USA - Creative Technology has selected the ROE Visual Sapphire platform to expand its rental inventories with a NNP LED system. After a thorough selection process, the Sapphire platform was chosen as the best performing product. CT has invested considerably in the Sapphire platform with 1,5mm LED panels. Using the latest 1in4 Mini LED technology, the visual performance is unmatched. The native 4K panels, with 16:9 measurements will be running on the new MVT processing platform by Megapixel. “As soon as we noticed a rising market demand for NNP displays, we have been interested on adding this to our rental inventory”, states Graham Andrews, CEO of Creative Technology Group. “We always try to offer our customers the best and latest technologies available. However, applying an NNP LED system for rental purposes has proven to be challenging for many LED manufacturers
South Africa - MGG is the first rental technical company in South Africa to invest in Braceworks, an add-on module for Vectorworks Spotlight, which helps ensure safety and compliance and is an easy way to assess a temporary structure under load. Gone are the days when a truck would arrive on-site and the technician would quickly chat to the client and only then decide where the stage and gear would be positioned. “Now everything is so well planned, right to the point of where the motors need to go,” explains Kevin Rieck, head of drafting at MGG. “Everyone can see what the final product is going to look like before the truck is even loaded, but with events getting bigger, we had to ensure safety first and this is where Braceworks comes in.” MGG recently took ownership of Braceworks, purchased from DWR Distribution, and have used it on shows such as Miss SA, Clas
USA - At the turn of the year, Lady Gaga kicked off two multi-year Las Vegas residencies at Park Theatre at Park MGM, both of which are presented in L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology from L-Acoustics. Lady Gaga’s first show, Enigma, which has now completed 18 sold-out performances is a nonstop, eye-popping spectacle taking its 5,200 audience members on a full-throttle, futuristic odyssey through two hours of her club classics. Her second show, Jazz & Piano, is a glitzy return to classic Las Vegas style with the artist accompanied by a full big band complete with string section. Alternating between stripped down solo piano and vocal arrangements of her pop numbers and swinging orchestral versions of Great American Songbook staples. Although the two productions could hardly be more different in terms of design and execution, the sound tec
Poland - Projection Artworks has completed Poland: First to Fight, an ambitious outdoor live immersive experience to mark the 80th anniversary of World War II at Museum 1939, Gdansk. The Projection Artworks team scripted, storyboarded, choreographed and produced Poland: First to Fight in collaboration with Museum 1939. The Museum’s dynamic external architecture is transformed into a skyline canvas, creating a 20-minute live sensory experience that integrates archive footage, animation, projection mapping, live action, music performance, narration and sound effects to tell the heroic story of Poland’s journey through the war. An interpretive dance is woven through the show, with dancers and actors interacting with the projection, choreographed by dance and theatre artist Rhiannon Faith. Museum 1939’s façades are manipulated using 3D mapping illusions, with
Italy - The Milan Latin Festival is a 10-week celebration of Latin American artists. They converge on the external area of the Assago Forum in Milan for 66 days of celebration from mid-June to mid-August, to deliver a varied programme of concerts to enthusiastic crowds. Artists such as the king of Reggaeton, Daddy Yankee and fellow Puerto Rican, Ozuna, lit up the stage for sold-out shows. At outdoor events such as this, where the hazards of dispersion are more pronounced, the true qualities of an audio system are laid bare and event technology provider Suono e Luci, chose Coda Audio to ensure that every artist performing during the two-month duration of the festival was heard loud and clear. Claudio Saoncella, head of audio at Suono e Luci, customers of Coda Audio’s Italian distributor Decima 1948, opted for a ViRAY solution configured in Bi-Amp. The system was install
Belarus - Thousands of lighting fixtures and LED devices supported the Bright Year, Bright You theme of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2019 Second European Games earlier this summer. Dinamo National Stadium in Minsk, Belarus was aglow with the glittering pageantry, and a network of High End Systems Hog lighting consoles controlled it all. The main lighting control system was comprised of two Hog 4-18 flagship consoles plus two Full Boar 4 consoles, all networked in a multi-programmer setup, outputting data via five DMX Processor 8000 units. A near identical backup system was also on standby. The physical set featured eight stages. In addition to the more than 1,000 moving head fixtures, Hog consoles controlled all the LED pieces, including the set decorations, the interactive audience bracelets and pixel tubes. Because of the massive amount of pixel m
UK - The Olivier and Tony award-nominated Blues In The Night has undergone its first revival in 30 years at London’s Kiln Theatre. Running until 7 September, and originally conceived by Sheldon Epps, Robert Jones’ hotel-based set design, steeped in Chicago 1930’s depression, is brought to life by eminent lighting designer, Neil Austin, with the aid of purpose-selected LED tools from GLP, with whom he has collaborated frequently in the past. It was Austin who had initially suggested the more theatre-friendly variant of GLP’s popular X4 Bars, proposing an RGBY batten that would deliver warmer tones, which is now available as a custom option in the GLP catalogue. Austin himself has been using quantities of these fixtures on an internationally renowned production currently being produced around the globe. It had been Rob Jones who was responsible for
UK - AV distributor PSCo and LED manufacturer Absen will be marking the fifth anniversary of their distribution partnership during the official opening of Innovation House, PSCo’s new, 50,000sq.ft purpose-built premises in Bracknell. The partnership, dating back to 2014, has given UK customers access to the latest Absen LED displays, with a dedicated local service centre and in-house technical support for both rental and fixed installations. Within five years, PSCo - part of the Midwich Group - has become the top Value Added Distributor (VAD) in Absen’s European partner network. To celebrate the opening, PSCo is hosting Innovation House Party, a free event for rental partners that on 20 - 22 August from 10am - 4pm at Innovation House, Segro
USA - Six-piece band Fitz and the Tantrums are currently touring with Young the Giant. Lighting design is by Jeremy Lechterman and his team at FragmentNine. Working with co-designer Jackson Gallagher from FragmentNine, and associate designer Mike Hankowksy from Hemlock Design & Technology, Lechterman uses a collection of 28 Chauvet Professional COLORado Solo Batten fixtures supplied by LMG. The bright RGBAW linear fixtures are arranged in two layers of semi circles behind the band and in vertical stacks between video panels. From these positions, they backlight the performers, separating them from the upstage area. This seems to bring the band closer to the audience. At the same time, the straightforward geometric configuration of the bright, colourful battens draws the crowd’s attention to the stage bringing them closer to the band. “Our client’s mus
UK - Showcasing the latest and greatest music, Hertfordshire festival Standon Calling was the biggest yet, welcoming a record 15,000 people. This year’s headliners across the three-day July festival included Nile Rodgers & CHIC, and Rag’n’Bone Man. Other acts included Friendly Fires, Echo & The Bunnymen, Róisín Murphy, IDLES, Lewis Capaldi, Mahalia, Kate Nash, The Big Moon, Steam Down, The Japanese House, Band Of Skulls, The Joy Formidable and Sea Girls. The festival hosts a range of acts across multiple stages. Adamson’s UK distributor The Warehouse Sound Services designed an Adamson sound reinforcement system for the festival’s main stage. The system consisted of a full complement of Adamson E15 line array loudspeakers and E119 Subwoofers with additional ground-stacked S10 line array loudspeakers on the sides, all powered by Lab Gruppen PL
Mexico - Emmanuel and Mijares, two leading figures in Latin pop, are delighting audiences across Mexico, Central America and the US by performing their popular ballads and pop songs beneath a large rig of Elation Professional fixtures, with lighting design by Hector Valencia and Axel Rebollo. The Mexican singers’ career that spans over 35 years with millions of records sold and multiple national and international accolades to their credit. As friends, they joined together to create a show of their all-time greatest hits, Two’r Amigos, a performance that has now been touring for almost six years, breaking several attendance records along the way. The show has been evolving since 2013 with musical arrangements and set lists changing, as well as the stage, video and lighting design. The show has been re-designed four times and this year returned to Auditorio N
UK - White Light has returned to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe where it is supplying the lighting and rigging equipment for all of the Gilded Balloon venues for the sixth year running. WL’s customer service key account manager Dan Last comments: “We work closely with Gilded Balloon across their five buildings: Teviot (nine spaces), The Museum (auditorium space), Old Tolbooth Market (three spaces), Rose Theatre (three spaces) and the newly-acquired Patter Hoose (five spaces). Our role is to supply the lighting and rigging solutions in each of these, ensuring that they are well-equipped and able to host a range of performances throughout the Festival.” Prior to the Fringe, Last and the WL team work closely with Gilded Balloon to decide on the equipment that will be used in each space. “We initially work with Karen and Katy Koren who each run Gilded Balloon, whi
UK - MDG has partnered with Arcadia Spectacular for this year’s Glastonbury Festival by supplying two of its Me8 fog machines for Arcadia’s new creation, Pangea. Named after the Paleozoic-era supercontinent that broke apart to form the seven continents we know today, the Pangea installation replaces Arcadia’s Spider, a prominent fixture at Glastonbury for the past decade. The installation also marks one of the first major installations for MDG’s Me8 fog generator. “As the first year of a five-year permanent installation, we were able to 'go to town’'with Pangea on a totally different scale from a touring show,” says Arcadia’s head of communications, Cyrus Bozorgmehr. “We wanted to explore possibilities with more scope for upward expansion into three-dimensional space, and investigate how to take over the area above people’s heads to make
USA - When the Events United team first saw the venue for the Warrior Conference in Waterville Valley, NH, they knew they had to push their design to the next level. The low, sloping ceiling of the Waterville Valley Ice Arena, where the event took place this May, is anything but conducive to creating the kind of dynamic lighting displays that were needed to reflect the spirit of this popular men’s conference. Compounding the task was the arena’s strict prohibition on rigging from the roof, which made the task of getting the adequate trim height for potential lighting even more daunting. The team met this challenge by building their lighting rig from the ground up. Helping them was a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures and LED video panels. “Supporting all the lighting from the floor limited how much gear we could send up and how high we could go,” say
Germany - The new Sprung.Raum trampoline and amusement park in the German city of Kiel features Martin Audio’s CDD speaker series as its featured sound system. The 4,000 sq.m park is the largest trampoline venue in Northern Germany - but in addition to its primary function as a sports venue, it also hosts kids and youth discos and other events. It was therefore essential that the sound system could create a homogeneous background ambience while at the same time having the characteristics of a club PA for special events. The lighting and sound system was designed and equipped by Hamburg-based PM White, who met this challenge with the installation of 21 CDD10W white loudspeakers and two CSX118 subwoofers. The trampoline area is equipped with 19 of the CCD10W, run in pairs off a single amplifier channel, while the remaining two CDD10W were installed in the instruction
UK - Singer-songwriter and musician Howard Jones is back on the road celebrating 35 years since his Human Lib hit album, complete with a striking lighting design by Yenz Nyholm from New Illumination Lighting Design. The moving lights include 12 x Robe MegaPointes, and 26 x LEDBeam 150s which were supplied in the UK and Europe by rental company Siyan. Jones is considered one of the defining figures of the mid-1980s UK synth-pop genre and he has generations of loyal and new fans who enjoy seeing him live. Yenz collaborated with Howard and his producer Stephen Tayler on the production design and look of the show, and the brief was to create something off-beat and interesting. The artist also wanted it to look and feel contemporary in an electronic / robotic way. He wanted an aspect of video in the production but stipulated that this should be part of the band
Italy - Each summer since 2013, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala has transformed Piazza Duomo, the Italian city’s central square, into an open-air concert hall where the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala give a free classical performance for residents and tourists. An L-Acoustics K Series system was supplied by Italy’s premier rental company, Agorà, which has provided audio and lighting to this event since it first started. Under the baton of maestro Riccardo Chailly, this year’s set list included Dvořák’s Symphony from the New World No. 9 in E minor and works from Italian composer, pianist and conductor Nino Rota, best known for his Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti film scores. With 25,000 concert goers packing the 17,000m2 piazza and the evening broadcast live on RAI 5 in HD, Front of House engineer Fabio Venturi was tasked with designing a system that wo
Germany - A large PA system comprising elements of four different Nexo line arrays has entertained audiences of 60-75,000 per night at the Klassik Open-Air Music Festival in Nuremberg. In Phase Event, one of the primary rental suppliers of Nexo systems in Germany, designed and supplied the system for the event, which is Europe’s biggest classical music open air event. This success story started in 2000, on the occasion of the City of Nuremberg’s 950th anniversary. Three free open air concerts performed by the city’s two major orchestras were intended to be a great party in the Luitpoldhain park. The event was modelled on similar concerts in New York’s Central Park and particularly on the Proms in the Park in London’s Hyde Park. The idea was that even people who normally do not listen to classical music could get together in a relaxed atmosphere, free of charge, to
USA - Summer may be winding down but Bandit Lites production schedule is still packed with tours, festivals and events. Due to the immense demand, the global lighting company has made another sizeable investment in Claypaky gear including the new Scenius Unico and Mythos 2 from ACT. The Claypaky Scenius Unico can be utilised as both a spotlight for projecting effects and a wash light and features six rotating gobos, a rotating prism and an animation wheel. It also shoots a powerful narrow beam of hyper concentrated light. Bandit Lites supplied Scenius Unico fixtures for Nick Whitehouse’s design for Carrie Underwood’s Cry Pretty Tour 360. “The Claypaky Unico offers designers a complete array of parameters from a high output spot fixture,” says Jake Tickle, Bandit Lites director of technology and service department. “It is truly a workhorse.” Bandit
USA - Matthieu Larivée with Lüz Studio in Montréal serves as production and lighting designer on the current tour of American rock band The Raconteurs and uses Upstaging-supplied Elation DARTZ 360 LED moving heads to complement the group’s guitar-driven sound. Formed in 2006 by Jack White of The White Stripes and Brendan Benson, The Raconteurs recently emerged from a 10-year hiatus with launch of a new album Help Us Stranger. White, known as a dedicated yet somewhat unconventional artist, is widely credited as one of the key players in the garage rock revival of the 2000s. “He is completely focused on the music and performance and wants to keep the audience very focused as well,” explains Larivée, who also worked on Jack White’s most recent solo tour. “He wants to make sure the audience is getting a good experience so there are no cell phones allowed dur
USA - In the two short years since he released his debut album, This One’s for You, Luke Combs has soared in popularity. Recently honoured as the newest member of the Grand Ole Opry, the North Carolina native is now taking a breather between the first and second North American legs of his Beer Never Broke My Heart Tour, which is being reinforced via Special Event Services’ (SES) L-Acoustics K1/K2 loudspeaker rig. The first stretch of Combs’ arena headlining trek initially ran from March through July and quickly sold out every venue, prompting the musician to add a 29-date fall leg running from late September through early December. “When putting together my production budgets for the 2019 tour, Michael Brammer from SES and I discussed the PA options in their inventory,” notes production manager Jerry Slone. “When I found out that K1/K2 would fit wit
USA - Passaic County Technical Institute is a large vocational, public high school that serves over 3,300 students in northern New Jersey. Its sizable campus is well-appointed, and its programmes are well-supported. Two full-time professional sound technicians number among its staff and oversee operations in its performing arts department and at its sporting events. Until recently however, the PCTI Bulldogs football team played for 1,500-plus crowds using only a portable sound reinforcement system that was underpowered and frequently unintelligible. JD Sound and Video of Voorhees, New Jersey, remedied that for the Bulldogs’ most recent season with the installation of Danley OS80 loudspeakers and OS115 subwoofers. Because they’re designed and built to be fully weatherised, the Danley OS-Series boxes will serve PCTI for a long time. “The Passaic football stadium ha
Lithuania - The Sakiai Culture House is an institution dedicated to preserving the rich and unique heritage of Lithuania. Located in the southwestern region of the country, Sakiai Culture House pays homage to the revolving tapestry of Lithuanian music and theatrical productions, which have helped earn the country recognition by UNESCO as an “Intangible Heritage of Humanity”. Bringing this tradition to life is a new lighting system designed and installed by Scenos Techninis Servisas (STS) of Vilnius, Lithuania, that features a collection of Chauvet Professional LED fixtures. Installed as part of a comprehensive renovation of the 60 year-old building, the new system features six Ovation E-260WW ellipsoidal fixtures, four Ovation B-195FC batten units, 10 Maverick MK2 Spots and 15 Maverick MK2 Washes. In addition to delivering even key lighting, the new system opens u
USA - When Treasure Island casino on Las Vegas Strip decided a renovation would include a new sports bar, The Golden Circle, the casino knew it couldn’t be subtle if it wanted to stand out. To shake things up and create a space for watching the city’s new, popular NHL team the Golden Knights, NanoLumens was contracted to design and deliver an ultra-wide 24ft by 5ft, 1.8mm pixel pitch LED videowall that is now the centrepiece of the all-new sports bar. According to Shane Snell of National Technology Associates (NTA), the firm that installed the bar’s technology infrastructure, the NanoLumens fine pitch LED display was the best choice for a number of reasons. “One of the most important factors of any casino technology installation is longevity,” Snell says. “For the most part, owners try to keep infrastructure relevant for as long as possible, only re
