerk was an early adopter of the brand, a trend that continued through the ColorWash 250 series, then the ColorWash 750 and ColorSpot 700 series, the DT 3000 and 7000, and more recently with LEDBeam 300s MMX Spots / WashBeams and LEDBeam 150s. The latest T1s were purchased because, collectively as a company, “We love tungsten!” decl
UK - On the surface, My Favorite Year and Children of Eden are very different shows. The Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens musical takes a farcical behind the scenes look at 1950s television, as a hapless writer tries to keep an irascible matinee idol from a bygone era out of trouble before his appearance on a live show. By contrast, Steven Schwartz’ Eden recounts the story behind creation in the Book of Genesis. Different? Indeed! But both shows offer audiences the shared experience of departing from everyday reality and cry out for brightness and colour on stage - which is what Nic Farman provided for recent productions of the plays at Mountview’s new theatre. Aiding him in this undertaking was a collection of Chauvet Professional Ovation fixtures supplied by White Light. “I’ve worked on a number of productions for Mountview before,
UK - ETC and High End Systems celebrated a successful tradeshow following three days of busy stands, Tech Talks seminars and a win for ETC’s Augment3d at the PLASA Awards for Innovation. The new 3D programming environment, which is part of the upcoming Eos v3.0 software release triumphed at PLASA in a ceremony that celebrates the year’s most pioneering product designs. Judges commented: “This will change the way lighting design and operation works by increasing speed in the lighting workflow and making the process from design to conception easier to manage.” This was proven during the tradeshow at ETC’s Augment3d challenge event where participants were invited to create five focus palettes on an Eos family console in the quickest time possible using either encoders, a mouse click (in the 3D model) or the Augment3d Focus Wand. The quickest time recorded was 37
UK - White Light has recently supplied the lighting equipment for the UK tour of The Lovely Bones. Based on Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones is a coming-of-age story about Susie Salmon who is observing her family from the afterlife as they try and deal with her death in different ways. Adapted by Bryony Lavery, the production is directed by Melly Still and features a lighting design by Matt Haskins. Haskins comments: “Bryony Lavery's adaptation is a mesmerising piece of theatre that, despite its often dark subject matter, proves uplifting and cathartic. The text actually expanded and changed heavily through the rehearsal process and what emerged was a very physical, and visually experimental way of storytelling.” As such, Haskins soon realised that he needed to have a flexible rig to respond to the new ideas as they unfolded throughout the pr
USA - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the ultimate special-event address, but that venue tends to be booked up at least four years in advance. So the team at Everlast Productions did the next best thing: they projection-mapped a detailed simulacrum of the presidential residence on a three-dimensional stage they constructed in the International Ballroom of the Washington, D.C. Hilton Hotel for the annual leadership event of Power Home Remodelling Group. And it was, thanks to Everlast Productions’ use of an Avolites Ai Q3 media server as the mapping engine paired with a Tiger Touch II lighting control console and the manufacturer’s Synergy software. “This was a huge projection event - it had to be very detailed, and it had to be built literally overnight,” says Washington Arias, Everlast Productions’ CEO, referencing the large-scale mapping project in which multip
Germany - Almost 30 years after Thomas Fenzl and Thomas Moritz joined forces to create the successful West Berlin rental house, PAM Events, their company is still setting the bar high for large scale productions both in Berlin and Germany at large. After looking to replace and update their stock of conventional Fresnel fixtures, PAM Events joined forces with a number of other Berlin-based rental houses in acquiring 48 Chauvet Professional Ovation F-265WW, 24 F-55WW and 24 E-260WW fixtures as part of a Berlin-wide cross rental platform. In a move echoing the collaborative efforts of Fenzl and Moritz behind the Berlin Wall, the Ovation fixtures were able to win over the wide collection of Berlin-based rental companies, such as Lichtwerk, Audio + Frames, Spice Events, Huth Events, Edelmat, Wemme-Evennt, and Atlantis-VT with their versatile yet highly efficient Fresnel s
South Africa - Lighting designer Joshua Cutts from Visual Frontier used Astera Titan Tubes to light various segments of the final of The Voice South Africa 2019, which was staged at the Mosaïek Teatro in Fairlands, Johannesburg, and broadcast on M-Net Channel 101. Josh has lit the series since it started in South Africa in 2016. For the finales, he is on the lookout for new, innovative and inventive lighting effects and potential visual eye-candy. This year, they came in the form of Titan Tubes shortly after DWR Distribution had been announced as the exclusive South African distributor. Josh decided to control the Titan Tubes through his grandMA lighting console. His initial idea was to use eight of the wireless battery powered fixtures to illuminate the dancers for different songs. Then, he and some other core production team members, including choreographer
Israel - Singer-songwriter Hanan Ben-Ari is currently one of the most popular artists in a country replete with singing talent, and his new tour has just started, complete with a lively and dynamic visual design by Nesi Alfasi, who has included 12 x Robe MegaPointes at the core of the lighting rig. These are being supplied to the tour by rental company Mega Kol based in Rosh Hayain and headed by Zvika Refaelovich, which has been involved with the artist as an equipment vendor since last year and has worked with LD Nesi for many years on assorted projects. Hanan Ben-Ari's tour features a 3m diameter circular LED surface upstage made up of over 3,000 smart pixels in strips which are mapped into a series of different shapes and graphic effects throughout the set, providing a digital element that is different from a standard video playback screen. Eight of the MegaPo
Guatemala - Obsidian Control Systems has announced Casa Instrumental as the exclusive distributor of Obsidian Control Systems products in Guatemala. Lighting professionals in Guatemala will be able to test the console line at a two-day ONYX training event taking place on 1-2 October at the Casa Intrumental facility in Guatemala City. Designed to provide both a basic and advanced look at hardware and software, interested professionals can contact info@casainstrumental.com for more information. With 35 years in the market, Casa Instrumental is established as a leading provider of some of the world’s top professional audio, lighting and musical instrument brands. Under terms of the agreement, Casa Instrumental will provide full support for the entire Obsidian line of hardware and software lighting control solutions. “We decided to distribute Obsidian Control Sys
