Australia - The Brolga Theatre in Queensland’s Maryborough is a typical regional venue – its 900-seat proscenium arch theatre hosts an international ballet troupe one night, Jimmy Barnes the next, and a local dance school the day after. Though the venue is just 17 years old, changes in technology mean replacement lamps are no longer available for their wash lights, leading the staff to assess how to upgrade for the future. The future, as they see it, is Elation’s Platinum Seven RGBWAC-UV LED wash. “We knew we have to move to LED and intelligent fixtures,” said Robert Haigh, operations technician at the Brolga. “We could afford to replace our wash, but not our profiles, so it was an easy decision to go to a moving fixture that could provide a wash, and in the case of Elation’s Platinum Seven, work as a profile in many senses.” Twelve Elation Platinum Se
UK - The Field of Avalon at Glastonbury has been accurately described as a “festival within a festival”. With its mix of folk and roots music, wholesome food and chilled out atmosphere, it’s easy to see why. To provide warm and engaging lighting for the field of Avalon’s main stage this year, returning provider GLS Lighting specified a collection of Rogue and STRIKE 4 fixtures from Chauvet Professional, in addition to 10 Chauvet DJ Festoon fixtures. “As the Avalon Stage serves as a key focal point not just within the Field of Avalon, but also within the Glastonbury festival itself, we wanted to create some big looks to make the stage stand out even more this year,” commented Ian Turner, GLS Project Manager. “With our curated selection of Chauvet Professional fixtures, we were able to provide excellent support to bands such as Sophie Ellis-Bexter and Busted.”<
Europe - GLP has continued to strengthen its UK operation, with the announcement that the experienced David Stewart has been recruited as sales manager. An industry veteran with nearly 30 years’ service, he spent the previous decade with Martin Professional, where he built up a powerful network of key specifiers, lighting designers and rental companies. Starting his career as a Vari-Lite operator, after working freelance for 10 years he then enjoyed stints with Stage Electrics, Fusion and Spirit Design before joining Martin Professional. Finding himself ready for a change, he said that GLP had been an obvious move. “The brand is very well known and they were at the forefront of LED moving head technology with their impression series.” “Aside from their excellent reputation and branding I liked the idea of working for an independent company where I can mak
UK - As part of British Style Collective’s three-day fashion extravaganza staged at Liverpool’s Echo Arena, VER London supported the production crew on Rock the Runway, a brace of daily show-stopping performances mixing models and dancers in a fashion-meets-music spectacle. Built as a full-on rock and roll style production, conceived and staged by Andy Turner with styling by Karl Willet and music by Des Lambert, the installation featured a full height, up stage LED video wall that delivered stunning content created specifically by Colin Rozee of ZeeFX to help intensify the audience experience. A variety of automated heads and effects were also incorporated to allow maximum creative control over the on-stage illumination. Working closely with LD Nigel Catmur, the VER Lighting department provided a mixture of Martin MAC Viper Performance, Profile and AirFX plu
UK - ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif) New Order + Liam Gillick So It Goes is a bold and original collaboration between gurus of electronic music New Order and conceptual visual artist Liam Gillick, which is orchestrated by Joe Duddell and presented for the 2017 Manchester International Festival on Stage 1 at the Old Granada Studios in the city. Lighting was designed by the band’s long term LD Andy Liddle, with equipment supplied by Blackburn-based rental specialist HSL, project managed by John Slevin and co-ordinated on site for them by Andy Chatburn. The show presents selected deconstructions picked from New Order’s vast body of work, played by the band and a 12-person synthesiser ensemble from the Royal Northern College of Music. Gillick designed the stage set comprising the 22.5m wide by 7m high structure upstage of the band that houses the 12 synth players. T
USA - Chris Lisle has designed the production and lighting for Jason Aldean’s current They Don’t Know tour and is using Elation Professional gear as part of a large lighting package. The country music singer has been on the road since late April and is playing a variety of venues across North America through the summer and into the fall. Jason Aldean has 19 country-chart number-one songs to his credit and was named Entertainer of the year by the Academy of Country Music in 2016. The They Don’t Know tour and album of the same name have been highly anticipated by his wide fan base, who admire the entertainer for the range of emotions in his shows and blend of musical styles, anything from traditional country to more upbeat rock, R&B and even rap. “This is my first tour with the Jason Aldean camp,” production designer Chris Lisle stated. “T
UK - This year, Projected Image is lending its skills for an exclusive sponsor event in the lead up to Lumiere Durham - the largest light festival in the UK. Held every two years, the festival attracts 200,000 people to the historic city of Durham and features a variety of light installations around the city. This will be the first year Projected Image has been actively involved in the event where designers from around the globe pitch for space for their temporary lighting installations. The piece de resistance in 2015 was a joint video piece led by Ross Ashton called The World Machine. The 10-minute video featured the work of the Cosmology Department of Durham University and the Ordered Universe Project. It combined theories on the modern view of the origins of the universe, with medieval stylings and music. Projected Image is teaming up with lighting de
Europe - Philips Lighting has announced that its new Philips Vari-Lite VL6000 Beam luminaires are playing a central role in the lighting design for Depeche Mode's Global Spirit tour. Lighting design for the tour is by Sooner Routhier and Robert Long of US-based SRae Productions. Associate lighting designer Brian Jenkins programmed the show for SRae, while lighting director Manny Conde is responsible for the lighting on the tour. The lighting equipment is being supplied by UK-based production rental specialist HSL Group. The lighting designers worked closely with Depeche Mode's long-time artistic collaborator and production designer, Anton Corbijn, whose design for the band's latest album Spirit underpins the show's creative concept. The album design features heavily brush-stroked painted figures holding flags, and this motif is emphasized in the production desig
China - PR Lighting recently previewed the new Butterfly among a suite of new products at the Prolight+Sound Show in Frankfurt. Although it was well received, the company decided to supercharge it by adding five small plates on the central disk, containing 15 x 1W LEDs, to the 6 x 40W Osram R/G/B/W 4 in 1 LEDs already existing. It is now known as the Butterfly II. The new de luxe fixture is thus now composed of 11 independently controlled or grouped LED engines all in one unit. The fixed centre 3.5° RGBW beam is surrounded by the five individual identical RGBW beams, all with tilt control, creating a flapping butterfly effect. This fixture contains five white LED clusters that can be individually controlled or can work together to create either a white blinder strobe or random strobing effect. The entire unit can pan 540° and tilt 270° while the entire head c
Belgium - Lighting and visual innovators Painting with Light were approached to design a special feature for the current Black To The Future art exhibition, which is being organised by art collective Het Labo and staged at the C-MINE cultural centre in Genk, Belgium. The environment is a redeveloped coal mine once the pulse of local industry, now tastefully restored and again serving the community meaningfully as a cultural centre and creative hub for media and tech-related companies and the LUCA School of Arts. The Het Labo logo is a lighthouse - so, it was a no-brainer for Luc Peumans and his Painting with Light team, who decided to imagine a ‘real’ lighthouse utilizing a high-powered beam luminaire and one of the two former mine head elevator shafts that still dominate the C-MINE site. A Vari*Lite VL6000 Beam was chosen to deliver the power and pr
Mexico - The sprawling grounds of a former Mexican steel foundry have become one of the hottest spots on the music festival scene. Started only five years ago, the Pa’l Norte Festival is already the number one tourist event in the state of Nuevo León in terms of its economic impact. This year’s edition of the two-day event drew 160,000 fans from throughout the world and featured a heady mix of stars that included The Killers, Placebo, MIA, The Offspring, Kaskade, Maná, Jason Derulo and Enanitos Verdes among others. Providing a suitably powerful background to their performances was a main stage festival rig anchored by 72 Maverick MK2 Washes from Chauvet Professional. Serpro Producciones, which supplied the RGBW LED moving wash fixtures, flew them on truss that descended in height from downstage to upstage. At the centre of this configuration were two diamond shap
The Netherlands - The saying that ‘success breeds success’ is proved at B-Amsterdam, where the inventive re-use of a former five-storey office block has proved so popular that the project now covers three separate buildings. The addition of restaurant Bureau has seen a new Yamaha Commercial Installation Solutions (CIS) solution added to the previously-installed CIS system. Opened in 2015, B-Amsterdam turned the city’s old 40,000m2 IBM-building into an imaginative multi-purpose office, work and events space for small enterprises and sole traders. New top floor restaurant Bureau is a creative addition used for lunch, dinner, private parties, fundraising and presentations, with many of its ingredients grown in an adjacent roof garden that also functions as an outdoor dining and socialising area. The building’s original conversion included the installation of a Dan
Europe - After being absent from the stage for some years, Phil Collins returned with his recent Not Dead Yet Live tour which played London, Dublin, Cologne and Paris. (LSi has a full report from the Cologne concert in the August/September issue) Patrick Woodroffe together with Roland Greil as the associate designer were responsible for the lighting design of this tour that Greil accompanied as programmer and lighting director using two grandMA2 full-size, one grandMA2 light and five MA NPU (Network Processing Unit). Greil, from Woodroffe Bassett Design, commented: “The grandMA2 system has been a trusty companion for many shows in the past and therefore we chose it once again. As expected it performed flawlessly and assisted us in creating a versatile, elegant and powerful design that provided the best possible canvas for such an outstanding artist and
UK - Like the free-flowing blend of eclectic music that floated through the summer air at Worthy Farm, ChamSys consoles were impossible to miss at the 2017 edition of the Glastonbury Festival. From the Other Stage, where superstars performed, to the Silver Hayes WOW Stage, where LDs cooked up hot looks for EDM artists, ChamSys products were everywhere at the festival. “We had some good things going on at Glastonbury this year,” said James Harrison, support manager at ChamSys, who along with software engineer James Crickmere and personality/support specialist Dan Coombs, represented the company at the five-day event. “There were a wide variety of our products at the festival, used in a wide range of different applications – and I’m pleased to report that everyone we spoke to was extremely happy with their performance.” A MagicQ MQ500 Stadium served as the ho
USA - As a full-service, live event design and production provider, Goalen Group has produced projects all over the world for a broad spectrum of Fortune 500 clients. At a recent supplier awards ceremony held by one of the world’s largest aerospace manufacturers, the design firm was asked to create an exciting production design inside the newly renovated The Bomb Factory in Dallas, Texas. Being given the opportunity to produce in a state-of-the-art music venue, Goalen Group wanted to push their design to a higher place, so they created a truly unique overhead LED video design with FLEXLite Plus 3.9mm LED video from PixelFLEX. “We specialize in the creative production of corporate events and have been a long-time supplier for this client at their annual senior leadership meetings and supplier awards ceremony,” began Matthew Goalen, vice President and technical dir
UK - This year saw the Greenpeace field take a leap into the future. With the theme of ‘forests’, the creative team ran wild designing structures visible from across the site. The most noticeable element of the field consisted of a huge 18m tree constructed by Factory Settings. When combined with ON LX’s bespoke lighting solutions, punters could interact with the 40 Universes of WS2811 Pixels within the tree. This interaction, triggered by a plethora of Raspberry Pi setups, was crafted by Bailes+Light’s Barri Mason. For this setup, GPIO inputs were utilised to allow OSC to trigger the system creating an effective way to communicate Greenpeace’s ideas through punters participating in the activity. This lead to people becoming more engaged with the campaign and influenced to consider future behaviour. In this case, linking hands around the ‘Giant Rave T
UK - From its humble beginnings in 1970, the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts has championed performance diversity in all its shapes and forms. The Circus Big Top and the Wow! stages are two examples which perhaps best encapsulate this tradition of diversity at Glastonbury. While both stages featured very different forms of entertainment, both had a consistently excellent visual palette thanks once again to Fineline Lighting and rigs that featured Chauvet Professional fixtures. Rob Sangwell, MD, specified a large selection of Maverick MK2 Wash, Maverick MK1 Spot, Maverick MK1 Hybrid, Rogue R2 Beam, and Rogue R2 Wash fixtures from Chauvet Professional across both stages. At the 1,500 capacity Circus Big Top stage, LD James Loudon specified 10 440W Maverick MK2 Spot fixtures to create stunning spot effects in support of the varied programme of circus
Italy - A crazy gig of epic proportions saw a quarter of a million Vasco Rossi fans pack into Modena Park for the one and only 2017 live appearance by Italian superstar and local hero in an epic homecoming concert. Lighting designer Giovanni Pinna, known for the imagination and flair of his work, wanted to make a serious impact for this show and utilized 550 Robes as the backbone of his rig – making about around two-thirds of the total fixture count – with 200 x Spiiders, 50 x BMFL Blades and Spots, 200 x LEDWash 1200s and 600s and 100 x LEDBeam 100s. It's safe to say that most people in Italy have a ‘soft spot’ for Vasco, who was also celebrating 40 years of a tumultuous career which has had its thrills and spills, so it’s good to see the maverick rock ‘n’ roll showman right back on form - performing at his very best. The show was also broadcast li
Moldova - King of Kings events are some of the most popular kickboxing events in the world and Elation dealer Eventica Grup SRL of Moldova has been a staging and technical contractor of KOK tournaments for years. For past events, Eventica has turned to Elation Platinum SBX hybrid fixtures for their multi-functionality, power and dynamism. For the King of Kings World Grand Prix 46 tournament held 1 April in Moldova, Eventica added Elation’s new Fuze Wash Z350 to the line-up along with other Elation gear. Lighting design was by Max Cojocari. KOK events are intense affairs with pre-bout introductions a vital step in building up the exciting atmosphere. The fighter entrance stage, key in the build up to a match, is a large space where anywhere from 18 fighters to a single fighter will make their appearance. “We needed to fill the space with dynamic lighting, whether it was f
Europe - Kling-Net is a new plug-and-play protocol for easy operation of LED devices introduced by ArKaos. The Kling-Net Tile app converts your smartphone or tablet into a LED tile and is available for for free. Kling-Net protocol, in combination with ArKaos software (LED Master, GrandVJ XT and MediaMaster), provides a plug and play connection to LED devices of all sorts. The compatibility matrix is on the Arkaos website (www.arkaospro.com) (Jim Evans)
World - CAST has introduced wysiwyg Lighting Design Software Release 39 which packs improved security to protect user investment as well as a rich new feature set for every wysiwyg mode: CAD, Data, Plots, Reports and Previsualization and more. Created with the lighting designer in mind as well as a futuristic workplace, wysiwyg’s powerful and integrated improvements result from the direct feedback from wysiwyg users and the wysiwyg beta testing program. Users will be able to be more creative and dynamic in their lighting design workflow from the design and presentation to clients as well as on site, saving valuable time and resources. Users now can export 360º Spherical images of their design and with the help of a VR googles, such as Google cardboard or Gear VR, users can step inside their virtual design and experience it in first hand. CAST has accomplished
Israel/Germany - The German-Israeli co-production St Matthew’s Passion 2727 is a dance oratorio choreographed by Tamir Ginz for the Kamea Dance Company, inspired by the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) by Johann Sebastian Bach, produced by Bayer Arts & Culture and a co-operation between two opera houses in Leverkusen and Wuppertal in Germany and Beer-Sheva Performing Arts centre in Israel. Lighting designer Yaron Abulafia was asked to add his magic and imagination to the intense performance. He is working for the first time with Ginz, one of the most important chorographers in Israel, who heard about Yaron’s fresh, innovative approach to lighting which brings a unique layer of kinetic sculpting to the artform. Yaron, already familiar with the music - a complex and ambitious musical construction that typically involves two choirs and at least one orch
Germany - When Let’s Dance, the German version of Dancing with the Stars / Strictly Come Dancing, celebrated its 10th anniversary series recently, lighting designer David Kreilemann decided to place special emphasis on the versatile and powerful XR 440 BWS moving head from PR Lighting. He could see this fixture, which integrates spot, wash and beam with a quality optical system, performing all manner of duties. He therefore requisitioned 22 of the heads from rental company MLS. "The powerful hybrid lamp impresses with its efficient sharp projection in both the spot and the beam modes,” says Kreilemann. “Even with slow rotations of the gobos and prisms, there are no visible jerks in the movement whatsoever. In fact, the two prisms, which can morph and contra-rotate with respect to each other, are absolutely brilliant on the XR 440 BWS.”
UK - The Urban Hero Awards is an annual event bringing together people of all ages for their inspiring work and leadership within their local communities. For this year’s event, which took place at Manchester’s Victoria Warehouse, Jonny Billitt was tasked with providing stunning visual support for the evening. This included an awards ceremony dinner with accompanying live music performances. To fulfill both of these roles, Billitt specified a number of Chauvet Professional fixtures, including eight Maverick MK2 Washes, eight Maverick MK1 Hybrids, 12Next NXT-1 fixtures, 108 PVP S5 LED panels, eighteen Rogue R1 Beams, 24 Rogue R2 Washes and 21 Rogue R2 Spots. Performing key lighting roles in Billitt’s overall illumination concept were the Maverick Wash and Hybrid fixtures, and Rogue R1 Beams, which fulfilled a variety of roles including front and ambient stage ligh
