Two well-known names in the entertainment lighting industry have launched an "e-commerce website with a new concept" - Gearmarket UK - on 9 December. Keith Dale, ex-managing director of Celco and John Lethbridge, ex-managing director of Cerebrum Lighting, have been working with software developers for several months to come up with a concept that is possibly unique in the entertainment technology industry - a web-based customer loyalty scheme.

The Gearmarket site offers innovative new products and a selection of popular products from several key manufacturers from around the world. Buyers can shop and pay in Euros or Pounds Sterling. Most E-commerce sites present the potential buyer with a single price, invariably discounted - but one can never be sure how good the price is without comparing prices available elsewhere. On first sight, the Gearmarket website only appears to sh

East London-based gobo and projection specialist, Projected Image, has taken on an additional new premises at its HQ in the Three Mills Island Studio complex, Bromley-by- Bow. This is part of an on-going expansion plan in line with recent company developments and the establishment of sister company Projected Image Digital.

In November, Projected Image announced an exclusive UK distribution deal with RADlite, the revolutionary new PC-based computer generated effects package. Expanding to the new, larger, 1100sq.ft premises will allow Projected Image to enlarge its gobo production facilities and move all administration into the new space, leaving the original area free to be set up and utilized as a permanent RADlite demonstration. "We’re very excited about the move," said director David March. "The intention is also to offer the facility to lighting designers and vi

A new feature awaits some of the two million visitors who flock annually to Madame Tussaud’s in London. Guests can now stand on a podium between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, and via a discreet camera have their image beamed onto a rear-projected screen above and behind them - thanks to a 120" New Wide Angle screen from dnp.

The installation is the work of systems integrators, Sysco, whose relationship with The Tussauds Group extends back nearly 10 years to when they first fit out sister attraction, Tussaud’s London Planetarium. Managing director Hugo Roche explained: "Over the years we have undertaken a lot of the Group’s AV work - sometimes winning competitive tenders, on other occasions being appointed during the design phase and working more on a design/build basis."

In terms of delivery, Sysco looked at a number of ways of achieving th

Large screen specialist GL UK is supplying production company Endemol UK for the BBC’s latest pop phenomenon Fame Academy, with 55 panels of Barco I-lite 8 mm LED screen for the 12-week series. The screens were specified for the show by the original director Tony Gregory, who worked with GL UK on Big Brother earlier in the year.

Throughout the week, leading up to Friday, they are also filmed auditioning, working, performing and practising, etc. In the studios, the screen panels are configured in two very different-sized formats. One is a seven panel wide by four panel high widescreen, and the other is a three wide by nine high horizontal screen. The latter is split into three equal sections, allowing images of three different performers to be shown simultaneously. This effect is specifically used as they approach their ‘jeopardy moments’, after which the voting elimin

QSC Audio has reported two major sales of its amplifiers via Dutch importer, Holland Audio Import (HAI) BV. The sales have been made to rental companies P&B Audio and Story Sound. P&B Audio purchased two racks, each containing a pair of QSC’s PowerLight PL4.0 and PL2.0HV models - as well as an additional PL6.0 rack to power the company’s Funktion One system.

At London’s PLASA Show, P&B discovered Funktion One’s Resolution 2 system and, noticing the demand for high-end larger scale FOH PA, they made the radical decision to do away with almost their entire previous inventory to invest in a larger system. "As a result, we switched to QSC’s PowerLight Series - and we wished since that we had done this years ago," says P&B’s Michel van de Beek. The new QSC system drives the company’s eight stacks of Funktion One Resolution 5/F218s. "W

Lighting designer David Agress approached this year’s Radio City Christmas Spectacular with two specific problems in mind - how to maintain the artistic integrity of his lighting design for the show when there were multiple companies touring that same production simultaneously, and how to cut the load-in time at each move. Agress, working with programmer Paul Turner, turned to three separate building blocks and put them together in pre-production to accomplish both goals - the Prelite Studios in New York, XYZ positioning on Whole Hog II and WYSIWYG.

The team began work with the show file from the 2001 production. Two focus grids had been constructed, which the team called a Map. The first focus grid was built on the downstage 20’ of the deck, with 4’ centres stage left to right and 3’ centres downstage to upstage. The second grid was further upstage, with the

The Jewish Free School's new campus in North London was officially opened by PM Tony Blair in October. Designed by leading UK architects Terrence O'Rourke, the new campus provides a base for approximately 2000 students.

In charge of the development of the 22,224sq.m facility was Jarvis plc, a facilities management and infrastructure services group, and the first company to win a schools project under the government’s Private Finance Initiative. The Jarvis team worked in partnership with the local education authority to create the facility, and also with a number of sub-contractors - amongst them Maltbury, who fulfilled the staging part of the contract.

As the facility's main hall is used for school presentations and exams, the Jarvis team wanted to provide under-stage storage for the exam desks without lifting the height of the stage. To achieve this, Maltbury designed and buil

Metropolis Studios has consolidated its position as one of Europe’s leading recording studio complexes through the reconstruction of two of its main rooms around SSL consoles. The 72 channel SSL XL 9000 K Series will be fitted into the customized 5.1 and stereo Studio E and an SSL 9000 J into Studio A.

The move is certain to be seen as adventurous in the current climate and watched with interest by senior industry figures. The studio industry has been in a state of flux for a couple of years with a change in the way records have been made, resulting in a number of mid to large studios closing. Metropolis created studio E, one of the world’s first purpose-built music surround mix rooms in 1996 and was the first major studio complex to embrace the ProTools revolution in the early 90s. The Group was also unique in offering ProTools workstations for every session with Prism con

21st century audio technology has joined 11th century history in the first ever Renkus-Heinz ST-STX installation in Europe. The Dala-Husby Church in the very heart of Dalarna, Sweden, has chosen the high powered Renkus-Heinz ST7, with built-in Class D amplification and integral processing, to deliver sound throughout its large, highly reverberant main hall.

The installation was supervised by DAT AB, Renkus-Heinz’s Swedish distributor. DAT installed the new Renkus-Heinz ST7/94 (90 x 40 degree dispersion) loudspeaker and a series of distributed nearfield speakers in the church, to minimize the effects of a long reverb time while projecting vocal and musical clarity throughout the building.

Faced with a limited budget and the requirement for a compact, simple, but state-of-the-art sound system, DAT measured the reverberation time at almost 4.5 seconds and created an EASE model of

Cadac Electronics Plc reports that its J-Type Live Production Console features on three of the current Mamma Mia! productions. September saw the show's debut in Sydney at the Lyric Theatre, Star City, underlining the Australian's continuing enthusiasm for the sunny musical. In November, the first ever non-English language production premièred in Hamburg - at the refurbished Operettenhaus an der Reeperbahn. The Umi Theatre in Tokyo completes the picture for 2002, where Mamma Mia! opened on 1st December.

For this latter, Mamma Mia! is being staged by the Shiki Theatre Company at this brand new 1200-seat theatre, which is located in the new Bayside Tokyo Shiodome SIO-SITE complex. The show is the latest in a long line of large-scale musical productions under the Shiki banner, including Phantom of the Opera, CATS and The Lion King. The Shiki team was responsible for the design of the Umi

Urbium plc notched up their 26th venue this month with the opening of the expansive Tiger Tiger in Newcastle. In keeping with their policy, the venue forms part of a new £70m leisure and retail development called The Gate at the top of Newcastle’s Bigg Market drinking circuit, in the shadow of the former Mayfair Ballroom.

To maximize an ideal location, Urbium brought back interior designers Tibbatts & Co to deliver this 1800-capacity multi-bar concept. With a large ground floor Tiger Bar, Moroccan-themed Kaz Bar, Manhattan-style Loft, colonial-style Raffles Bar and the retro feel of The Den, as well as a clever tunnel which acts as a bass trap into the industrially-appointed club, the venue caters to all tastes. There is also further evidence of the company’s move towards fine dining with the stylish, silver service restaurant. Yet where Newcastle has become truly groundbr

St. John's Church in the Lebanese city of Achkout, 15 kilometres north of Beirut, has recently had a brand new sound system installed. With seating for 750 and a maximum capacity of 1,000, St. John's is one of the largest Christian churches in the area.

Installer Tony Abou-Khair outlines the brief: "In terms of speech intelligibility, the old system was not capable of doing justice to the demands of today. As an ever-increasing number of people have been frequenting the services, the sound system had to be expanded. The budget was tight so the loudspeaker cabinets we chose had to be capable of producing a balanced sound with excellent speech intelligibility, even without any type of external controller. As a result, we opted for the HK Audio Linear 3 Series. The acoustics in the front portion of the church are problematic because of a potentially unpleasant build-up of mid to hig

L&SI’s series of industry networking events got off to a flying start on 10 October when 58 delegates joined the PLASA Media team and the technical production crew at the London Palladium for a backstage tour of the world’s most technically-advanced musical production, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

After a welcome drink in the Palladium’s Cinderella Bar, delegates were welcomed to the theatre by L&SI editor Ruth Rossington, before being given a fascinating potted history of the site and the venue by theatre manager Nick Bromley. Following this, the delegates were split into groups to begin the behind the scenes tour, which took in the automation control position, the lighting control room, the lighting rig, FOH sound desk, the under-stage engineering and the radio racks, plus a chance to view the amazing car itself, built by Howard Eaton Lighting Ltd. At each point, deleg

Birmingham's SSE Hire has recently completed the first sale of a Nexo GEO loudspeaker system by a member of the UK GEO reseller network. Supplied as a complete package to Litton Lane, the system includes speaker enclosures, amps, processors, flying hardware and flightcases. As an existing Nexo Alpha user the addition of GEO to Litton Lane's hire stock was a natural progression for the Dublin-based company.

The system supplied by SSE included 18 GEO-S cabinets, four CD12 cardioid subs, two Nexo NX241 digital controllers, four Camco Vortex 6 amplifiers and flying hardware to suit. To complete the package, SSE also supplied its custom GEO cases, capable of holding seven GEO-S cabinets and all flying hardware in a ready-to-fly configuration. Also included were SSE GEO distribution boxes providing AC, signal and speaker distribution for the shock-mounted SSE Cube racks housing the Camco a

Australia’s Gold Coast is home to the Movie World theme park - the brainchild of Warner Bros, and the only theme park in the southern hemisphere dedicated to the film industry.

Given the renewed interest in all things Scooby Doo, the park has launched a new dark ride - the Scooby-Doo Spooky Coaster - a $13 million indoor rollercoaster inspired by the feature film which was shot at Warner’s Movie World Studios.

Coaster cars carefully replicated from the film launch visitors on a hair-raising journey, complete with laser, lighting and sound effects, animatronics and a kaleidoscope of colour, depth, height and trickery of dimension.

One of the central players in the ride’s design was Australian laser specialist Laservision Macro-Media. The installation required a complete reversal of laser display rules: whilst discreet laser effects have previously been employed

A special event at BBC TV Centre in Wood Lane, West London, on December 6 saw a unique demonstration of LED screen technology to an invited audience of television lighting directors.

The Society of Television Lighting Directors (STLD), Blitz Television Services of Elstree, UK, and LED screen manufacturer Lighthouse joined forces to demonstrate the newly installed Lighthouse LVP0630 screen on the BBC children’s television show The Saturday Show, which includes a special Saturday edition of Top of the Pops.

Presented by Lighthouse International sales and marketing director Graham Burgess and Saturday Show LD Rod Litherland, with Guy Horrigan, Dave Gunn and Blitz’s Scott Burges also on hand, the presentation aimed to explain the characteristics of LED technology and explore its creative possibilities. Topics covered included colour balance, contrast, camera angles, viewing d

Known as much for his elaborate outdoor shows as his music, Jean Michel Jarre recently added to his reputation for groundbreaking outdoor performances with an extraordinary show in northern Denmark.

On 7 September, he held an out-of-the-ordinary event at Gammel Vrå Enge windmill park near the Aalborg in Denmark. Titled ‘Aero’, the show’s central theme was ‘energy and environment’ and bizarrely, the wind played the lead part, not only as energy, but also as a carrier of sounds, images and messages.

The concert consisted of 16 Jean Michel Jarre numbers, both classics and new material, with a scenography that was radically different from his previous concerts. The show featured a number of visual treats such as the windmills ablaze in light, and pyro exploding in sync with the music. Lighting designer Lars Nissen (Eurovision 2001), of lighting rental compa

Swedish Radio (SR) has announced that it will begin 'extensive bench testing', utilizing DTS’ Coherent Acoustics compression/decompression algorithm, aimed at providing live surround sound radio broadcasting.

While SR is examining all potential surround sound platforms, research has established a popular demand for the higher quality signal of DTS Digital Surround. A download on the company’s website (see link below) offering material in the alternative formats has been on-line since June and of the 300,000 downloads of this material, approximately 70% have been of the DTS encoded version.

SR has formed a 5.1 working group which has been allocated funds for the production of more 5.1 programming and has established contacts with potential distributors among satellite, terrestrial, cable and broadband-based transmission companies. DTS’ Coherent Acoustics compression/

Our photo shows industry consultant Peter Ed, part-way through his three-day journey to scale Mount Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa, located in the Atlas Mountain Range. Peter and his wife Lynne undertook the trek (which involved mules, freezing temperatures, cascading boulders, 6am starts and vertigo) to raise money for ARK - Absolute Return for Kids - a charity established to transform the lives of children who are victims of abuse, disability, illness and poverty.

Anyone who’d like to add to the money that’s already been raised, can contact Peter on p.ed@btclick.com or 07887 713 215.

Marquee Audio has supplied a Soundcraft MH4 audio mixing console to Tour Tech, which immediately went out with Idlewild, initially to support Coldplay on their European tour. "Idlewild was the perfect opportunity for Tour Tech to confirm the purchase of the MH4, which Dick Rabell had been considering for some time," said Glen Smith of Marquee.

In a separate sale, ML Executives have purchased two Yamaha DM2000 digital mixing desks from Marquee Audio, which are currently in China with The Planets. The DM2000s were first specified for front-of-house and monitor mixing of The Planets' European shows supporting Deep Purple. "As the opening act, we needed consoles that were compact," explained Gary Marks of ML Executives. "The whole band uses in-ear monitoring and all their instruments are on radio systems so the mix is quite intricate. We were looking for a digital

Imagination has created a new space for young people to learn about technology at the science centre, @Bristol. The Orange Imaginarium is aimed at 4-16 year olds and seeks to explain wirefree technology (developed by @Bristol sponsor Orange) from a child’s point of view.

The Imagination team, led by designer Caroline Wilson and lighting consultant Tony Rimmer, worked in collaboration with researchers and futurologists from Orange to create the interactive learning environment. The experience begins with a series of animated stories, linking everyday needs to technology. Three more zones follow a pattern of ‘Search and Find’, letting visitors experience and be creative with technology. The space is built around three key technologies - voice activation/recognition, personalized information and Orange Home services. In ‘Tell Me A Joke’, voice recognition sof

The first week of December saw ETC using the newly finished demo room at its Acton offices for a full week of hands-on, technical product training for new and existing Authorised Service Centres (ASCs). Companies can only become Authorised Service Centres once they have received full training in relevant products. The week's course gives ETC a further six ASCs across Europe and the Middle East.

The three new Middle Eastern ASCs are Oasis in the UAE, Niletec of Egypt and Al Diwan of Kuwait. The newly appointed European companies are Helsinki Lighting, Finland, Stockholm Lighting in Sweden and Decima of Italy.

The training covered ETC's Sensor and Unison dimming, Express and Expression consoles, Emphasis and ETCNet2, ETC's Ethernet system, plus Irideon fixtures and associated software and enables the ASCs to offer their customers full technical and service back-up for these ETC product

The MTV Staying Alive concert, in Association with YouthAids, and staged at Cape Town’s Green Point Stadium in late November, proved a major success with over 20.000 people witnessing the event live and millions more watching an edited version on television channels the world over.

Three of the world’s most successful music stars headlined the event, which was held to create awareness of HIV/Aids, as well as encourage tolerance of those affected by the disease. Alicia Keys, Usher and P. Diddy were joined by homegrown stars Mandoza, Zola, 101, Danny K, Bianca Le Grange and DJ Ready D.

Gearhouse South Africa was contracted to provide lighting, sound, structures, audio-visual, rigging and power. The SABC (South African Broadcast Corporation) filmed the show on behalf of MTV, for its MTV Presents Levi’s Jeans Staying Alive Concert In Association With YouthAids 90-minute

Architectural and feature lighting specialists i-vision continue their proliferation of Irish projects, with an installation at the 700 capacity Ennis pub and bar in Balbriggan, County Dublin.

Owner Gary Brown, together with Pete Williams of AVL, gave i-vision’s Geoff Jones the brief to design and realise an exterior lighting scheme. The stone constructed building posed several challenges - with dark grey stone proving a less than ideal lighting canvas!

Jones has lit the front façade with seven Superlight CDM 150 up/downlighters. Each fixture is fitted with a blue dichroic for the downlight and a magenta dichroic for the uplight. This method was employed to break up the architectural lines of the frontage, producing a dynamic blue wash over the lower half, and an eye-catching magenta sweep across the first floor. MA250 blue asymmetric floods were used to complete the picture

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