Canada - Twelve Ayrton Domino-S fixtures, part of Ayrton’s IP65 multi-function luminaire family designed for intensive outdoor use, played a variety of roles at Les Francos de Montréal and the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, staged back-to-back in September this year due to COVID-19. Les Francos de Montréal is a large annual pop music and performance festival featuring French-language performers from around the world. It has been held for more than 20 years. The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal holds the 2004 Guinness World Record as the world’s largest jazz festival; every year it features about 3,000 artists in more than 650 concerts and welcomes 2m-plus visitors. This year’s 41st edition was reduced in size due to the coronavirus pandemic with all shows taking place outdoors. Both events were centred around downtown Montréal’s Quartier
The Netherlands - Located in the eastern Dutch town of Hengelo, the Metropool is a long-established live music venue featuring a wide range of acts and genres. It moved to its present home in 2009 and at that point its console stock was updated to include three DiGiCo SD8s and a large-format analogue desk, covering all its audio mixing needs across its Jupiler and Jack Daniels halls. They were one of the first Dutch venues to invest in DiGiCo technology as Teun Zekhuis, their Head Technician recalls: “We chose the SD8 for its sound, interface, workflow and overall look and feel. Being one of the first stages in the Netherlands with this first series of SD8s we were really pioneering in a new world of digital audio. The SD8s proved to be a great choice and served us very well.” Fast forward nine years to 2018 and through a series of events, Metropool found itself ta
USA - Rapper and songwriter Nate Feuerstein, more commonly known as NF, embarked on a massive amphitheatre tour this past fall that showcased Martin Professional VDO Sceptron and MAC Quantum Wash fixtures with P3 system control, provided by Solotech. Boasting several songs with hundreds of millions of streams - including the single Let You Down which recently crossed one billion streams - NF is a multi-platinum-selling artist who has gained a dedicated following for tackling themes like vulnerability, faith and mental health in his music. This latest tour featured just Feuerstein and drummer Rico Nichols onstage, leaving plenty of room for Feuerstein to move around and display his electric showmanship. The tour’s lighting crew aimed to create a rig that enhanced and heightened Feuerstein’s energy for arena-sized venues while also maintaining an aesthetic u
Japan - Kobe Port Museum, is a new cultural complex in the Japanese city, consisting of an aquarium, food hall, and bridal desk. The space on the ground floor is a ‘next-generation food hall’ typified by the well-known Kobe restaurant brand, Tooth Tooth which has recently installed a Martin Audio system with background music produced by Fish Four. Based in Kobe, the president Yutaka Okano says: "High-quality BGM is an indispensable element for restaurants and cafes. We choose music suitable for both daytime and nighttime and develop the atmosphere of the place. We have enjoyed a long relationship with Martin Audio and have used the brand in several facilities to date. With confidence in the quality of Martin Audio's speakers, we again requested them without hesitation." A total of 29 CDD6TX cabinets have been installed on several pillars, covering a wide area of th
USA - A cornucopia of performers, including Billie Eilish, Coldplay, Dua Lipa, and Nelly, descended on the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas for the iHeartRadio Music Festival - a live production backed by striking visuals driven exclusively by Hippotizer Tierra+ Media Servers. The Hippotizers were supplied by rental company 4Wall Entertainment and looked after by screens producer Jason Rudolph of Mobius Productions. “I’ve used Hippotizer products for a long time, since the early days of V3,” says Jason. “I’ve always gotten incredible support from the team at Green Hippo, and that's a big reason why we have continued to use them over the years.” Rudolph selected the Tierra+ model to drive high-impact visual content onto the upstage LED wall, noting the Tierra+ offerings of 4 Native Outputs, 8K playback, unlimited mixes, and 39,816 Notchmarks. “We l
USA - Boxing matches are inherently unpredictable. Some end with a sudden thud mere seconds after they start. Others are boring uninspired 12-round dances. Then there are those that serve up more than their share of dramatic moments. But one thing is certain at every boxing event: a sense of excitement and anticipation fills the air when pugilists enter the arena and walk with handlers to the ring. Pangea Land of Dinosaurs’ Jurassic Fight Night in Phoenix was no different, even if the combatants approaching the 40ft by 40ft boxing ring were not your typical athletes. Bearing names like Blue Lighting The Velociraptor, and Steve The Spine Crusher Spinosaurus, these boxers were realistic replicas of dinosaurs, Pumping up the crowd as the dinosaur fighters entered the Gilia River Arena during the two-day event was a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures supplied a
Canada - Brompton Technology recently helped the VFX team at Pixomondo bring Star Trek: Discovery into a new era using virtual production. The new season of the Paramount+ streaming hit leveraged virtual production for the first time, filming on Pixomondo’s large volume LED stage in Toronto, Canada. Pixomondo’s Toronto stage is a 70’ x 30’ horseshoe-shaped volume equipped with ROE Visual Black Pearl 2.8mm (BP2) LED panels for the walls and ROE Visual Carbon Series 5.77mm (CB5) panels for the ceiling, each with Brompton Tessera SX40 4K LED video processors. The volume also features OptiTrack motion capture cameras to handle multi-camera tracking, and the LED walls are fed CG content in real time from Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. The Tessera SX40 offers support for full 4K screens at 60Hz with 12 bits per colour output, as well as a zero-latency up/down s
UK - Dermot Kennedy’s breakthrough #1 album Without Fear, released in October 2019, had its touring cycle interrupted by a worldwide pandemic, just when the Irish singer-songwriter and Brit-nominee would rather have been treading the boards of global stages. Undeterred, Kennedy featured in Billboard's Live At-Home concert, and subsequently organised his own virtual concert, Sound Waves, in May 2020 in support of the World Health Organisation's Solidarity Response Fund. He also performed his own global live stream from London’s Natural History Museum. Now, he’s finally back on the road with two DiGiCo SD5 consoles supplied by SSE Audio and operated by FoH engineer Will Donbavand and monitor engineer Simon Peter Lawson. “We were lucky enough to be back out in the US with rehearsals in Nashville from late July,” says Donbavand. “This was followed by a U
UK - The Bridge is a tourable 22m wide by 6m high bridge structure providing a platform for music, actors and performers, designed by Sydney based designer Dan Potra and executed by Imagineer Productions, After a series of ‘workshop days’, these events conclude with in a circus style performance, featuring international artists, including regular Cirque du Soleil performers, in an explosive finale, up to 12m above ground. To provide visual support for The Bridge's series of residencies in town centres throughout the UK, lighting designer Arnim Friess required a multi-purpose, flexible solution to accentuate the varied day and night programme of performances, conversations and workshops from the local artistic community. Friess’ solution, which utilised a number of Chauvet Professional Ovation E-260WW IP fixtures, drew heavily from the fixture’s theatri
China - Organised by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Beijing Municipal People’s Government, the 9th Chinese Peking Opera Arts Festival took place over a three-week period in September and October at The National Centre for Performing Arts. As the leading opera art event in China, the Festival has been the launchpad for a large number of productions and performances, and has been instrumental in the advancement of Chinese traditional culture. The principal work featured at the festival was The Grand Canal of Beijing, a complete orchestral suite for the Beijing Opera, combining a range of different vocal genres with orchestral music. The presentation was a multimedia stage event, combining music, choreography and costumes. Held in the concert hall of the National Centre for Performing Arts, the symphonic performances not only demanded the highest qu
USA - In the tri-state area where Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio meet, just north of Cincinnati, lies Citygate Church’s new campus, Forest Park. The church, which originated in Cincinnati and was once mobile, has grown from a small congregation into a thriving, multi-site ministry that enhances services for live and broadcast audiences using customisable lighting from Elation Professional specified and installed by integration company S&L Integrated Systems. Citygate is a multi-ethnic, outreach-driven church with a vision to positively impact the community and share the word in a creative and dynamic way. “Pastors Eric and Kim Petree have always had a vision to become a multiple campus church - one church, multiple locations,” says Dustan White, production director at Citygate Church. “We know that our success and our blessings come from how we impact other people
USA - Lighting designer Tim Deiling chose two MDG Atmosphere generators to provide the ambient haze for his lighting of the Broadway production of Six. The British musical is a modern retelling of the story of Henry VIII’s six wives, presented as a pop contest – a production report on the musical will feature in LSi December, out next week. The show’s signature style is very much that of a rock concert, utilising an abundance of beam effects to take the place of set changes, which simultaneously give a different look and identity to each of the queens. To achieve this, Deiling needed a good, clean haze as a canvas on which to highlight this motif. The fine white particles of MDG Atmosphere haze proved exactly what was needed, delivering a beautiful base layer of haze that defined the beams clearly without any adverse effects on the dynamic perfo
UK - Reading-based television lighting rental specialist Version 2 Lights has made a large investment in Robe’s new Forte moving lights with the purchase of 50 fixtures. These have been supplied with both the HCF (high colour fidelity) and the HP (high performance) LED engines - to service V2’s upcoming projects. Versions 2’s managing director Nick Edwards stated, “We needed a high-powered, high-quality fixture to meet the demands of the big shows, so explored a number of options and selected Forte as the best fixture with optimum quality output for camera.” The Fortes - among the first in the UK - will be working hard this winter, including on ITV’s new talent show, Walk the Line which is being lit by LD Tim Routledge. The show is produced by Simon Cowell and due to be aired in December. For Nick and V2, a product like Forte has all t
USA - Offering 360° views over the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline, The Glasshouse is a new multi-function, interconnectable event space in New York City. Able to accommodate almost 2,000 people, and with multiple outdoor terraces set within the 75,000sq.ft footprint, the venue required a cutting-edge production infrastructure, including transparent audio transmission, video and lighting and broadcast-ready cabling. The work went out to tender, and the successful bidder was Martin Audio partner, Audible Difference (ADI). “We were offered the contract based on our design, and the fact that Martin Audio system offered a robust and adaptable Dante platform,” believes ADI principal, Erich Bechtel. Consequently, the stage area pop-up space, taking advantage of the extra ceiling height on the 7th floor, comprises two hangs of eight MLA Compact, while LF extensi
Romania - Aware that their students needed a way to understand signal flow more easily, course leader Áron Fazakas, associate professor and József ‘Yogi’ Lénárd, sound master instructor at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania “decided to teach a more solid, analogue-based hybrid studio process.” After much research, they chose the Audient ASP4816 mixing console to facilitate this, saying the desk “perfectly met our educational and production needs”. Áron and Yogi make up two-fifths of the teaching staff on the Sound Master course. Yogi continues, “In the all-digital beginnings of our sound engineer training, the problem was that our students were always staring at the computer screen. Reading the various values and admiring the beautifully crafted audio plug-ins on-screen, slowly began to eclipse their confidence in their musical hearing.”
Saudi Arabia - Visitors to 1Rebel in Riyadh might easily think they’ve entered an upscale club were it not for the rows of treadmills, bikes and other exercise equipment that reveal its identity as a fitness centre. This is precisely the sort of image, management of the London-based gym hoped to create when they opened their two Saudi Arabian locations. Their vision for their Middle East expansion was based on the success they had in the UK, offering guests a total experience. AV designer Toby Jones worked with lighting designer Durham Marenghi, who he had also collaborated with in the UK. Together they endowed the new Saudi centres with the engaging look and feel that have become a signature of 1Rebel. Helping them accomplish this was a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures. The team positioned Ovation, COLORado and ÉPIX strip fixtures within the four
China - Part of the Aochi Production Resource Platform, Moto Group is one of China’s largest commercial advertising resource platforms. It has offices and service teams in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Vancouver, as well as three large-scale production studios and a Fortune 500 clientelle and has recently announced its first Moto Stage XR in Shanghai. Brompton Technology is one of the partners that has invested its technology and technical expertise into developing this new facility. The studio focuses on the research, development and application of XR visual effects technology, creating seamless connection and a perfect immersion into physical and virtual reality across film, broadcast, TV, advertising and other areas. The studio’s opening ceremony, held on 16 October, attracted many industry leaders including TVCBOOK, Wunderman Thompson, Havas, Publ
Germany - Anolis Eminere 1 RGBA LED wall washing lighting fixtures were specified to create mood lighting in a series of breakout rooms in the newest extension to the Estrel Congress Centre (ECC) in Berlin, with the Czech manufacturer also producing some specially adapted ceiling mounting versions of the fixture to suit this project. The 10 breakout rooms are part of a new 5000sq.m extension project which opened last summer having been under construction for nearly two years, adding an 800 seat auditorium / presentation space and 10 event rooms to ECC’s substantial multi-purpose conference, exhibition and hotel complex which first opened in 1999. It occupies a massive site in the south of Berlin city. Each of the new rooms can accommodate up to 50 - 240 people, and Estrel’s owner and technical management teams planned mood lighting from the early stages of the de
UAE - As many as 25 Italian-made Powersoft amplifiers are handling the audio demands of the award-nominated Italy Pavilion at Expo 2020 at the recently opened world fair in Dubai. Over 28,000 people a day are expected to visit the Italy Pavilion, which centres on a spectacular 3D-printed, 1:1-scale reproduction of Michelangelo’s David created in Powersoft’s home city of Florence, over the next six months. The pavilion, based on the theme Beauty Connects People, is one of the 192 stands competing for visitors at Expo 2020, which comes to a close on 31 March 2022. The Italy Pavilion is already proving to be one of the most popular attractions, with more than 200,000 visits in October alone, including the thousands who attended concerts by celebrated pianist Ludovico Einaudi and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino orchestra conducted by Zubin Mehta. Key to that popu
USA - Indie/emo band Foxing entitled their fourth studio album Draw Down The Moon. For the album release show at the Pageant theatre in St Louis, designer Gerry Dintleman reflected the mood of the music with a redolent, theatrical lightshow that drew on a collection of over 45 Chauvet Professional fixtures from the venue’s house rig as well as ten Nexus panels rented from Arch City AV. “I wanted things to have this emotional power, with very dramatic highs and lows, using as little front light as possible, with the exception of specials,” explained Dintleman. “Since the album is called Draw Down The Moon, I added a moon gobo with my Ovation ellipsoidal for the backdrop. Overall, I just wanted to match the wide dynamics of the record and bring Foxing’s live show to a whole new level.” Back, key and side lighting were critical to Dintleman’s p
Japan - A classic concert took place recently at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre Concert Hall, featuring Nobuaki Fukukawa. One of the world's most active horn players, he is also principal player in the NHK Symphony Orchestra and a major name in the orchestral world. At this recent recital, Mr. Fukukawa had the clear desire to emulate his recordings from King Records and play the songs on it in the form of an eight-horn ensemble, by overdubbing himself. Mr. Fukukawa and King Records consulted with Koichi Ishimaru, sound master at Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, and he suggested “treating the loudspeakers as musical instruments”. His idea was that Mr. Fukukawa should perform live on stage to create the one part while the seven remaining parts should be played back one by one through the surround speakers, with the recorded source created in Pro Tools. However, this
USA - San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival now in its 13th year, returned to Golden Gate Park for a special Halloween weekend edition. For three days, more than 74,000 concertgoers flooded into the park’s vast lawns to experience sets by headliners The Strokes, Lizzo, and Tame Impala, along with more than 80 additional acts performing on four stages and in two tents. Since the event’s inception, festival producer Another Planet Entertainment, Bay Area rental company UltraSound, and Meyer Sound have worked in close collaboration to provide a world-class audio experience. Since the inaugural festival in 2008, Meyer Sound systems have supported the annual festival’s main stage, with strategic system designs meeting the duelling goals of providing clear, consistent sound and keeping the sound contained within the sprawling urban park, which is surr
USA - Designer and programmer Keith Hoagland and co-designer Steve Leopard of Leopard Production recently lit a corporate event livestream for country band Sixwire with special guest Steve Augeri, the lead singer of Journey from 1998 to 2006. Accounting for the small studio space that the livestream was shot in, the two designers deliberately kept their video wall backdrop simple. “In some instances, it’s better to approach video with the less is more mindset, especially when space is an issue,” said Hoagland. “In this case, having a quite backdrop with a series of smaller video walls, allowed us to paint the area between those walls with rich colours. This gave us depth of field for the cameras to read.” The duo lined the walls of their set with seven video panels in a U-shaped configuration. Rather that show the same images on each, they devoted one or two
Austria - For the two million Austrians who tuned in every Monday to watch the country’s 2021 Ninja Warrior championships, keeping pace with the gifted young athletes as they raced across unstable bridges, swung along series of hanging rings, and hauled heavy weights up a ‘salmon ladder’, would have seemed like an impossible task. But, for Bernhard Endl, it was a matter of routine. Endl didn’t physically run through the new show’s gruelling obstacle course, but he did keep pace with its athletic participants, when lighting the programme on Austria’s Puls4 network. Powering his 89-universe 936-fixture lighting design was a ChamSys MagicQ MQ500M console. “This was a fun project with a different set of challenges than you typically face on a tour or other kind of show,” said Endl. “We had to create an even illumination over the entire parkour with all it
