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UK - The ALD has today announced that its ALD Awards for Excellence 2020 are open for submissions.
Aimed at all students and recent graduates studying in the UK, the awards are a celebration of imaginative and creative lighting and video production and represent a chance for young designers to showcase their talents and to bring their work to the attention of experienced lighting and video designers.
Johanna Town, chair of the ALD, comments: “The ALD’s Awards for Excellence are so important to a designer’s future. To be able to sell your ideas and passions for a design or methodology to other industry leaders is an important skill.”
The awards are now open for submissions from students studying in the UK, recent graduates from 2018 onwards, or correspondin

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UK - Philip French of UK technical production company Peachy Productions has just relocated to Wiltshire after being based in Guildford, Surrey for eight years.
But during the coronavirus crisis, he is making the journey back twice a week to volunteer for the Surrey Drive Campaign.
This is a locally-based crowd-funded initiative that delivers around 2,500 cooked meals - with locally sourced ingredients - each week for hardworking staff at the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust hospital.
The Surrey Drive Campaign includes some of Surrey’s live event experts. After seeing heart-breaking stories of exhausted NHS workers finishing their arduous frontline shifts and being unable to buy food at this critical time, Steve Page and Hannah Sheppard thought it was time to step up.
Having furloughed all his staff while the UK continues in a largely restricted lockdown

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Vietnam - MiQ, a New York-based global market research firm, retained designers Martin Dudley and Chris Davey through UK-based event technology specialists Great Expectations, to provide professional lighting design services for a series of events the company was holding around the world for local clients and other interested parties.
Dudley of Martin’s Lights Ltd. and Davey of Stagelighting Tech (both of the UK), knew they would need a powerful, yet flexible, controller that would allow them to accommodate a wide variety of rigs. They also wanted a control solution that they could they could carry on international flights.
These considerations led them to pack two ChamSys PC Wings for their globe-trotting MiQ Ignite tour, which concluded shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown. “We are both long-time ChamSys users,” explains Davey. “This made us confident
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Indochine X PixMob Fan Immersion

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's - 40 thousand LED pixels on a ceiling!!! Indochine's whirlwind tour transports fans to another level of the live experience - immersing them from floor to ceiling with PixMob's X4 wristbands, and an LED ceiling made entirely of its NOVA Minis! With the vision of Indochine's creative team, PixMob used its LED fan-technology to turn attendees and venues into an ocean of effects, and a starry sky of LED magic. Très très cool!

Read more about the Indochine tour in the latest issue of LSi

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USA - Obsidian Control Systems will present an Onyx at Your Service webinar on 28 May at 10am PST, focused on lighting control and programming for houses of worship.
Onyx is Obsidian’s scalable lighting control platform that is a popular choice for many houses of worship around the world. It is promoted as easy to learn for volunteers, while having the feature set and power to drive large gatherings.
In this webinar, Obsidian Control Systems product manager Matthias Hinrichs will lead a two-hour discussion with experienced Onyx programmers and lighting designers Chris Eguizabal of Riverside, California, and Joseph Wolff of Calgary, Alberta.
The programme will include insight into their workflow and programming styles and the components needed to put together small and large Onyx systems for churches and other venues.
You can register for the event

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USA - Eventide Audio’s Quarantide has named an impressive line-up of pioneering musicians for its daily discussions.
On Friday, 22 May, Backstage in the Green Screen Room will feature genre Jon Anderson, Laurie Anderson, Clara Ponty and Jean-Luc Ponty, hosted by violist and composer Martha Mooke, an Eventide artist in residence.
Joining the artists will be Eventide principals Tony Agnello and Richard Factor, along with Jean de Reydellet, Eventide brand ambassador in France and a musician/composer.
“Some of the most inspired and intriguing conversations happen backstage in the ‘green room’ just before musicians go on to perform,” shares Mooke. “I’m truly thrilled to spend some time in the Eventide ‘virtual green room’ with these musical icons.”
Created to keep audio aficionados connected, to stimulate their minds and provi

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UK - Record industry charity the BRIT Trust has announced a donation of £30,000 to Music Support, the peer-led music industry charity that provides confidential mental health and addiction services.
The funding will help Music Support at a critical time when many people in the artist and music industry community are in urgent need of its help. It will also go towards Music Support’s ambition of giving 10,000 people access to Thrive, the NHS-approved mental health app.
Matt Thomas, chair of trustees of Music Support, comments: “We are hugely grateful to The BRIT Trust, the BPI and the recorded music sector for their valued support when we are seeing a sharp rise in the number of vulnerable industry peers coming to us for help. Technology has provided a lifeline to many during the of COVID-19 emergency, and this timely funding will enable us to give thousands of peo

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UK - During Mental Health Awareness Week, Unusual Rigging is urging its industry counterparts to consider what mental health in the workplace will look like in a COVID-adapted world.
As the entertainment industry has been knocked sideways by the global crisis, Tom Harper, managing director at Unusual Rigging believes the time is right to tackle the growing problem of work-related mental health problems head-on and to nip it in the bud rather than simply putting a sticky plaster on it.
MD Tom Harper comments: “If ever there was a time for it to be OK to not be OK, it’s now. With the world as we know it turned on its head, those who can put their hands up and say they’re ‘absolutely fine’ are, without doubt superhuman. With lives and livelihoods lost or at least put on hold, this year’s Mental Health Awareness week is really shining the light on the problem

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UK - The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden is one of the world’s leading opera houses. The recent Open Up refurbishment created a series of new spaces within the building offering a more welcoming visitor experience.
Built in 1858, the Royal Opera House is home to The Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera, as well the Linbury Theatre and various restaurants and a gift shop. The Open Up project was a £62m major refurbishment to create a welcoming visitor-friendly experience, improve crowd flow, welcome daytime activity of events for all ages relating to the art of dance and music and refurbish the Linbury Theatre into a world-class venue for intimate performances for ballet and opera.
Martin Adams, technical manager, Open Up Project, Royal Opera House, and Tom Thompson, technical manager, Linbury Theatre, were tasked with creating an audio network to meet the theatre's c

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USA - Mainline Marketing, an independent manufacturer rep firm, will represent the QSC systems and live sound business in Florida and Puerto Rico, effective 25 May.
The change comes after Mainline acquired former QSC representative Meyer Marketing earlier this month.
“We would like to thank the entire Meyer Marketing team for their hard work and dedication representing QSC over the years,” comments Frank West, senior director of sales for QSC Systems. “We look forward to working with Mainline Marketing in the southeast region and leverage their vast experience and connections in the AV industry, specifically in corporate AV, theme parks, production and retail.
“Our companies share a dedication to integrator and end user training, and as Mainline prepares to open their newest training centre next month, they will help support regional trainings for the Q-

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The Netherlands - ROE Visual Europe has recently completed a refurbishment of its showroom in Leek, showcasing its LED products in an intimate setting.
With its flexible set-up, the showroom is created with the intention of allowing clients and designers to use it for demos, try-outs or testing and to accommodate different set-ups and events. The facility will be open from 1 June.
A broad range of the company’s latest LED panels will be on show, with the highlight being the Ruby RB 2.3 screen shown as a full HD wall measuring 5.5 x 3m and with a resolution of 2376x1296.
The showreel displayed is based on the 4K content shown at the ISE exhibition.
Flanking the Ruby screens are panels of Black Quartz, Carbon, Diamond and Vanish. The showroom will also feature the Black Marble, showcased both as wall mounted screen and interactive LED floor. The selection o

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USA - Architectural specifiers and installers are discovering the advantages of products derived from TMB’s road-proven technology.
Concert touring is among the most technically challenging environments and touring technology has a long history of being the vanguard for design innovations in other industries.
“There is no question rock & roll technology drives innovation in other industries; first theatre, then film and TV, then corporate events and theme parks, and now architecture,” comments Colin Waters, ex-roadie and TMB’s CEO and founder. “To this end, TMB now has regional reps throughout America, to liaise with specifiers, contractors, and designers who place our innovative products into a broad spectrum of high-profile installations, including Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas, O’Hare airport in Chicago, the Moxy Hotel in New York, the Schuster Center

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Europe - Yamaha has launched new additions to its range of professional audio products, the Rivage PM5 and Rivage PM3 digital mixing systems. The launch of two new control surfaces and two new DSP engines gives sound engineers greater choice and flexibility to deliver optimum sound in a much wider range of applications, says the company.
The core components of the new PM5 and PM3 are the CS-R5 and CS-R3 control surfaces. Both feature the same fader configuration as the rest of the Rivage PM series, with three bays of 12 faders each. The combination of touch screens and selected channel controls offers functionality and intuitive operation familiar to Rivage PM series users, while also offering easy entry for users of Yamaha’s CL and QL series consoles.
The commonality of fader configuration also means the same layout can be maintained when using different control sur

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Singapore - Singapore’s Bicentennial Experience was conceived to illustrate milestones in the island’s history. It employed a rich mix of immersive audio-visual solutions, from the large-scale to the intimate. Originally aiming for 300,000 visitors, by the time of its close at the end of 2019, its creative storytelling had attracted 760,000.
Behind that success was show design specialist Ctrl Fre@k, whose Wee Cheng Low used the power and versatility of Hippotizer to realise the multitude of solutions. A founding partner of Ctrl Fre@k along with Jeffrey Yue, Wee is one of Singapore’s leading experts in video and lighting control solutions, a long-time Hippotizer user and a member of Green Hippos’s Key User Support Programme (KUSP).
Wee’s career path had its beginnings in 2002, when he worked for a time as a theatre technician for a local theatre company. “I

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Germany - The VLink communication solution for RTS intercom matrix systems has become a key tool for broadcasters during the COVID-19 pandemic. The software-based virtual intercom platform has been a common part of the broadcast comms workflow for many years. However, it has become even more relevant in recent months as it has allowed broadcasters all over the world to work remotely during the international crisis, maintaining vital public information services while observing social distancing protocols.
RTS VLink enables remote users to interface with their RTS intercom matrices via the Internet using a simple application, allowing a new degree of control and flexibility from anywhere in the world - including from home.
“In the current pandemic, remote production is the new normal for broadcasters everywhere,” says Denis Castanet, director product management at RT

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USA - Sound engineer Eugene ‘Geno’ Mulcahy uses Waves SuperRack, Waves Axis Proton computer and Waves plugins for broadcast at the Vox Church based out of New Haven, Connecticut.
“Due to Covid-19,” Mulcahy says, “many churches, ours included, are now challenged with creating a high-quality web-stream/broadcast presentation for their parish. To achieve a smooth-running stream, we went along with a setup that includes a DiGiCo S21 with a DMI Waves SoundGrid interface and a Waves Axis Proton computer running the Waves SuperRack plugin host and all plugin processing handled by the Waves Proton Server.
“We are streaming live, so I create a mix by using Waves plugins so I can manage all levels once I set them in. Waves plugins directly address the input level at the video deck, and I am able to set and get the most consistent output level to video. We also recor

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USA - Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon is a little over six miles from the Imperial Cars automotive mall. Lately, a lot of seniors from the 654-student enrolment school have been making that drive to the dealership. They aren’t necessarily looking to buy a new car; they’re coming to see a special graduation tribute that the popular dealer has sponsored for them.
With the regional high school’s usual live graduation ceremony cancelled because of the COVID-19 lockdown, Imperial Cars contacted Image Production Services of Worcester, MA to put together a virtual alternative for Nipmuc students.
Having worked with Imperial Cars on many projects in the past, Darren Lussier and his team at Image Production Services including media specialist Tovia ‘Ben’ Shapiro, put together an impressive video display to honour graduates. They used 80 Chauvet Professional PVP

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UK - Last year, Astera Titan Tubes were at the heart of a lighting scheme designed by Ben Donoghue, now of Flare Lighting, for Beyond the Road, an immersive exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery.
Featuring the music of Unkle, the experience merged the worlds of visual arts, music and film, offering visitors a chance to lose themselves in a multi-sensory world led by sound. Together with music pioneer James Lavelle (Unkle), the overall work was curated by creative producer Colin Nightingale, and sound designer/creative director Stephen Dobbie (both of the Punchdrunk theatre company).
Lighting designer Ben Donoghue - who has recently joined Ben Cash, David Amos and the team at Flare Lighting from global creative agency Imagination - has worked regularly with Nightingale and Dobbie and was asked to collaborate on the project to create a lighting design for the e

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USA - The city of Nashville was already well-known as a centre for artists and artisans, but due to a 2009 fire that robbed the community of its music centre (known affectionately as the Little Opry) county officials sought to build a venue that would draw top touring artists.
In an effort to craft a lighting system that would match the talent they sought, Brown County commissioned Bandit Lites, trusting the sales and integration team to make the space usable for touring acts. From rigging to backstage layout and ultimately the lighting controls, Bandit’s team elevated the lighting to match the vision of the centre.
“We wanted the stage to be a first class, state of the art lighting package,” explains project manager Doug Harden of Miller Architects. “Bandit delivered exactly that.”
Bandit Lites provided all the fixtures for the building, including th

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Croatia - House music pioneer David Morales continues to produce and to play to packed clubs all over the world and his current rider specifies a KV2 Audio ES System as his preferred monitoring setup.
Morales has also been using a KV2 setup at home for a while - he currently has two EX10s and two EX2.2 subs which he loves - but hadn’t used a KV2 system on a gig until his show at the Boogaloo club in Zagreb, Croatia on St Valentine’s Day this year. He tried out a full ES System comprising an ES1.0 high power active mid/hi loudspeaker stacked on a pair of ES1.8 high output subs per side, powered by two EPAK2500R control and amplification units (one per side).
“These speakers sound amazing!” he enthused, “and I’m in a big room – this is not a small intimate club!” Indeed, Boogaloo has been a cult club in Zagreb since the mid-80’s and with a capacity of 1

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Japan - Alcons Audio has announced the appointment of Osaka-based E’Spec Inc. as its Japanese distributor. Established in 1990, E’Spec has offices in Osaka, Tokyo and Nagoya.
Initial talks between the companies had started at ISE 2019 when E’Spec approached Alcons with an interest to become its distributor for Japan.
“For the past 20 years, there have been very few systems which feature truly innovative technology,”comments E’Spec’s Yoshiaki ‘Yoshi’ Yamaguchi. “Currently there is almost no difference in the system quality from different manufacturers. Equipment choice is based on slight differences in sound quality, cost performance and usability.
“The beautiful high frequency range at high SPLs and minimal listener fatigue produced by Alcons pro-ribbon systems are powerful advantages, which we know will interest many Japanese live sound e

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Portugal - Located on the bustling boulevard of the Avenida de República in the Saldanha district of the Portuguese capital, Mercantina Bistro 37 is the third Mercantina restaurant to open in Lisbon. The elegant building was formerly home to Café Cubana, the favourite watering hole of a coterie of Portugal’s famed surrealist artists.
Seven decades later, the interior with its striking murals and rich colours designed by architect Tiago Silva Dias, offers echoes of the building’s surrealist past. Distribution and AV integration specialists, Garrett Audiovisuais, designed and installed a zoned audio and control system across all areas of the bar and restaurant, based on Genelec 4000 Series installation loudspeakers.
According to Garrett’s Alain Pierre who managed the project, Mercantina’s owners were frequent clients at JncQUOI - a Lisbon restaurant already eq
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