Switzerland - The LIT Lighting Design Awards has added several leading lighting designers from the entertainment lighting industry to its judging team. Highly respected by their peers in the industry, the judges are tasked with recognising creativity and innovation in the fields of stage and concert lighting, live art and theatre lighting. They include: LeRoy Bennett, Roland Greil, Peter Morse and Charles B ‘Cosmo’ Wilson. "For the sixth consecutive year, the programme is honouring the efforts of the talented international lighting product designers and lighting implementers. With fast-growing interest, and an increase of projects submitted from the entertainment lighting industry, LIT has invited new jury members to join the LIT Lighting Design Awards," says a statement from LIT. “Their technical knowledge, extensive experience, eye for detail and their creative minds
USA - The fifth annual Elements Music and Arts Festival took place at a new site less than a two-hour drive from Mid-Town Manhattan, adjacent to the NASCAR Pocono Raceway, but as far as fans at this three-day event were concerned, it could have taken place a million miles from anywhere. Nestled within the region’s Northern Hardwood Forest with its sugar maples and yellow birch trees, the festival immersed fans in a natural canopy that ‘transcended time and place’. In keeping with its setting, Elements drew power from an onsite solar panel farm and was fed with locally sourced organic foods. The lightshows that supported the acts, a group that included Liquid Stranger, Rezz, Kaskade, Duke Dumont, and Big Gigantic, reflected the natural setting and spirt of the festival. Aerial effects accentuated the tree lines of the woods, and in place of conventional strobes, there w
USA - Disney+’s popular High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (HSMTMTS) returned to TV screens for a much-anticipated third season, with producers Skot Bright and Zack Lowenstein asking Hisham Abed to join the production team as director of photography. Shot over four months in the spring, 12 x Robe SuperSpikie moving lights were specified by Hisham and the producers to help provide flexible and efficient solutions for lighting ‘permanent’ sets in the Burbank, California, studio where the season was recorded in addition to assorted locations in and around Los Angeles. The Season 3 narrative is set at Camp Shallow Lake, a sleepaway camp in California, as theatre kids the Wildcats and fellow campers are primed for an unforgettable summer ripe with romance, curfew-less nights and a taste of the great outdoors. Skot and Zack have worked together
Italy - The summer tour of Jova Beach Party 2022 saw Italian songwriter Lorenzo Cherubini, aka Jovanotti, performing from June until September along Italian beaches, in front of stadium-size audiences totalling 550,000 spectators. This was a project that wanted to break the mould, leaving behind the usual live circuits to collaborate with an ambitious ecological initiative that aims to clean up 20m sqm of beaches, lakes, rivers and seabeds. "The beach is the most significant frontier line that exists, and bringing the party there is, for me, the most beautiful and difficult undertaking, and the most exciting," says the singer. This is an ecological philosophy also shared by Ayrton, whose products were chosen for the main lighting design of the tour which featured two large sailing ships as its central motif. Lighting designer, Paul Normandale, with the collaboration o
France - Victorien Cayzeele of Blue Like Cue designed the lightshow, and artistic director Julien Mairesse created the scenography for rapper Soprano’s Chasseur d’Etoiles tour. This collaboration created an all-embracing environment through a combination of inviting colours and patterns, audience lighting and an open stage that facilitated the connection between the artist and his fans. “Sopra’s’ philosophy is to use light accent to emphasise actions on stage. In this tour we occupied the venues with a 360° stage, so it’s important to be generous with everyone all of the time,” said Cayzeele. “We want a group cohesion, bringing everyone together by unifying fans through light. To achieve this, we need to light up the stadium correctly and get a homogenous rendering of colour, to sublimate the stadium’s architecture and create a cocoon inside.” Help
France - Ayrton is hosting the first in-person Entertainment Lighting Sessions for Women in Lighting at the Ayrton head offices in Paris on 20 October 2022. The full-day event promises to be one of inspiration, motivation, networking, personal and professional development and community for women. Ayrton is an active sponsor of the Women In Lighting (WIL) project which aims to promote the work of women lighting designers, and all women who work in lighting, across the entertainment industry by showcasing the skills and capabilities of these talented women, celebrating their achievements and encouraging others to become involved. Ayrton invites you to come along and enjoy the company of this growing community of women who are all about connecting, collaborating and empowering each other. As part of a wide-ranging programme, four keynote speakers from France, UK,
USA - Rock band LANY recently wrapped their 34-city Summer Forever tour with a lighting system supplied by Bandit Lites. The band, named as an acronym for Los Angeles and New York, is comprised of the duo Paul Jason Klein and Jake Clifford Goss. LANY boasts four studio albums, several EPs, more than 3.5bn song streams, and over 750m video views. Lighting designer Ben Gilbert and production manager Alex Rousso based the design around a cube, with the centre section of the design evoking three sides. The rest of the design flows from the top to the back, to the floor, all while remaining perfectly symmetrical. “The artist took inspiration from Kanye West’s set at Glastonbury in 2015 with the grid of PAR cans,” explained Gilbert. “When considering the space and budget, we wanted to look for a light with more flexibility with more than just a dimmer.” Band
USA - At the 74th Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards ceremony on 28 September in Los Angeles, ARRI was honoured with the Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award. With this prestigious accolade, the Television Academy recognises the company for its more than a century of designing and manufacturing camera and lighting systems as well as its development of systemic technological solutions and service networks for a worldwide complex of film, broadcast, and media industries. Accepting this prize, named after the American inventor and television technician Philo Farnsworth and presented since 2003, was Dr. Matthias Erb, chairman of the ARRI Executive Board. “On behalf of all ARRI employees, I thank the Television Academy for this tremendous honour,” said Erb. “The Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award is a very special accolade since
USA - Lighting a co-headline tour can, at times, be a tricky proposition, especially when one of the acts wants to build its show around a car wash theme, complete with a sawn-off Corvette on stage, while the other opts for a more romantic setting. Richard Fong faced this situation when he was called upon to light the Welcome To Hellvetica Tour, featuring Joywave and iDKhow. “For me, the design process always starts with a conversation about what story the band wants to tell onstage,” said Fong. “Joywave wanted to go all-in on a very theatrical car wash themed show. iDKhow is also a very theatrical band, but on this tour, they wanted to take a somewhat different route.” Drawing on the fresh original energy and vitality that characterizes both up and coming bands, Fong has successfully navigated his way through this dual mission, creating shows that are true to
USA - Phish delivered a summer tour experience for fans in North America, uniting a collaborative lighting team of Chris Kuroda, long-time lighting designer for Phish, and associate designer Andrew ‘Gif’ Giffin, who have created an eye-catching design with the help of 72 x Robe Tetra2 moving LED bars and 60 x Robe Spiiders. The band has amassed a loyal, enthusiastic, and cross generational following over the years and are known for their genre-blending extended jams and innovative improvisations. Chris and Gif have been working together on Phish live projects since 2009. Gif initially joined Chris as programmer and is now the associate lighting designer and most creative decisions are made jointly. Chris says laughing, “Sometimes we bicker about choices like the proverbial ‘old married couple’,” but this clearly works, and whatever the dynamic, the duo pro
Mexico - In June, the show Hasta que se nos hizo! was presented at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City where renowned Mexican singers Lucero and Manuel Mijares delighted the audience with a litany of hits from over 40 years in the entertainment industry. Axel Rebollo, in charge of lighting and production design for the show, used Elation Professional’s 51,000-lumen Artiste Mondrian LED profile FX moving head, along with Chorus Line 16 and Protron 3K Color, to highlight the set and ran the show using an NX2 console by Obsidian Control Systems. “A great thing about working with the Artiste Mondrian is its LED source, which is efficient and produces a very powerful output,” stated LD Axel Rebollo. “I also like its optics, the wide zoom range it offers and how versatile it can be thanks to its gobos, prisms, colour system and all the tools it features.”
Europe - Eloise Reed has joined SGM Light as specification manager for Northern Europe. Reed has over 25 years of experience in lighting, spanning several global markets in both the architectural and production lighting sectors. Reed will establish and build customer relationships and support business development within Northern Europe, providing a go-to point of contact for architectural lighting designers. By establishing Reed’s role, SGM is expanding its global team focused on the development of solutions and resources for the Architectural market, ensuring that consultants and integrators have the tools and support needed for successful design and implementation of architectural installations. Eloise adds: I'm thrilled to be joining SGM at this time of renewed optimism in the global market and unparalleled growth. SGM enables specifiers to create outstanding exte
USA - Californian quartet Marca MP’s lively blend of banda, mariachi, and ranchera has an uplifting effect on fans, getting them on their feet, dancing, stomping, and singing along, as everyday concerns seem to float away with the music. Frontman Pedro (El Chato) Vargas exemplifies the buoyant spirt of the band with his magnetic stage presence. But Vargas’ smile wasn’t the only thing shining when Marca MP took to the stage for their long-awaited show at MGM Grand this summer as part of their Lo Que Fuera Un Sueño Tour 2022. Glittering along with their spirited performance was a dynamic Gus Martinez-designed lightshow that filled the big concert space with intense flashes of audience lighting and strobing that ran in sync with the music. Like the music itself, Martinez’s lightshow was characterised by its energy and motion. Weaving light and video together, he
Portugal - Europalco, one of the largest providers of solutions for events and shows in Southern Europe, was the global provider of the United Nations World Ocean Conference held at the emblematic Altice Arena stadium in Lisbon. The five-day event, organised by the governments of Kenya and Portugal, was attended by more than 7,000 participants and brought together 25 heads of state and government and a hundred ministers. Europalco dedicated a team of 141 people (120 technicians, five project managers, eight purchasing managers, and eight logistics operators) to the event, providing a comprehensive solution. The Portuguese company was in charge of setting up the stages, providing all the furniture and all the technology necessary for the event. It also oversaw sound and lighting, screens, video, and live transmissions, as well as teleprompter tools, simultaneous transla
USA - To meet expected expansion, Bandit Lites has announced the hiring of industry veteran Paul Strom to the sales and integration team. Strom joins Bandit’s Charlotte office as system integrator and will primarily focus on rigging and soft goods, allowing even more rapid growth in this area. “We’ve had countless professional interactions with Paul over the years, so this was a natural fit for our team,” said Chris Barbee - vice president of sales & integration. “His comprehensive knowledge of rigging and drapery is going to be both an asset for us and our clients.” Strom has more than three decades of experience in the industry, spanning both lighting and carpentry with a strong emphasis on permanent rigging. “I have worked with the entire Charlotte staff in the past and am excited to join them on new projects,” said Strom. “I am thrille
Europe - Lightware Visual Engineering has announced Roger Takacs as vice president of education. Takacs will play an instrumental role in developing and growing business in the education sector. Takacs has more than 20 years’ experience in sales and executing strategic initiatives across several key verticals, including education. He has worked with many manufacturers, including Crestron, Atlona and Custom Display Solutions, and integration companies, such as CompView, MCSi and The Intellisys Group. “We continue to expand our team with many of the industry’s most widely respected professionals,” said Jason Tirado, president of Lightware Visual Engineering. “We are focused on building relationships with customers, consultants and integrators and demonstrating our confidence in Lightware’s innovative solutions. We are thrilled to welcome Roger to our team a
Italy - One hundred Claypaky Sharpy Plus Aqua fixtures were deployed at the Venetian Arsenal from 31 August to 10 September 2022 for the Campari Boat-In Cinema event at the time-honoured Venice International Film Festival. Campari has been the main sponsor of the festival for the past five years, during which it has organised a whole series of events to promote dialogue between established filmmakers and emerging talent. Among the best-known initiatives is the screening of some of the films in competition with the audience watching from the water on small boats or platforms in the scenic Arsenal basin. A spectacular live performance opens the evening after an apéritif and welcome dinner for a select audience of about 180 people. This is followed by a film screening on the big screen. After the film, the evening firework party begins for a larger audience of about 1,500 peop
Singapore - Showtec, one of the largest rental companies in South East Asia, has purchased 40 Ayrton Domino LT luminaires from Total Solution Marketing Pte Ltd, Ayrton's exclusive distributor for Singapore. The fixtures were subsequently used for the prestigious Singapore National Day Parade on 9 August 2022. Showtec is one of the top professional entertainment technology companies in South East Asia and carries a very extensive range of equipment for every kind of event. Its inventory is backed by a team of highly proficient technicians who achieve fantastic results for everything from intimate concerts to large scale outdoor events. Henry Ang, founder of Showtec, chose Ayrton Domino LT both to boost his rental stock and, specifically, for the National Day Parade. “We chose Ayrton Domino LT after a lot of research comparing it against other major moving light brands
Belgium - This past summer, community centre and local theatre GC De Kroon in Bocholt invested in a new Elation LED lighting package just in time for the new theatre season. The new energy-efficient lighting upgrade includes both stage and house lighting fixtures, a dynamic system that will serve the local performance community well into the future. The transition from conventional lighting to LED lighting was high on the city council’s agenda and Jasper Hendriks, technician at the theatre, was tasked with looking into the newest available technology. According to Jasper, the 400-capacity theatre had several good reasons for wanting to upgrade their lighting system. “One issue was with the conventional 1 kw and 2 kw lighting we had – there was simply no more spare parts for them,” he explains. “Another reason is the local dance schools and associations that
France - DJ, music producer and creative live experience imitator Michael Canitrot presented another innovative Monumental show, this time in front of the Cathedral Notre-Dame of Laon in the city of Aisne in the Hauts-de-France region of France. A special musical performance was created for this event which was presented in collaboration with design collective AV-Extended led by Jérémie Bellot, featuring a giant video mapped projection show onto the front of the Cathedral’s imposing 56m-high façade, supported by a light show designed by Mikael “Mika” Trochu utilising 56 x Robe moving lights. This followed Michael Canitrot’s 2021 Monumental Tour, a series of site-specific performances staged at some of the most spectacular heritage landmarks and monuments around France. Robe Fortes and MegaPointes were chosen for their power, brightness, and impact as
Europe - Showlight reminds you that there is still time to submit your suggestions for papers for the Showlight quadrennial next May. Showlight takes place from 20-23 May 2023 in Fontainebleau, France, and its papers committee is engaged in the process of considering and selecting topics for the papers programme. Says Showlight, “We are looking for the latest news on lighting projects and technology in our second call for papers focusing on recent projects. Have you worked on an incredible installation or a fantastic festival this summer? Has your project achieved its peak? Did your event engage the latest technology? Did your broadcast bowl its audience over? “We want to hear from you! We aim for variety across topics relevant to all aspects of the lighting industry today. We want to hear about your experiences, your ambitions, your inspirations, your concer
USA - The Congressional Medal of Honour Society returned to Knoxville to celebrate and pay tribute to the sacrifices made by Americans around the world. Bandit Lites was honoured to donate a lighting system for the gala, where more than 30 recipients of the Medal of Honor gathered to “reconnect with each other, solemnly commemorate those recipients who have passed, conduct Society business, and engage the local community”. “When asked, ‘what is the greatest event you have ever been involved in,’ my answer is simple: The Medal of Honor Celebration,” said Bandit chair Michael T. Strickland. “Other than the birth of my sons, this is hands down the event that is the most important moment in my life. We are honoured that this is our second time illuminating this amazing event, and these fine men are the true American Heroes. No other star shines as bright. To be in
USA - “We are deeply grateful and savouring every nano-second of this,” Flea proclaimed to fans at the start of one Friday night show on the Red Hot Chili Peppers Global Stadium Tour. It’s a safe bet that everyone in the sold-out arena knew exactly how the bass guitarist felt. None of them would have traded that moment either, as they joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band on a two-hour musical odyssey that wove its way through classic hits and new material, with plenty of spontaneous jams thrown in. Reflecting the open exhilarating spirit of the music every step of the way has been a sweeping, panoramic light and video show by Scott Holthaus and Leif Dixon that includes over 250 Chauvet Professional fixtures supplied by Premier Global Productions. Like the music of the clients it supports, the production design seamlessly blends various parts into a magnific
UK - The summer of 2022 was a huge moment for the city of Birmingham, as it played host to the 2022 Commonwealth Games, as well as the competing athletes from 72 nations. Taking place in the newly updated Alexander Stadium, the opening and closing ceremonies colourfully book-ended the largest multi-sport event held in the UK since London 2012, and was broadcast live to billions around the world, in addition to a 30,000 strong live audience. Both productions delivered a high-octane, multi-genre and multi-cultural tribute to the history, culture, and pride within the region, featuring a now infamous 10m-tall mechanical bull, and musical performances from West Midlands artists like Duran Duran, Dexy’s, Apache Indian, Beverly Knight, Goldie, Jorja Smith, Laura Mvula, Panjabi MC, UB40 and Black Sabbath. Positioned to light the festivities was Al Gurdon of Incandescent Des
