UK - A Serious Stages Supanova provided the colourful focal point for Brighton’s Fabulosa Pride in Preston Park, with over 150 LGBTQ+ artists entertaining 60,000 fans, 5-6 August, 2023. Widely acknowledged as the country’s most popular Pride event, Serious Stages supported the organisers of this year 50th Brighton Pride anniversary weekend. The Black Eyed Peas, Zara Larson, Steps and Melanie C were amongst the artists appearing on the 22m Arch Supernova stage, complete with front-of-stage thrust allowing the stars to get up close to the sparkling audience. Two goalposts carrying giant LED video screens and PA speakers flanked the stage, creating a spectacular focal point for two days of music, looked over by the Serious three-storey front-of-house tower with the technical sound and lighting mixers. Serious also installed speaker delay towers across the park.
France - One of the biggest heavy metal music festivals in the world, Hellfest recently wrapped its 16th edition in Clisson, where KISS launched the festival with Claypaky Xtylos and an array of Claypaky fixtures played key roles for other bands. The four-day festival featured 180 bands performing on six stages in the concert area plus additional outdoor stages. KISS, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue and Slipknot headlined as more than 150,000 extreme music fans attended performances, camped out and explored the full Hellfest 2023 experience. France-based B Live Group has been Hellfest’s technical partner from the start of the festival providing lighting for both of the main stages and the Warzone. This year, they chose Claypaky Sharpy X Frames to illuminate Main Stage 2, which hosted the biggest international bands, and Arolla Profile MPs and Sharpys for the Warzone, the st
Finland - Bank 55 in the Helsinki district of Lauttasaari is the brainchild of Finnish stand-up comedian and actor, Sami Hedberg. Formerly a bank that was first inaugurated in 1955 – hence the name – today Bank 55 is a sauna and lounge dedicated to private events of all types, from conferences and meetings to corporate get-togethers or simply private parties with friends and family. Music plays a vital role in the new events space, and Hedberg – who was already familiar with Genelec – had no hesitation in specifying custom painted Genelec 4000 series loudspeakers for his new venture. "I’d been dreaming of opening an events space for some time, but I needed to find the right venue – and that takes time," confides Hedberg. "I finally came across the old bank premises in Lauttasaari which I loved. I bought it in 2016 and have been renovating it bit by bit, all
USA - District E Powered by Ticketmaster is an esports venue situated in the heart of downtown Washington, D.C. Adjacent to the Capital One Arena, this venue spans nearly 14,000sq.ft and stands as a hub for esports enthusiasts and fans. With a prime location and partnerships with globally recognised esports teams including Team Liquid and Wizards District Gaming, District E offers a different and immersive gaming experience. The audio system needed to accommodate diverse programming, from high-stakes esports matches to corporate events and viewing parties with a seamless integration with the cutting-edge LED video throughout the venue. Monumental Sports, an assembly of seven DC-area sports and gaming teams, turned to McCann, to design and install the audiovisual integration help to create an elevated esports experience. For the main gaming space, McCann selected 1 Soun
Belgium - There were over 230 Chauvet Professional fixtures at the Happy Belgium concert in the Cinquantenaire Arcade, but it’s doubtful that any of the 60,000 people who were there to celebrate the National Day of Belgium on 21 July noticed many of them. Lighting designer Jordi Vandekerkhof of the More To Show design studio would have it no other way. For him, the purpose of the majority IP65 lighting fixtures at this exquisitely orchestrated evening event, was to be “seen” (in terms of their effect), without being noticed because of their protective domes. “We wanted to light the stage, audience and surroundings without drawing attention to the fixtures,” he explained. Jordi credits Splendit, which supplied the fixtures for the event, with helping to put together a rig that was low profile, while still being powerful enough to create a stunning impression.
USA - Lighting designer Eric Price turned to Elation’s Proteus Lucius as the feature light of an all-purpose floor package for rock band Taking Back Sunday as they headlined the travelling Sad Summer Festival in July. Reminiscent of the Warped Tour, the fourth incarnation of Sad Summer Festival ran coast to coast and featured a strong line-up of pop punk’s finest. Price has been with Taking Back Sunday since 2017 and served as lighting designer, programmer and operator for the band’s Sad Summer set. He says he had used the Proteus Lucius before, on a tour with Mastodon, and knew the all-purpose LED moving head well. “The Proteus Lucius is great technology with a lot of features and you don’t lose anything with it being IP rated,” he said. “It makes no feature compromises and is just what you would expect from a professional moving fixture.” Proteus Luc
USA - A 500-mile-long NASCA cup race, the Daytona 500 is an annual event held at the Daytona International Speedway. This year’s event marked 75 years of NASCAR, and to celebrate this anniversary, the event included a special virtual final lap. The Famous Group were chosen as NASCAR’s preferred partners to bring this ambitious project to life. “We were asked to recreate 18 historic NASCAR racecars and show them racing in a single lap together on the Daytona racetrack,” explains Erik Beaumont, head of mixed reality at The Famous Group. “The fantasy lap would include a Dale Earnhardt Jr. No.88 car and a Dale Earnhardt Sr. No.3 car, a nod to some of the most important moments in Daytona 500 history.” Creating a virtual mixed-reality event for live broadcast required careful tracking to ensure the seamless fusion of the imaginary and the real. Stage Precision
UK - Last Autumn Martin Audio partner, 22live, completed its first full production tour, with The Australian Pink Floyd show, which provides an authentic tribute to the original band and has long used Martin Audio PA on tour. For the band’s late 2022 UK tour Paul Timmins, now hire director and one of the founders of the recently formed pro-audio service company, 22live, was reunited with the long-term team of band manager Kevin Hopgood, production manager Chris Gadd, and FOH engineer Trevor Gilligan. There were a number of factors to consider for Timmins, along with 22live technical director, Simon Gladstone, and operations director Stefan Phillips, when they were preparing their bid as a new player in the market. In addition to general touring economics this included the choice of PA. With regard to the latter, 22live knew they couldn’t offer Gilligan, who h
USA - Fire blasts, frenzy and rock ‘n’ roll bombast is bolstering American emo-pop-punkers Fall Out Boy’s current US tour, which is playing amphitheatres across the country backed with LED and projection driven by Green Hippo Hippotizer Boreal+ MK2 Media Servers. Screen content is guiding the audience through the hitlist set via colour, with strong orange content for the daytime and cooler blues, greens, and purples for the night time scenes. The Boreal+ MK2 Media Servers are running pre-made content and Notch Blocks as well as live feed for the IMAG screens, with one live and one as backup. BAFTA and Billboard Award-nominated creative directors, TAWBOX, consisting of London-based visionaries Amber Rimell and Bronski, have created a theatrical show for the band as they tour to support their 2023 album, So Much (for) Stardust. It sees an array of high-produ
Italy - Massimo Pezzali, commonly known as Max Pezzali, is a prominent Italian singer-songwriter. He embarked on his musical journey as a member of the band 883, and together, they released six albums before he decided to pursue a solo career. In 2004, Pezzali unveiled his debut solo album, II Mondo Insieme a Te, which marked the beginning of his meteoric rise to becoming one of the best-selling Italian artists of all time. Since March of this year, Pezzali has been captivating audiences during his Italy tour, accompanied by his sound engineer, Michele Nicolino, who utilises a DiGiCo Quantum7 digital mixing console at the monitor position. By working closely with professionals such as Riccardo Parravicini and Luca Morson, among others, Nicolino honed his expertise as a monitor engineer for renowned artists such as Mannarino, Willie Peyote, Michele Bravi, Bowlan
USA - Solstice: Reflections on Winter Light is a multimedia and meditative art experience celebrating the shortest, darkest day of the year, created by Masary Studios from Boston, and presented at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts. It started as a small two-day installation idea in 2020 during the pandemic and has grown rapidly and organically to become a hugely popular and accessible 10-day annual public art festival. Visitors engage with the magic and ephemeral beauty of lighting and sound and its relation to the algorithms, mystery, and energies at work in the greater universe. Masary Studio’s Sam Okerstrom-Lang initially needed “high quality and durable kit to withstand tough environmental conditions of New England in the winter”, so when their technical partner AVFX introduced them to Astera in 2020, they were delighted
Europe - UK-based rock band Marillion has built up a formidable and near cult-like following over a career spanning five decades that has spawned 20 studio albums plus a string of top 40 hits since their formation in 1979. For the last 21 years, they have staged biennial two and three-day summer convention events for fans, which include special live performances plus additional Marillion world activities. Lighting designer Yenz Nyholm’s specification for the 2023 Marillion ‘convention tour’ included nearly 100 Robe moving lights - 31 Robe Esprites, 22 LEDBeam 150s, 16 MegaPointes and 30 Spiider LED wash beams. Conventions were staged in the UK, the Netherlands (twice), Germany, Italy, and Canada. For the shows at Berlin Tempodrom, Leipzig-based rental company Konteg supplied the full Robe package. It was also a completely new lighting design for this year.
Australia - Tumbalong Park, a five-hectare respite of green in the centre of Darling Harbour is serving as the site of a FIFA Women’s World Cup Fan Festival this month. A vibrant celebration of all things football, and much more, the festival features giant live streams for watching FIFA Women’s World Cup games, a variety of fun football-related activities, a cornucopia of street food, and live performances by popular Australian artists like Jessica Mauboy, Jack River, Mia Wray, and Jacotene. Enhancing the festive atmosphere and providing memorable visuals at the event, which began 20 July and runs through 20 August, is a bold and colourful lighting setup by dplr that is anchored by 108 Chauvet Professional fixtures from Showtools International. Included in this collection are 16 Maverick Storm 4 units, 20 Outcast R2X Washes, eight Colorado PXL Bar 16 motorised ba
USA - Rapidly rising folk and indie star Lizzy McAlpine’s The End of the Movie tour featured a set that was designed around her actual living room space. “All the items in the room were chosen by Lizzy, and were very specific to her inspiration and interests,” said Kat Borderud, the tour’s lighting and scenic designer. “The set contained her own personal clothing, family photos, books, and other cherished items.” Borderud intensified the effect of this living room set by accentuating its various elements with light and shadows. “My role was to fulfil Lizzy’s vision and transform the stage,” she explained. “Darkness and shadow play are incorporated in this design for bringing the room to life as another character in Lizzy’s show. Shadows and light move and reflect on the walls from inside and outside the windows to move us through the set in a nar
Slovenia - From 23 June to 1 July, the city centre of Maribor was transformed into a large festival area for music, art and culture. Festival Lent is the largest open-air festival in Slovenia and one of the biggest city centre festivals in Europe. For the 30th anniversary, national and international artists performed on the numerous large and small stages, including this year's Eurovision Song Contest participant Joker Out as well as funk legend Fred Wesley. To stage the broad spectrum of genres, the lighting designers of the respective stages relied on an equally versatile range of moving lights, LED bars and flood lights from Cameo. On a total of five of the seven stages, including the Main Stage, Jože Skarlovnik, technical director of the festival, relied on Cameo fixtures. The focus was primarily on IP65-capable outdoor spotlights, with which those respons
USA - At 46, Floyd Mayweather still packs a punch, even five years after the former champ retired undefeated from professional boxing. This was plain to see during his recent exhibition bout against John Gotti III. But the Boxing Writers of America’s ‘Fighter of the Decade’ wasn’t the only one flashing impressive firepower at the sold-out FLA Live Arena. Also displaying its prowess was a collection of Chauvet Professional Rogue Outcast 1L Beam fixtures from The Design Oasis that were used to rev up excitement during the exhibition. “The 1L beams really created an impact throughout the arena,” said Abbas Ritscher, of The Design Oasis. “They were small, which allowed our lighting designer John Hollingshead to bunch a lot of them together, keeping the cables clean but still creating impact by directing beams of lights across the entire venue. They have a very tigh
USA - By any measure, summer 2023 in the U.S. has been extreme with intense heat, severe rainfall and unrelenting smoke. So when a number of outdoor festivals and events are on the program, the challenge for any production company is immense. “This is a very current issue,” states Ryan Knutson, president of Brown Note Productions in Colorado. “We've seen some really intense changing weather patterns and IP fixtures have become critical in outdoor applications.” Knutson credits Danny Wimmer Presents for initiating their move to weather-resistant lighting solutions, a client they have worked with since 2014. “DWP was really the first client we worked with who stressed that the dynamics of weather and shows had changed and therefore a change was needed in how we approached these events. Specifically, we needed to stop the behaviour of plastic bagging fixtures wheneve
France - International light artist Christien Methot enabled Parisians to see the River Seine in a new light when he created the first Light:Bridge with Ayrton Cobra phosphor laser source luminaires. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America. For one July night, Methot, the principal lighting designer at New York City-based Design One Lighting Design, added a new bridge across the Seine using 10 powerful parallel beams of light to project a ‘bridge’ across the water near the Passerelle Leopold-Sedar-Senghor footbridge, which links the Left Bank’s Musee d’Orsay with the Right Bank’s Jardin des Tuileries. From far away, the light beams appeared to be a sturdy, physical crossing. But as people approached it, the ethereal nature of a bridge built of light was revealed. Only light could achieve that dichotomy linking the tw
Poland - Putting on a high-calibre philharmonic open air concert comes with a number of challenges. The sound of the orchestra needs to be amplified for the large audience in the most natural way possible. One of the key elements in doing this is to choose the microphones that are best suited to each instrument, and mics that are designed to perform well in a loud, concert environment. Radek Barczak, the music director for this particular concert, summed up the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra concert: "This was probably the largest sound capture with Austrian Audio microphones in the world. Producing a large symphony orchestra concert is quite an equipment challenge. “Prior to the Poznań Philharmonic concert, our agency, ViolinArt, already owned an arsenal of Austrian Audio microphones: we had 16 CC8s, 4 OC818s, 4 OC18s, an OC16 and an OD5, but we couldn’t put on
Brazil - Already recognised for its high-profile appearance at Brazil’s Rock in Rio festival, Martin Audio’s MLA multicellular loudspeaker array also provided main stage artists at the annual Festival Coolritiba in Curitiba, nearly 500 miles further south, with quality sound. Headliners included Marisa Monte, Sandy, Mano Brown and the legendary Gilberto Gil - but it was the influence of Marisa Monte’s sound engineer, Daniel Carvalho, that brought about the change from the originally specified festival system. He had been piloting the mix on the famous singer’s Portas tour through an MLA, provided by predominant rental company Gabisom (who also service Rock in Rio). Coolritiba was part of their 100-show tour schedule where Marisa Monte was top of the bill. Daniel Carvalho reports: “The festival had requested [another brand], but since we were headliners,
USA - The Backseat Lovers are on the road with an innovative and interesting production and lighting design created by Meagan Metcalf, who has been working with the indie rockers from Utah since 2022, with 22 x Robe Esprites and 24 Tetra2 moving lights at the heart of the lighting rig. Meagan was offered an initial short tour with the band in early 2022 after her work with Caamp, who share the same management. While everything was quite low key then, Meagan loved being imaginative with a small lighting rig, enjoyed the music and knew that the band were ones-to-watch, a roller-coaster that gained serious velocity following the release of their debut label album, Waiting to Spill, at the end of last year. The Backseat Lovers are now on a much larger full production tour playing 3,000-5,000-capacity rock clubs and theatres, selling out every time and amplifying the
USA - Dude Perfect recently wrapped their high octane 24-city Panda-monium Tour with a lighting system designed by 46 Entertainment and provided by Bandit Lites. Former college roommates Tyler ‘Beard’ Toney, Cory and Coby Cotton, Garrett ‘Purple Hoser’ Hilbert, and Cody ‘Tall Guy’ Jones famous for their crazy stunts and trick-shot battles have amassed 59.6m YouTube subscribers and 11.8m Instagram followers. For Dude Perfect’s second tour, Davis Kornegay and Mason Felps utilised a larger LED surface for the eye-popping family-friendly content of silly competitive battles, audience-involved games and dynamic tricks. “The interactive content is really the backbone of this show,” said Felps. “This year’s design was less beams and more tasteful colour washes/looks. Davis did a great job on the design this year.” Bandit Lites supplied
Poland - Poland’s largest lighting rental company, Transcolor, has invested in Robe iFortes, currently the highest-powered LED fixture from Robe’s expanding iSeries of IP rated products. The purchase - the first iFortes to be delivered in Poland - underlines Transcolor owner and boss Lucjan Siwczyk’s trend setting policies by purchasing innovative equipment. Lucjan explained that they looked carefully at some different options when sourcing high powered IP rated luminaires before deciding on the iForte, although the company already has a consistent track record of investing in Robe over the years, among other brands, so it was always a strong contender. “Lighting designers and show producers are often wanting to work with IP rated products now. Obviously for any outdoor work and for various other circumstances,” Lucjan commented, adding that an advanta
Serbia - LD Anđelko Popić and team at Chameleon Rental opted to reflect the spirit of the Lake Festival in Bačka Topola by building their production design around three concentric circles that expanded outward from the stage’s centre. This arrangement gave designers the freedom to create widely different settings for the festival’s various acts, allowing them to move from the intimate, when almost all light came from the smaller centre sphere, to the more elaborate, when crossing beam patterns from fixtures on different circles created complex patterns. To enhance this flexibility and add power to their circular design, the Chameleon Rental team anchored their rig with 88 Chauvet Professional fixtures from their company’s own extensive inventory. Playing a key role in this rig were the eight Rogue R2X Beam fixtures flown on the smaller centre stage circ
