UK - London's largest ever New Year's Eve celebration took place at the London Eye on the River Thames, featuring a stunning fireworks and drone display accompanied by a mesmerizing light show designed by Tim Routledge. His first time lighting London’s end-of-the-year celebration, Routledge chose Elation’s powerful Proteus Excalibur beam moving head as a key fixture in his design. “We wanted something that could cut through so you could see the beams and create more architecture with light,” Routledge said of his decision to use the Excaliburs. “It was very much about getting the chunkiest beam we could.” The Proteus Excalibur’s enormous output - the beam light generates up to 7,500 lux at 100m - -in combination with a 260mm lens and 0.8° beam competes with xenon searchlights and sky trackers. “It’s hard to punch through the amount of smoke that th
New Zealand - Aotearoa-based design studio Filament Eleven 11 combines the talents and imagination of lighting and visual artists Rachel Marlow and Brad Gledhill. Working across multiple genres – theatre, opera, dance, rock ‘n’ roll’ live events, installation, and light art – and embracing a mix of medias and light forms, the company is known for its innovative and fun approach to enhancing storytelling with this form of expression. Filament Eleven 11 also owns some specialist lighting and control kit, and this year invested in Astera wireless LED products – AX3 LightDrops and NYX Bulbs – which have been busy on several projects. Three AX3 LightDrop kits (24 in total) and 30 x NYX Bulbs were purchased from Astera’s New Zealand distributor, ULA Group, in the last year for use as “ultimately useful lighting tools” commented Rachel, and since then, s
Denmark - Creative Technology has worked alongside the Nordisk Film-owned VFX and post-production company Nordisk Film Shortcut to create the Shortcut LED Stage – a full 360° LED stage, 16m in diameter and six metres high, with walls and ceiling completely covered with LED panels. The new stage allows film makers, production companies and other visual storytellers to shoot and tell stories in a flexible, creative, cost-effective and environmentally friendly way. The project started last year, when Creative Technology was asked to build a 360-degree LED stage in Copenhagen for Nordisk Film, one of the oldest film studios in the world, and its post-production company Shortcut. After visiting the ARRI X CT stage in London, Nordisk Film Shortcut decided that they wanted to create a similar facility to enable film production in a virtual environment. In collaboration wi
UK - Sonny Fodera performed two sold-out shows at O2 Academy Brixton recently. Throughout both shows, the walls of the venue reverberated with fans responding to the highly emotive songs from his recently released fifth album Wide Awake and other recordings. Helping to connect the music to the big crowd to at the South London venue was a bold Tom Cull lighting design that featured 89 Chauvet Professional fixtures, supplied and installed by Bigabox Productions, which also furnished the video wall. Seamlessly moving from intense aerial displays with aggressive crossing patterns, to moody atmospheric settings, to dark, shadowy haunting looks, Cull’s lightshow reflected the wide and nuanced emotional range of Fodera’s vocal-driven compositions. The kit’s 10 Maverick MK1 Hybrid, 24 Rogue R3 Beam, and 16 Outcast 1 BeamWash fixtures, hung primarily on mid a
USA - The 2022 Latin Billboard Awards celebrated both the classic icons and modern-day hit-makers of Latinx music using versatile JBL Professional VTX Series speakers, supplied by Reflections Productions. Held in the University of Miami Watsco Centre in Miami and broadcast live on Telemundo, 2022’s Latin Billboard Awards featured performances by an eclectic roster of artists; honorary achievement awards for Chayanne, José Feliciano and Christina Aguilera; and a tribute to legendary singer Raphael. With a record-breaking 23 nominations, Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny took home eight awards including Tour of the Year, which used Martin MAC Series fixtures. Like all televised award shows filmed live with an audience, the Latin Billboards required an audio rig that provided full-scale live sound for the audience and accommodated both the performers and presenters with
USA - A lot of lighting designers looked for ways to stay busy and productive during the pandemic lockdown. Daniel Thibault of Life is Art Studio in Raleigh, NC, found a number of means to do this; one was by lighting in-your-car-concerts at drive-in movie theatres, the other was by helping the Lincoln Theatre develop a “covid safe” seating plan that could be implemented when restrictions on live shows were finally eased. “The theatre wanted to figure out how to reopen responsibly for live music shows when the time came,” said Thibault. “So during the pandemic, I spent time making an exact 3D model to scale of the stage and the building , so we could help figure out a safe seating chart.’ In the process, Thibault also figured out something else: how to get “the most lights possible” on the popular venue’s relatively small 24ft wide by 20ft deep stage,
Italy - Staged for the first time at the Cagliari Lyric Theatre in Sardinia, Arthur Laurents’ two-act stage musical West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and loosely based on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, was a guaranteed success. The staging offered by the Cagliari Lyric Theatre was derived from three major U.S. musical institutions: the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival in New York State. The performance, which blends the language of traditional opera with that of the musical, took place from 15-23 December, bringing to a close the 2022 opera season with 10 highly anticipated English-language performances. Lighting designer A.J. Guban, nominated for eight Helen Hayes awards, opted for 12 Ayrton Bora TC and 25 Ayrton NandoBeam S6 fixtures for the lighting design taken from Mark McCulloug
USA - Wilderado is a three-piece indie folk band from Oklahoma with a loyal and ever-expanding fan-base. The beginning of the year saw them complete of a sold-out US headline tour and announce their first UK tour as special guests on alt-J’s The Dream Tour, ending this autumn with their own headline leg. Despite their solid success, not everything was perfect in the Wilderado-camp. Struggling with monitor wedges and inconsistent set ups on stage, they knew something needed to change. When audio engineer, Davis McCoy, joined them at the beginning of the year, he recommended KLANG immersive in-ear monitors. They have not looked back since. “As we started building longer sets and were doing more and more dates, I found I just couldn’t sing through the show,” says lead singer and guitarist, Max Rainer. “It was too taxing trying to project and to hear myself in th
Australia - Crowded House returned to touring again in 2022 after re-forming in late 2019. A recent show at Stage 88 in the lush green environs of Commonwealth Park, Canberra was one of a week of rescheduled Australian shows, postponed from April when the tour was interrupted by the Covid lockdowns. Here, locally based technical production company, Elite Event Technology (EET), supplied an all Robe moving light rig. The band’s lighting designer Dan Black used this mix of Robe BMFL Blades and WashBeams, MegaPointes, LEDWash 300+s and 600s to great effect, crafting an elegant lightshow that matched the mood and style of a crisp springtime evening outdoors. Crowded House had played a splattering of concerts throughout 2020 and 2021 in Australia and New Zealand as and when pandemic restrictions allowed, with lighting and video designed by Ben Dalgleish from Human
USA - To ensure clear, impactful live sound with wide, even coverage for the Long Beach Jazz Festival, AV integrator Flag Systems deployed a dynamic selection of JBL Professional solutions. Featuring headliners Robert Glasper, Ledisi and Sergio Mendes, 2022’s Long Beach Jazz Festival took place at Rainbow Lagoon Park for waterside views as fans enjoyed a mix of jazz, soul and R&B. While the location was a pristine setting for a weekend of laid-back jazz, the stage needed an audio rig with enough coverage to reach audiences on both sides of the lagoon, while also considering the stage’s limited height and space. To meet these requirements, Flag Systems designed a sound reinforcement system exclusively featuring JBL VTX and VRX Series solutions. “If you’ve ever seen the site, you know one of the main challenges is that there’s a lake right behind the front-
USA - Some 33 years after it was founded, the 550-seat CupOJoy live music venue in Green Bay, Wisconsin, has taken delivery of its first permanently installed sound system in the larger space within the two-auditorium venue to which it relocated two years ago (having successively occupied two previous locations). Part of a complete audio-visual fit-out masterminded by local system integrators CCCP (Camera Corner), a Martin Audio Wavefront Precision WPS line array was specified after careful evaluation. Since the facility - whose mission is to be a family-friendly venue, offering ‘music that inspires’ - is a non-profit organisation run by volunteers, the two-year fund-raising programme, leading up to the investment, required an outcome that would please operators and donors alike. And the WPS has certainly delivered. CupOJoy’s technical director, Mark Berg c
Australia - AIE Film School has chosen Brompton Technology’s LED processing to power its Virtual Production volume on its Canberra campus soundstage, with plans for an expanded volume later this year. AIE’s temporarily constructed 18.5 x 3.5m stage creates a single, large volume, made up of Liantronics LED panels and powered by Brompton Technology Tessera SX40 LED processing and Tessera XD 10G data distribution units. In 2023, AIE plans to build a new permanent film studio, AIE Film Studios, featuring a larger 30m x 30m x 15m soundstage, with an expanded 24m x 6m volume (770sqm of LED panels) powered by Brompton LED processing. It will initially be used for feature film development, and later TV production, with students undertaking Work Integrated Learning (WIL) with AIE’s industry partners on the programmes. "We have been exploring features of different L
USA - After relying on a venerable Meyer Sound system since first opening at its current location in 1997, Yoshi’s jazz club in Oakland, California recently upgraded to a new system incorporating the latest technologies from the same company. Supplied by Advanced Systems Group (ASG) based nearby in Emeryville, the new Meyer Sound installation has earned praise from management, artists, guest engineers, and patrons alike. “Every artist that has come in here has been blown away,” says Yoshi’s production manager Marcel Quiroz. “Haley Reinhart’s engineer told me it was the best house system he’d ever heard, and the engineer for Dave Weckl said that hands down we now have the best-sounding room in the Bay Area. After his set, Freddy Jackson came up, gave me a hug, and said, ‘Thank you!’” The prior system had served Yoshi’s well, reinforcing the music o
Finland - To complement its growing global network of physical Experience Centres, Genelec has introduced its online virtual showroom, where visitors can explore a wide range of active loudspeaker systems and technologies in a set of stunningly realistic room settings. This allows customers across the Studio, AV, and Home Audio segments to instantly access valuable Genelec information and resources in a visually engaging interactive environment. Hosted on the Genelec website, visitors to the virtual showroom can experience the latest in VR technology to navigate separate and distinct areas for professional audio monitoring, AV installation and home audio, which showcase both stereo and immersive systems that comprise a carefully selected range of key loudspeaker and subwoofer models. Visitors can then access detailed product information, video content and valuable learning r
Australia - Sydney is back and evidence of its uniquely Australian celebration of Summer will be an unprecedented line up of artists’ work at Sydney Festival. TDC - Technical Direction Company, award-winning provider of event and entertainment technology solutions and sponsor of Sydney Festival, has announced its biggest involvement yet in the city-wide celebration of culture, creativity and live performance. Its team of technicians have been busy preparing creative design technology and projection mapping expertise showcased at multiple events across Sydney from 5 – 29 January 2023 including Festival highlights featuring feminist Frida Kahlo, and mythic new opera epic Antarctica. Chris Fitzgerald, TDC technical project manager, said: “We are very excited to be a Sydney Festival partner once again in 2023. Organising and coordinating our sponsorship of Sy
USA - Heavy metal band Gwar recently wrapped the fall North American leg of their Black Death Rager World Tour in which Claypaky Sharpy Plus Aquas played a key and unusual role. The tour marked the third for Nick Drake as the band’s lighting designer; he is also a light technician with Richmond, Virginia’s Lite-Tek Entertainment, a lighting rental and production company which supplied the fixtures. Lite-Tek has a history with Gwar, which also hails from Richmond, having worked with them multiple times over the years, including providing lighting and studio space for the band’s 30th anniversary live stream from Lite-Tek’s warehouse during the COVID pandemic. Gwar’s fall tour kicked off at the Blue Ridge Rock Festival in Virginia in September and concluded in Baltimore in November. Sharpy Plus Aqua fixtures add an IP66 rating to the award-winning S
Finland - Casino Tampere is a far cry from the glitz and bling-bling of Las Vegas. Located at Tampere’s Nokia Arena, it’s only the second casino in Finland and is owned and operated by the Finnish state-owned company Veikkaus. Casino Tampere operates a responsible gaming policy with tools in place to enable players to self-regulate as well as mandatory loss limits on slot machines. Exuding Finnish style with lots of natural wood and greenery, Casino Tampere combines Nordic design with advanced casino concepts. Over 100 Genelec Smart IP loudspeakers contribute to a complete sensory experience. Digital AV solutions experts, Craneworks Oy, won an open tender to design and supply all of the digital AV solutions for the new casino thanks to their imaginative, ideas-driven approach combined with solid technical expertise. As Craneworks managing director, Sami Käyhkö de
China - Located in China’s most populated urban area, Shanghai New York University (NYU) is China’s first Sino-US research university. Founded in 2012 by NYU and East China Normal University with the support of the city of Shanghai and the district of Pudong, the university offers 19 majors and teaches entirely in English. One of three universities in the NYU Global Network, NYU Shanghai chose Audinate’s Dante audio network platform managed by Dante Domain Manager software to deliver upon its mission to offer its teaching, research and public service. At the start of 2020, the pandemic forced educational leaders around the world to transition from in-person to remote learning, including the administration at NYU Shanghai. This presented many challenges for the University leaders and its almost 2000 students, including improving the audio setup in 57 lecture hall-
Canada - The Girardin Sports Centre in Drummondville, Quebec, is the city’s first indoor multisport complex. Opened in 2021 at a cost of $21.7m, the centre is helping to alleviate a shortage in hockey facilities in the area for the city’s 68,000 residents. The centre’s project team chose AtlasIED’s systems to provide audio entertainment and communications for the nearly 5,000 weekly visitors. The 73,000sq.ft facility needed an audio system to cover key spaces including the ice rink, indoor soccer field which is overhung by a 250m running track, and the 16 rooms including conference rooms, offices, and locker rooms in the complex. One challenge was controlling different music playlists for different zones of the facility with a range of acoustical qualities. The centre chose AtlasIED’s AtmosphereAudio Processing and Control Platform and IPX loudspeakers and endpoint
USA - Project manager Jonathan Blake and the crew at The Lighting & Sound Company spent 16 days setting up the popular Garden Glow walk-through event at Maymont Estate Park in Richmond, Virginia. “A key goal for us was to highlight all aspects of the ground’s horticulture in a way that accentuated its natural beauty,” said Blake. “In support of this goal, almost all of our LED fixtures were positioned to enhance the appearance of every scenic element. The entire event covered a lot of ground, so there were numerous opportunities to highlight interesting sights. I’m grateful to our client, Maymont Estate for given us the opportunity to work at such an impressive site. Also, thanks to our lighting designer and programmer Ryan Williams, lighting control network engineer Logan Adams and installation team lead Brennan Adams for making this happen.” H
The Netherlands - Andre Beekmans and a team from his Eindhoven, design studio, The Art of Light, created the lighting scheme for the 2022 Amsterdam Music Festival (AMF) a one-day electronic music extravaganza produced by ALDA and staged at the Johan Cruijff Arena as part of the 2022 Amsterdam Music Event (AME). Andre chose over 400 Robe moving lights to be a major part of the lighting rig, including 166 x LEDBeam 100s, 192 x Pointes and 76 x MegaPointes, which helped make a significant impact for this first post-pandemic AMF. Andre has lit the event for the 10 years since it started, and with this year being the first since 2019 everyone’s expectations were even higher than usual, and he worked closely with event technical production manager Maarten Hoogland from ALDA in creating the set and staging elements as well as delivering the lighting design. A line-up
Ireland - An Audient ASP8024 Heritage Edition console was installed as part of a full studio upgrade at Dublin’s Dun Laoghaire Further Education Institute (DFEi) this academic year, which has already sparked great interest from students. Patrick Wall, course coordinator of the Music and Sound Engineering programmes explains, “We offer students the chance to undertake supervised studio time outside of class hours to work on their own projects. There has been really great uptake this year, and I am sure that the new console and studio improvements have played a part.” The studio setup consists of a control room, main live room, drum room and smaller booth. The control room houses the Audient console, Genelec monitoring, Mac Mini M1 running ProTools and an outboard rack with various processors and effects. “As well as the new Audient console, we installed bespoke
UK - Scottish singer-songwriter, Gerry Cinnamon, concluded his 10-date summer tour of the UK and Ireland with two sell out dates at his hometown stadium, the 50,000-capacity Hampden Park National Stadium in Glasgow, in mid-July and simultaneously made history as the first independent act - and the first Scot - to sell out multiple nights at the venue. Production and lighting designer Pete Hutchison of Illumination Creative Design chose Ayrton Khamsin S, Bora S and the new laser-sourced Cobra to provide the big looks the show needed. Forty-eight Khamsin S were rigged across four pairs of side trusses and on overhead finger trusses from where they were used as the main workhorses for stage lighting and for lighting out towards the audience. “The main reason I chose Khamsin was for the power of their LED source which matches up perfectly with old discharge lamps
USA - Dave Matthews Band wrapped their November US tour with two sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden, deploying a system anchored by Meyer Sound’s Panther large-format linear line array loudspeakers for the first time. DMB has carried Meyer Sound for their 25+ years of touring, and FOH engineer Tom Lyon was excited for the chance to deploy UltraSound, LLC’s Panther system on this recent run. “I had a lot of fun mixing on Panther. I noticed a certain sparkle to the top end of Dave’s guitar that I hadn’t noticed before. Everything sounded nicer through the system. When we walked around, we could tell the improvement of the coverage consistency: it sounds great off axis as it does down the middle of the coverage. I hardly had to touch the EQ on the system at all.” The system comprised 18 Panther-L loudspeakers for left and right mains with two Panther-W pe
