USA - The Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida has a history that dates back nearly a century to the campus’ founding in 1926. Today, it is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most innovative and comprehensive music schools. Located within the L. Austin Weeks Centre for Recording and Performance, the intimate 147-seat Victor E. Clarke Recital Hall is a familiar venue to all of the nearly 700 students currently enrolled. Used daily for recitals, concerts, and ensemble performance, the room was designed with variable acoustics by noted acoustician Charles Bonner so that a wide range of music could be performed with optimal listening and recording conditions. To accommodate the growing interest in electronic music studies and performance, the school called on Unreal-Systems, an L-Acoustics certified provider for installation and
Japan - The Finnish Embassy in Japan is located in the cosmopolitan district of Azabu in Tokyo. The area has a distinctly global feel, due in part to the large number of foreign embassies that have chosen to make Azabu their home. The Finnish Embassy has recently renovated part of their buildings. A Genelec Smart IP loudspeaker solution was installed as part of the project. Mikke Kinnari, Vice Consul and 3rd Secretary of Administrative Affairs at the Embassy was in charge of the renovation project. “We wanted the best possible experience for our guests, ideally using Finnish products,” he explains. “Having studied several options from a variety of suppliers, we decided that the Genelec Smart IP solution with its easy, single-cable installation and high-quality audio offered the best possible solution for our requirements.” The buildings of the Finnish Embassy
Finland - Harman Professional Solutions recently partnered with Studiotec Oy and Turku Energia to illuminate the recently renovated Piispantorni building’s façade and its new whale mural with Martin Exterior Projection 1000 fixtures. Originally constructed in 1973, Piispantorni is the tallest building in the Finnish city of Kaarina and offers a dazzling view of the nearby Gulf of Finland from its upper floors. Formerly owned and utilised by Finnish brewing company Hartwall, the building’s new owner recently renovated the building to offer commercial office rentals to professionals in the Turku region of Finland. As part of the renovation, the building received a completely new steel façade featuring a stunning, 82-foot-long mural of a life-size blue whale titled Big Blue by artist Mauri Kosonen. In order to enhance the effect of the mural, Piispantorni
France - For more than 20 years, Mvision has been providing its service as an audiovisual technical expert to its customer base in France and beyond. The company’s regular investments in new equipment allows it to set up innovative solutions, such as its studio for filming, capturing, and dissemination of eventsat the Palais des Congrès in Paris, which is the third space Mvision has equipped for creative content production in France. The 300sq.m set features a curved LED wall, controlled by two Brompton Technology Tessera S8 LED processors. “Mvision invested in its first LED screens more than eight years ago, and our first cylindrical screen was awarded a prize at the innovation show, Heavent Paris,” says Meziane Lounis, Mvision’s owner. “Since then, we have been building up our experience and expertise in LED technology, with our latest opening of a studio and in
USA - This January, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu passed up a long list of other possible sites, and delivered his inaugural address at Studio Lab, a production facility created by Events United. The address marked a milestone for Events United, which formed Studio Lab before the pandemic, but began pouring renewed energy into the space once the lockdown brought live events to a halt. “For us it was a matter of trying to stay busy,” recalled Messina. “But Studio Lab tapped into a strong demand for professional livestream studios and surpassed everyone’s expectations.” Outfitted with a lighting rig anchored by Chauvet Professional Maverick fixtures and featuring a massive 52’ wide by 14’ high curved video wall made with F2 LED panels, the production space has produced a steady flow of livestreams during 2020. Among these events was a Greater Manchest
Australia - Lighting designer Trudy Dalgleish appreciated the quietness and other features of Robe T1 Profiles and T1 Fresnels that are part of the new house rig at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide, which reopened in June 2020 after a major two-year redevelopment. The State Opera of South Australia’s production of Australian drama Summer of the 17th Doll was the first show to utilise the new facilities in the 1467-seat main auditorium – which includes the 24 new Robe moving lights, 12 of each type. The Summer of the 17th Doll action is set in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton in 1953, focussing on the lives of six central characters. Director Joseph Mitchell already had some very clear ideas for how he wanted the production to look and feel, so Trudy and set designer Simone Romaniuk worked closely to evoke the ambience and period feel of the pi
USA - Marc Janowitz of e26 design chose 30 Mistral-S - Ayrton’s LED spot fixtures as key features of his lighting design for Trey Anastasio’s The Beacon Jams. The eight-week ‘virtual residency’ was live-streamed weekly from New York’s historic Beacon Theatre throughout October and November 2020. In an unusual twist, since no audience was present, the filming took place on stage in a reverse set-up, with the musicians facing the back wall and the auditorium acting as a backdrop. “The jam sessions were aimed specifically at the home audience, for which we wanted to create an intimate connection that felt like we brought a series of music sessions into the viewers’ own home,” explains Janowitz. “The reverse angle gave us something more like a studio environment into which Mistral fitted beautifully – it was very much in keeping with the look we were trying t
Australia - While Australia’s national day might be a little different this year it is still, however, a day of reflection, respect, unity, gratitude and a celebration of many achievements. The day is a national holiday and celebratory events take place country-wide. In Sydney, the harbour is a focal point for a day-long of events but thanks to Covid-19, many activities were cancelled. Fortunately, the popular Australia Day concert was still held on the Sydney Opera House forecourt along with a spectacular fireworks display, a flotilla of yachts and jet-skis. The event was produced and managed by The Department of Premier and Cabinet. This year’s audience was capped at 1,200 with specially invited, social-distanced frontline workers. Chameleon Touring Systems supplied the lighting for the concert, lit by Stuart Anderson, and the surrounding lighting lit by Pa
Mexico - Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional’s (AN) was built in 1952 as a site for equestrian events. The building is made of riveted iron - the same technique featured on the Eiffel Tower - and has undergone extensive redesigns throughout the years. The Auditorio Nacional is known equally for its intriguing architectural design and for housing the largest pipe organ in Latin America. The venue’s main hall consists of nearly 10,000 seats raised above and around its 23m stage, primarily used for national and international music concerts, song, dance and film festivals. Since 2013, the Auditorio Nacional has been ranked top selling venue in the world according to Pollstar Magazine. Lunario, Auditorio Nacional’s alternative stage, seats 1,200 and is used for small and medium-sized events. Both spaces have hosted notable companies such as the Vienna Philharmonic, LA
Italy - With its light and airy Neo-Renaissance forms, the Nicolò Bruno-designed Politeama Rossetti theatre affords excellent views from each of its 1,531 seats. Regardless of where visitors find themselves in the historic venue, however, they can only see the stage from one angle at a time. No such limitation exists for livestream viewers, though, and that, believes Crt Birsa, changes the fundamental trajectory of a lighting design. “The live audience has just one point of view,” he explains. “But in a livestream each camera is a new point of view that has to look good. The viewer sees things from all angles, so your design has to present a very consistent image from one end to the other.” Birsa provided an example of this principle in December when lighting a one-hour livestream at Politeama Rossetti for the Trieste-based guitar quartet 40 Fingers. Covering
USA - Guests at Wisconsin’s Wilderness Resort are getting an aerial view of US National Parks, national landmarks and the Wisconsin Dells, onboard the new FlyRide Take Flight adventure ride. Developed by SimEx-Iwerks, the ride uses four Christie D4K40-RGB pure laser projectors with Christie Mystique, a camera-based multi-projector alignment and blending system. Wilderness Resort is located on over 600 acres of forest, where guests can stay at three properties, enjoy golf, indoor and outdoor waterparks, dining, and a range of activities for the whole family. Take Flight opened in September 2020, expanding the list of exciting activities for guests to enjoy. Take Flight begins as guests enter an airport-themed lobby, with ‘windows”’ looking out onto the National Parks. Guests are then queued at an ‘airport’ featuring airplane seats, before entering the ride.
Australia - Dave Weir has worked as a freelance professional audio engineer and educator for the last 10 years. As a teacher, he draws upon wide experience of the industry to deliver audio courses at Oxygen College, a multi-disciplinary training organisation in Geelong West, Victoria, Australia, that specialises in the creative arts. His role as an educator dovetails neatly with a full spectrum of audio duties, from studio mixing to live sound engineering, including touring the length and breadth of the country with notable bands such as Thirsty Merc, Rival Fire and Teramaze. In addition to his work with bands on the road and in the studio, Dave also runs arena audio for the Australian Open Tennis tournament, controlling court audio feeds for broadcast, running music between points, and managing post-match interview audio. As is the case for many audiophiles, the boun
USA - Prior to 2020, The University of Miami redesigned its live sports production workflows to ensure all audio feeds were on the network with Audinate’s Dante. From field mics to mixers - and from basketball to soccer - the university made the choice to trust Dante for all audio-over-IP capabilities. “We don’t have a single XLR patch anywhere in our workflow,” said Anthony Lestochi, director of production services at the university. “Moving to Dante was clearly the better way to operate. It made building out our production really easy and effective. And, when COVID happened, Dante made it easy to quickly adapt.” Dante has also proven its flexibility over the course of 2020. As productions needed to drastically alter their approach to adhere to COVID-19 safety guidelines, the ability to use Dante audio-over-IP as a connective fabric was a crucial enabler.<
Thailand - Elevating teaching programmes and services in its Dharma Practice Room, the Young Buddhists Association of Thailand hired audio integrators Mahajak Development Co to deliver a Harman Professional audio solution to provides quality sound. Founded in 1950, the Young Buddhists Association of Thailand (YBAT) is an organisation dedicated to enriching lives by bringing Buddhism to the younger generation and general public. Focused on developing minds and cultivating deep experiential wisdom through educational services, YBAT’s main office is located in the Phasicharoen District of Bangkok and includes the Thamnawet building, which features a 500-seat Dharma Practice Room. "The client wanted an upgrade to their existing sound system in the Thamnawet building,” said Pongsakorn Kanchanachayphoom, project director at Mahajak. As we had already worked on renovating
Saudi Arabia - FAZ Medical Centre in the city of Abha, south-west Saudi Arabia, is the latest in a chain of Saudi Arabian polyclinics, equipped to treat a wide range of conditions. The new seven-storey facility is equipped with all the latest medical technology, complemented by a Yamaha audio system. Located between 2200 and 3000m above sea level, Abha is promoted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination, its semi-arid climate appealing to overseas visitors, as well as to Saudi citizens who live in the fiercer desert heat of the rest of the country. Jeddah-based aDawliah Universal Electronics was asked to design and supply a system which would cover 16 areas of the building with high quality public address and paging audio, using both wireless and wired control for volume and independent routing of audio sources to different areas. The system also had t
USA - When Northside Baptist Church in Huntsville, Texas, needed to source a sound system for its newly constructed worship space, the church’s technical team found itself confronted with familiar challenges. Like so many houses of worship, the church leadership needed to ensure the best possible sound coverage within their new sanctuary’s acoustic environment while balancing its love for music in worship with clarity of speech. Crucially, all this needed to be achieved without taking too much from the donation plate. Now the church has found a solution in the TW Audio ELLA. Marking the first ELLA installation in the United States, the system has been greeted by Bob Slie, youth pastor at Northside Baptist Church, as having transformed the church’s worship experience. Slie first experienced ELLA as part of an early demonstration of the technology at the WFX
Slovenia - The marriage between lighting and set design is never far from Crt Birsa’s mind. Only when light absorbs itself completely in its surroundings, can it exert its full power to transform. This is always true, he believes, but especially so when lighting television productions, where the limited and less forgiving eye of the camera replaces live human vision. “In TV shows lighting has to walk hand in hand with set design,” he said. “There must be tight collaboration between the lighting and set designers for the total design to reach the level of perfection that the camera demands.” Birsa and his frequent collaborator set designer Greta Godnic achieved this level, and then some, for a NYE special run by Slovenian National Television (RTV) in its famed Studio 1. Powering his five universe show with a ChamSys MagicQ MQ80, he wove light from 101 fixtures
USA - Liberty University has invested in a complement of 20 Ayrton Khamsin-S LED profile luminaires for the new Liberty Arena on the Lynchburg, Virginia campus. Liberty Arena seats 4,500 spectators and is the home of the university’s men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball teams whose games are broadcast on ESPN+. Liberty University previously purchased Ayrton Mistral fixtures for a multi-use event space, which hosts a wide array of entertainment programs and gatherings. “We wanted bright LED fixtures that would really pop and enhance the fan experience in our new dedicated sports arena,” says Amy Caun, lighting director and Tier 2 production technician in Liberty’s Event Production department. Designed for scenic applications, the Khamsin-S is equipped with a new LED module delivering powerful metallic white light with a record-breaking output of
Sweden - Panasonic projectors helped celebrate man’s understanding of Space with over 100,000 visitors seeing the spectacular projection mapping onto Stockholm’s City Hall (Stadshuset) as part of the Nobel Week Lights festival. The installation is one of the largest video mapping projects ever seen in the city. The event celebrated the 2020 Nobel Prize in Stockholm with lighting installations created around the city inspired by Nobel laureate discoveries. The creative result was SPACE, designed by Andreas Skärberg and produced by PXLFLD studios. The content is a 16-minute projection mapped, animated art installation celebrating amazing advances in space physics. PXLFLD called on its partners Lumination of Sweden and Creative Technology, which specialises in advanced technical solutions for the live events and broadcast industry, to help make the vision beco
USA - Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, Squeek Lights owner Victor Zeiser converted the Ruby Stage at his company’s Middlesex. NJ facility into a performance space for livestreams and video productions. Rigged with Chauvet Professional Rogue BeamWash fixtures, the new studio was well-received, attracting name bands like Motionless in White and The Wonder Years, in addition to hosting the chart-topping trio AJR for their Biden Presidential Inauguration, as well as their appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden. While most people at his improvised studio were watching the performers on stage, Zeiser was focusing his attention on LDs like Mike Null (Motionless in White) and Ezra Donellan (AJR) and their crews as they worked cameras and light to make these productions click. His observations led him to shake things up at his successful Ruby Stage
USA - The Beacon Jams were a successful eight-week ‘virtual residency’ presented by guitarist and singer-songwriter Trey Anastasio (AKA lead singer of Phish) and MSG Entertainment in New York City’s Beacon Theatre. The shows were live-streamed free on Twitch at 8pm every Friday through October and November 2020. The artist played with varied arrangements of his Trey Anastasio Band (TAB), adding and changing line-ups and special guests each week, offering a dynamic mix of live music and interactive entertainment. With up to 12 musicians onstage and the challenge of playing live with no audience in such a famous venue, production and lighting designer Marc Janowitz from E26 Design thought out of the box. His mission was to adapt and redirect the visual drama and ambience that usually accompany a 3,000 strong live audience as well as light all the performers
USA - 12Stone Church, a thriving multi-site congregation serving the Atlanta metro area, is radically rethinking worship for not only the COVID-19 crisis but also into the post-pandemic era. The church’s innovative ‘12Stone Home’ initiative is a creative fusion of remote streaming and in-person worship, with the dynamic power and flexibility of a new Meyer Sound Leopard reinforcement system playing a key role in the success of the concept. The new system is flown inside the main worship auditorium at 12Stone’s Sugarloaf campus, where a rapid renovation last summer reconfigured the 900-capacity room to serve as a hybrid combination of live worship space and video production studio. With the old point-source system already slated for replacement, a new Leopard-based solution was the odds-on favourite as Leopard arrays already had been installed at four other 12Stone ca
Germany - Built in 1908, the Laeiszhalle concert hall in Hamburg enchants visitors with architectural features, such as the towering organ integrated into the back wall of its stage. This made the historic venue an appropriate setting for Hype, an on-demand Netflix production by and about the award-winning comedian and author Felix Lobrecht. No stranger to German fans, Lobrecht has rapidly risen to become one of the country’s most sought-after stand-up comedians as a result of his television shows and books. Following his first live tour, the highly successful kenn ick, he launched Hype in early 2020. The appearance at Laeiszhalle was a stop on the Hype tour. As things turned out, it also wound up being the site of his stand-up special on Netflix, which was published on the streaming service in November 2020. Supporting this recorded performance
Australia - Lighting designer Hugh Taranto lit a vibrant array of artists performing on the Sydney Stage for the 2020-21 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s New Year’s Eve broadcast. The high-profile event culminated in a pyro spectacular fired off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, stretching right across the harbour and watched by millions across Australia and worldwide. This year, the event was named We Are One following 12 gruelling months that started with raging bushfires and ended with the ongoing pandemic. As the date neared, the tough decision was taken to go ahead without a live audience, due to general Coronavirus concerns, then a fast-spreading local cluster developing in the days immediately prior meant that even plans for a limited capacity ‘local hero’ audience – nominated by communities – had to be dropped. Wanting to fill the gap imm
