USA - This November marks the 25th anniversary of the birth of the Source Four fixture at ETC. Between now and this year’s LDI tradeshow, the company is taking a look back at this product that has become such a major part of ETC’s story, the fixture that has made a long-lasting impact on the industry, and the product that has inspired many additional ETC fixtures. When asked what he remembers about the first time he saw the Source Four, ETC CEO Fred Foster says: “When I first saw the Source Four it was just a HPL lamp, glass reflector, and a lens on an optical rail in Dave Cunningham's lab. But it was 40% brighter than a 1000W FEL and used only 575W of power. I was awestruck. It was even more fun to watch the looks on the faces of the LDI attendees when we launched the product a year later.” Ellen White, outreach and training specialist at ETC, was working in E
USA - The award-winning Chroma-Q Inspire range has introduced its newest addition - the Inspire XT. Incorporating all the features of the popular Inspire range of luminaires, including; fully homogenized beam, theatrical grade dimming and convection cooling, the new Chroma-Q Inspire XT boasts an impressive output of more than 9,500 hot lumens. The Inspire XT uses Chroma-Q's advanced homogenized optics, allowing for a single output beam that is clean, pure and uniform. Factory calibration ensures every Inspire’s output is colour matched. The Inspire XT’s range of beautiful whites, soft pastels and bold saturates provides for maximum creativity. Its ability to transform the look and feel of a space and engage an audience while subtly or boldly shaping an environment makes Inspire XT perfect for entertainment, Houses of Worship and architectural projects.
USA - Six standards are available for public review on the ESTA website - click here. Five have comment deadlines of 25 September 2017, but one is a week later, 2 October. People materially affected by these standards are invited to review them and to comment on them, saying they are acceptable as they are or are in need of changes. BSR E1.9, Entertainment Technology - Reporting Photometric Performance Data for Luminaires Used in Entertainment Lighting This standard defines the minimum data to be presented on documents purporting to accurately describe the photometric performance of stage and studio luminaires used in the live entertainment and performance industries. This is a proposed reaffirmation of the standard first published in 2007. The closing date is 25 September 2017. BSR
Hungary - The 17th FINA World Aquatic Championships took place in Budapest with 14 days of aquatic sports following a vibrant, colourful, elegant and epic opening ceremony directed by Olivier Feracci from French event production specialist ECA2 and Hungarian film director Csaba Kael, CEO of cultural hub Mupa Budapest. Lighting designer Frédéric “Aldo” Fayard from Concept K in Paris specified over 400 moving lights for the event, 80 per cent of which were Robes. He was brought on-board by French event production company ECA2 who co-ordinated all the technical production. The event included a host of other visual elements like large format projections, mapped buildings, water fountains and fireworks. A cast of several hundred performed during the two-hour show, broadcast live on national TV, on the M4 Sport channel (Directed by Andras Kakatos) and streamed
UK - The 2017 Knight of Illumination (KOI) Awards has announced this year's shortlist of lighting and video designers recognised for their creative work in television. The winners will be announced at the 10th anniversary KOI Awards ceremony, to be held at London's Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, on 17 September. The Television shortlist is the second of this year's three category shortlists to be announced. The nominees are as follows: The Light Initiative Television Award for Events Philip Brines for Proms in the Park, Ben Cracknell for the Olivier Awards broadcast on ITV, and Bernie Davis for BBC1's Festival of Remembrance The Philips Vari-Lite Televsion Award for Drama Chris Ramage for ITV's Emmerdale, Larry Smith for ITV's Dark Angel, and Dominique Clements for CBBC's Hetty Feather The SLX Television A
USA - Australian Pink Floyd has appeared before over four million fans in 35 countries. The band captivates fans by recreating Pink Floyd’s stage shows. This immersive multi-sensory experience is very much on display in Australian Pink Floyd’s current USA tour, thanks in no small part to a nine-universe lightshow that Tom Mumby designed and controls with the ChamSys MagicQ MQ500 Stadium console. Mumby, owner of Vivid Lighting Design, is using over 150 fixtures in the show. A 5m ircle that holds 26 moving washes and frames a video wall serves as the centrepiece of his design. His main rig is also made up of six vertical ladders, hung at staggered heights from a 50’ truss. Complementing the lights on the ladder trussing is a collection of 26 washes, strobes and blinders that runs along the downstage edge. An additional eight washes are used as sidelights. Rounding
USA – On Thursday 20 July, nearly 250 ETC end users arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, for the fourth CUE conference. CUE, short for Create Understand Experience, is a professional development conference hosted by ETC every other summer. This year’s classes were organised into one- and two-day-long tracks so attendees would have a more immersive, educational experience. Tracks focused on technicians, educators, general system networking, designing a better theatre, and Eos console programming. The typical daily class schedule was enhanced this summer with optional Saturday evening classes. With so many opportunities for hands-on learning, it’s no wonder that reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. When asked to describe one main takeaway from the event, a CUE attendee says: “This should be required for technicians everywhere. There are too many benefits to list
USA - When Tim Farquhar took his first look at the site of the Beanstalk Music and Arts Festival, he described it as “a lighting designer’s dream”. Not only was the setting breathtakingly beautiful with its panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains and the Upper Colorado River, but at 6,600’ above sea level and miles from the nearest city there was virtually no ambient light, save the stars in the summer sky, to distract from a lightshow. Farquhar, owner of Farquhar Productions in Boulder, CO, recently made the most of this dream opportunity for himself and visiting band LDs by creating a powerful and flexible lighting rig for the four-day Beanstalk event. His flexible rig was anchored by a collection of Chauvet Professional Rogue R1 Spots and Chauvet DJ Intimidator fixtures supplied by Field View Productions. “Every LD wants work in a beautiful setting, and you
UK - The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) staged the London premiere of Scuttlers in its city centre GBS Theatre, an intense drama about the struggles and power politics of 19th century Manchester street gangs set against a steaming, grinding industrial revolution backdrop bringing massive social change and great uncertainty. The work was written by Rona Munro in response to the UK’s unsettling spate of urban riots in 2011. Directed by Hannah Eidinow, the production was lit by Declan Randall, a South African theatre lighting specialist living in the UK, who made use of a number of different Robe fixtures available at RADA. Declan was asked to light this production by Matthew Leventhall, RADA’s head of production lighting, working alongside a team of RADA students. The stark, raw industrial set – designed by Postgraduate Theatre Design (Set & Costum
USA - A pair of grunge rock heavies teamed up for a once in a life one-off at a music hall 150 miles outside Chicago this July, and were support by some punchy looks from an equally powerful duo: The Intimidator Beam 350 LED and Intimidator Spot 255 IRC from Chauvet DJ. Fresh off their appearance on the Make America Rock Again tour, Puddle of Mudd and Saving Abel visited the Boiler Room, in Kewanee, IL for a sold-out show. Jeff Hinton, working for Jonny B. Enterprises, supported their intense non-stop 90-minute performance with a hard-hitting lightshow that featured 16 of the moving fixtures. “These were big name artists for this town and this venue,” said Hinton. “We wanted to create a lightshow that had a full production look, but we had a small stage and limited power. The Intimidators allowed us to create some impressive visuals despite this limitation, not
Moldova - Elation dealer Eventika Grup SRL of Moldova recently finished an interesting project that the company worked long and hard to complete. After the USSR collapsed, the circus in the town of Chisinau, Moldova, disintegrated along with it, leaving behind a large circus building that had the potential to be an excellent performance space. After years of laying idol, Eventika was able to partially restore the building on their own, without foreign investment, and held a 20th anniversary tribute concert at the venue for the Moldavian rock band Gindul Mitei (Cat’s Thoughts). The circus building, Chisinau City Circus, opened in 1981 and was once the largest auditorium in Moldova with over 50 performances there each year. With post-communist era struggles however, the venue was abandoned in 2004. For the 2017 20th anniversary tribute concert, bands and solo artists
France - Airstar has announced the appointment of Clément Guittet as export manager to strengthen its international presence. With 80% of its lighting turnover generated abroad, the company is focused on supporting and growing its global network. Commented Xavier Ponson, Airstar sales director: “Our brand is already represented in 40+ countries through 12 subsidiaries and over 70 independent distributors. This role has been created to help nurture our existing relationships and further boost our international presence.” Based in Airstar’s Headquarters near Grenoble, Clément will be responsible for Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, India and Switzerland, with the aim of supporting the existing Airstar international network and developing the company’s presence in the event, construction, industry, security, architecture and cinema sectors. W
USA - When Eos family console users install software v2.6, they may find that their systems get a serious boost. As announced at CUE, ETC’s professional development conference, Eos v2.6 brings major upgrades for Element consoles, and improvements to Snapshots and other programming features. The release also marks a change in the way the console family handles output upgrades for both new and existing users. Eos v2.6 dispenses with the notion of incremental upgrades, by which customers could purchase consoles and output upgrades at a number of different levels. From now on, any upgraded console is a fully-upgraded console. Moving forward, each Eos family controller will be sold in two formats: base and unlocked. A base level Gio @5, for example, will have 4,096 (4K) outputs, while an unlocked Gio @5 will have 24,576 (24K) outputs. If a user wishes to increase a base-l
UK - CPL (Central Presentations) working for creative event producers Bright, took its experience and knowledge of festival productions and delivered full technical production - sound, lighting, rigging and some AV - for the 2017 OVO festival. The event, now in its third year and a big hit with OVO’s staff, families and friends, was again staged at Mojo Active, Almondsbury near Bristol. CPL and Bright are regular collaborators and there is a great synergy between the two companies in their respective roles and end-goal of ensuring that event environments are smooth, entertaining, memorable and fun for all guests. CPL’s project manager Mike Radford commented: “We were delighted to be involved again, and enjoyed working closely with Bright’s team led by their PM Mike Matthews. The brief was to bring all the production values of a premium festival to this event
USA - The US capital is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. Yet ironically, the US Travel Association’s annual IPW convention never took place in Washington until this summer, when the group held its first ever convention in the city. Making a positive impression on a select group of the convention’s 6,000 guests from 70 different countries was a lavish VIP dinner held at the majestic Washington National Cathedral. Accenting the beauty of the towering Neo-Gothic limestone structure during this event was an enchanting and endlessly fascinating lighting design by Elizabeth A Coco that featured 160 Chauvet Professional and Chauvet DJ fixtures supplied by Atmosphere, Inc. of Silver Spring, MD. Coco, a USA 829 union designer, relied on multi-coloured uplighting to draw attention to some of the historic building’s captivating architectural features,
UK - After much deliberation, the theatre judging panel for the 2017 Knight of Illumination (KOI) Awards has announced this year's shortlist of lighting and video designers, recognised for their creative work in theatre. The winners will be announced at the tenth anniversary KOI Awards ceremony, to be held at London's Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, on 17 September. The KOI Awards was established to publicly celebrate the artistic achievements of lighting and video designers whose work has been showcased in the UK in the past 12 months in the sectors of Television, Theatre and Concert Touring & Events. Now one of the most celebrated nights in the live entertainment design industry calendar, KOI attracted more than 500 industry creatives and professionals to last year's celebrations. The first of KOI's three shortlists to be announced, the Theatre judging panel's shor
Belgium - British lighting console and media server manufacturer, Avolites, has appointed Fairlight as the exclusive distributor of its lighting and video network control products in Belgium. The exclusive partnership, which took effect on 1 July, follows nearly two decades of successful collaboration between the two companies. Commenting on the relationship, Koy Neminathan, sales director for Avolites, says: "We are very satisfied with the performance of Fairlight in the Netherlands. They bring Avolites to a larger audience by undertaking numerous seminars, trainings and demos regularly. Furthermore, Fairlight always carries a large stock of Titan, Ai and Art dimming products. This is supported by their technical department who have been assessed and accredited by Avolites and thus provide the best technical assistance." Technical service in Belgium will be provided b
USA - t’s been said that “experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.” John Garberson, owner of Creative BackStage, picked up some valuable experience recently when he worked a Hello Arizona-produced show by Nile Rodgers. Garberson had created a design for the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer that was built around a lot of high-energy aerial effects. At the last minute, though, he learned that he would not be allowed to use haze. With his original lighting concept severely crimped, he and his LD and programmer James Simpson reworked their plans and created a lushly coloured stage design using the 32 Chauvet Professional Rogue washes in his rig. For added good measure, they turned up the eye candy volume with the four STRIKE 4 multi-formatted fixtures on their front truss. “Lately, we’ve become more aware of building versatility into our rigs
UK - When lighting designer Cate Carter first conjured with Elbow appearing at the Barclaycard Summer Time (BST) annual concert series in Hyde Park this year she was immediately presented with two dilemmas. “One was the sheer scale of the stage, that enormous wall of LED screen cannot be ignored,” she said. Supplied by Video Design, the wall has, since last year, been extended from centre stage across and right down the outside edges of the PA wings. Wrapping the entire performance platform, it measures 200ft across and 35 high, a total 650sq/m of 9mm. “The other thing was about timing,” Carter continued. “We started supporting the new album Little Fictions, earlier this year in February/March. As it was a theatre tour we decided on no IMAG, relying instead on pure content projected onto a rear cyc. Our slot at Hyde Park made both those factors anachr
UK - Space Spectacular, the annual space-inspired music co-production between the Royal Albert Hall (RAH) and promoter Raymond Gubbay, needed a spectacular lighting and effects show to live up to its name. With limited time to set up and programme the extensive rig, RAH’s lighting design manager, Richard Rhys Thomas, was able to put together a stunning show in only a few hours using a Jands Vista L5 Console. He commented: “For me it comes down to limited time availability and being able to maximise time to create the actual design looks, effects and sequences with ease. The fact that over 180 moving lights, 100 LEDs and 200 dimmers, together with all attribute controls and palettes were accessible from a single layout on a large screen meant there was complete control at any one time. This greatly speeds up the programming process and is a fantastic credit t
UK - London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), took full advantage of the capabilities of one of MDG’s ATMe haze generators during their recent production of Rona Munro’s Scuttlers. “The brief from the director, Hannah Eidinow, was to create the atmosphere of Manchester in the 1890s: hot, industrial, sweaty, dirty, polluted and foggy, so clearly we needed to use a hazer that was up to the job,” says guest lighting designer, Declan Randall. “And MDG’s ATMe haze generator was more than up to the task.” Scuttlers was first performed at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in 2015. It follows the exploits of the city’s first street gangs, set against the background of Manchester’s cotton mills and industrial expansion of the nineteenth century. The recent production at RADA moved the setting from the 200+ seat theatre-in-the-ro
USA/Europe - Canadian singer / songwriter The Weeknd is currently rocking plenty of style and enjoying success, critical acclaim, multiple awards and several hits from his chart-topping third studio album Starboy, propelling him a long way from his underground roots and early anonymous mixtapes uploaded to You Tube in 2010. Lighting for 2017’s Starboy Legend of the Fall tour has been designed by Sooner Routhier who picked Robe Spikie moving lights together with BMFL Spots and WashBeams to be at the heart of the rig. Sooner has worked with The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye) since 2012. She and design business partner Robert Long of SRae Productions were contacted by his creative directors Lamar C Taylor and Drop last year and asked to assist with this tour, which involved lighting an impressively beautiful flown sculpture created by production designer, Es Devlin.
USA - For a recent collaboration with the Cavalettes Dance Team in Austin, TX, Lake Travis High School students Max Dalton and Trenton Schoonmaker used High End Systems SolaSpot 2000s to take the group’s production Love to a new artistic level. The technicians at the Lake Travis PAC are all students enrolled in the Technical Theatre program at Lake Travis High School, and are part of the LTHS Student Chapter of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. Lake Travis PAC managing director K.J. Bartosh comments: “We’ve worked hard over the last decade to transform our dance show from a very basic recital into a spectacular community event that adds a great deal of production value to the talent of our dancers, as well as to stretch the significant educational opportunities for our technical theatre students. The Cavalettes are a highly-decorated dril
Ireland - The annual Galway International Arts Festival is one of Ireland’s largest cultural events. This year’s line-up features musical performances by Dublin’s own Gavin James, England’s Passenger, original Beach Boy Brian Wilson, and many others. Lighting for the eclectic series of nightly concerts in the festival Big Top is provided by Light Source, with data networking by ProPlex. “We have used ProPlex cable and devices for every show over many years,” says Light Source general manager, Ciaran Donnelly. “This gig has two GBS 10-port switches, four Opto-Splitters including two Minis in the truss, and an IQ Two 1616 16-universe DMX node. Tying the system together are over 200m of ProPlex Fibre, and 200m of ProPlex Cat 5e and DMX cables.” Donnelly added, “Additionally, we are using 200 meters of ProCable Multicable, fanouts, and 16 amp TRS mains cables.
