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Belgium - With many music stages and event spaces throughout the city’s UNESCO protected medieval centre, the annual 10-day Gentse Feesten is a go-to event for Northern European music lovers.
Shining brightly against the city’s beautiful gothic architecture was the festival’s Sint-Baafsplein square stage. Vince de Schinckel brought the stage (one of the festival’s largest) to glittering life with help from eight STRIKE 1, 20 Maverick MK2 Wash, and 16 Maverick MK2 Spot fixtures from Chauvet Professional, supplied by Belgian rental specialists Euro PA.
The 230-watt single source STRIKE 1 fixtures provided de Schinckel with an impactful tungsten emulating blinder and wash tool for creating classic main stage looks.
“After having a great experience with the S

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Europe - UK based creative design practice Okulus – James Scott and Louis Oliver – was asked to create a production design for rising Canadian singer songwriter Shawn Mendes’ tour.
This followed their work for the launch of his second studio album, Illuminate at Madison Square Garden in September 2016, and Okulus’ penchant for bringing fresh and interesting visual perspectives to a show.
39 Robe Spikies are incorporated into the lighting scheme, crafted with Okulus dexterity and imagination in close collaboration with the show’s creative director, Paul Caslin and 24/7 Productions. The overall stage look is clean and definitive with attention focused on the artist.
The set is built from a multi-layered fixed riser system with curved frontage and a high-gloss black floor, fabricated by TAIT. It keeps the band positions balanced across the upstage

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Italy - Singer/songwriter and producer Tiziano Ferro is known as the modern face of Italian pop music and his phenomenally successful career has seen one chart-busting album and single after another earning him a dedicated fan following.
His live shows are also known for their visual flamboyance and style and the recent Italian stadium tour was no exception. Belgian engineering and automation specialist WIcreations was commissioned to find solutions for two primary motion-control ‘brain-teasers’.
The show was creatively directed by Claudio Santucci working in close collaboration with video designer Romain Sabella from Clonwerk and lighting designer Giovanni Pinna.
The two automation challenges were to provide a fluid and smooth movement system for a large video ceiling weighing 11 tonnes, which moved in all directions and to track two massive upstage LED scre
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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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UK - Now in its third year, the three-day Ramblin Man Fair is an annual music festival celebrating classic and contemporary rock, progressive rock, blues and country music.
Promoted by Spirit Of Rock it is billed as “a rock festival designed for rock fans by rock fans”.
Set in Maidstone’s familiar Mote Park, sound production company Capital Sound were contracted to provide the audio infrastructure for the first time this year, and they were eager to show off the power of Martin Audio’s MLA PA to Kent’s rock community.
Project manager Robin Conway was himself responsible for winning the contract after meeting with the event’s technical production manager, Kev Sutherland. “I think he was impressed that we were able to come up with a total production package built around MLA,” he said.
Capital provided sound reinforcement for all four stages b

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Germany - Forty years on the air and 1,000 episodes are really a reason for celebrating 1, 2 or 3, the legendary children’s quiz show from ZDF - with a 150-minute prime time show from the MMC Studios in Cologne. Moderated by Steven Gätjen and Elton, prominent guests included actress Stephanie Stumph, comedian Bülent Ceylan and singer Mark Foster. Günther Jauch, who presents Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, also made an appearance and superstar Helene Fischer appeared on stage.
For the lighting design of this special anniversary show, MBTV, the production company for ZDF, awarded the design work to mo2 design, run by lighting designer, Manfred "Ollie" Olma. Olma is one of the long-time users of GLP fixtures, and on this occasion he also made the most of it - specifying more than 100 impression X4 atom, as well as 92 GT-1 hybrids and 60 impression X4.
"W

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Europe - illumination Physics has opened a European office in Bremen, Germany.
Martin Opolka will assume the role of European manager, effective immediately. Martin is a career lighting professional and his experience and specialisation are ideally suited to illumination Physics’ core business in architectural and architainment façade lighting, says the company. He has been involved in many international projects including The Chicago Bridges illumination, London Television Tower, London, and Aspire Sports Dome in Doha.
"My new role as European manager for illumination Physics represents an exciting challenge that I'm honoured to accept," says Martin. "I have known the company directors and have been familiar with their work for many years and am delighted now to be part of its success story.”
The office is located at Bruno-Bürgel-Strasse 11, 28759, Bremen,

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UK - To best support and grow its rapidly expanding user-base, global design and BIM software developer Vectorworks has announced the formation of a new office in the UK.
To facilitate this new corporate office, Vectorworks has acquired Design Software Solutions Limited, a long-time reseller of Vectorworks software. The Vectorworks UK office will build on the support, training and sales infrastructure developed by Design Software Solutions as a launch pad for further development in the region. The new office will be led by Tamsin Slatter and Adrian Slatter, former directors of Design Software Solutions.
“With more than 10 years of experience helping users make the most of their investment in Vectorworks software, Design Software Solutions has provided significant input to the growth of the UK market while also providing valuable support and training materials,

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UK – The 2017 Knight of Illumination (KOI) Awards has announced this year’s shortlist of lighting and video designers, recognised for their creative work in the Concert Touring & Events sector. The winners will be announced at the 10th anniversary KOI Awards ceremony, to be held at London’s Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith, on 17 September. The KOI Awards was established to publicly celebrate the achievements of lighting and video designers in the sectors of Television, Theatre and Concert Touring & Events. The annual Awards are open to designers whose work has been showcased in the UK in the previous twelve months. The Awards is now one of the most celebrated nights in the live entertainment design industry calendar, with more than 500 leading creatives and professionals in attendance at last year’s celebrations. The Concert Touring & Events shortlist is the

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Ticket To Ride - Amazon could soon be entering yet another new market - working with US venue owners to sell event tickets. Sources told Reuters news agency that Amazon was in talks to offer event ticketing in America, seeing the market as ripe for a new entrant. If such a move were to go ahead, it would be the latest effort by the Seattle-based online retailer to use its huge customer base and bargaining power to enter a big market.
It would also challenge Ticketmaster, which has a strong grip on the market. Ticketmaster is currently the exclusive seller of tickets for many top US venues, generating $1.6bn in revenue from initial sales in 2016, according to estimates by research firm BTIG. That figure does not include revenue from reselling tickets, which BTIG estimates at $250m.
Price Sensitive - Producer Thelma Holt has become the latest figure to rail agains

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UK - Presteigne Broadcast Hire has announced the appointment of Ben Hawker as senior supervisor of RF and special cameras.
Hawker comes to Presteigne from Broadcast RF, where he amassed considerable experience as a senior RF engineer for major international news and sporting events including the London Summer Olympics, Royal wedding, Brazil World Cup, multiple London and Singapore marathons, crown jewel horse racing events, and the UEFA European Championship among many others.
Hawker will apply his planning, technology build, and high-level project management experience to lead Presteigne’s specialist RF camera hire and deployment activities.
Presteigne CEO, Mike Ransome, said, “Ben is a highly respected, world-class expert on RF development and deployment. His engineering experience is vast, and his track record of success unrivalled. I am personally delight

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USA- LED video manufacturer PixelFLEX has announced the introduction of FLEXTour, a new robust, high-definition and curve-able LED video display designed specifically for the high demands of production touring.
With its rigging capabilities and fully modular construction, FLEXTour is front or rear-serviceable and employs an integrated climbing ladder for enhanced accessibility. FLEXTour has the highest standard in components from NovaStar and Macroblock. The new NovaStar A8s receiving card and Macroblock premium drivers deliver stunning image fidelity, grayscale and flicker-free performance, says the company.
“As LED video continues to be highly integrated into live event and concert touring production designs, we are excited to be introducing FLEXTour which addresses the high demands presented by life on the road,” said Monty Rains, PixelFLEX president. “Underst

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USA - It isn’t often that a rock star coming off three successive Billboard Top Ten albums takes time before a big show to hold a yoga class, but then Michael Franti has made a habit of defying expectations, whether it’s with his genre-bending music, or unconventional dress code. (He gave up wearing shoes in 2000 and hasn’t donned a pair since, save for the flip-flops he puts on to board airplanes.)
Franti’s iconoclastic and richly fertile imagination was on full display at his 13 July appearance with his band Spearhead at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Supporting their multifarious performance was a Matt “Jonezy” Jones designed light and video show run with a ChamSys MagicQ MQ80 console.
Kicked off after the conclusion of his Love Out Loud Yoga class, Franti’s show took the audience through a weaving musical journey that touched rock, hip hop, blues, da

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USA - The Moody Blues have been touring since the fabled moment in music history referred to as the British Invasion, and while they have 18 platinum and gold albums, retail sales of more than 70m units and decades of touring behind them, the trio, consisting of Graeme Edge, Justin Hayward and John Lodge shows no plans of stopping any time soon.
The band’s illustrious career stretches across more than half a century. In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the album Days of Future Passed, Bandit Lites supplied the lighting and video elements for the legendary group’s latest tour.
Bandit Lites supplied lighting designer Mick Thornton, now in his fifteenth year with the band, their exclusive GRNLite Moving Washes, GLP X4, Robe Pointes, 4 Lite Moles and LED Pars, along with Chauvet Video Panels (6mm) and Clay Paky Mirage Video Panels (20 mm).
“The bal

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Europe - Front of House engineer Pete Johnson is impressed with DPA’s d:facto Linear Vocal Microphone, which he is using on the current Glass Animals tour.
“It’s absolutely great,” he says. “At points in the set Dave Bayley (Glass Animals’ vocalist) often sings quite softly while at the same time we want the show to be big, punchy and powerful. The d:facto Linear has excellent feedback rejection and lets me keep the amount of surgery I need to do to a minimum - always a bonus. We’ve used it in all different settings too, from tiny clubs to football stadiums. It’s taken all the stress out of achieving a solid vocal sound.”
Johnson has been a FOH engineer for 15 years and has worked with an impressive list of artists including Bonobo, Coldcut, Laura Marling, Leftfield and Django Django. He’s been mixing Glass Animals since May 2016 and is currently to

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UK - The successful Brendan O'Carroll comedy creation Mrs. Brown’s Boys continues its popular live touring version with full technical production – lighting, sound, video, rigging and crew – supplied by Adlib.
Adlib has been involved with Mrs. Brown’s Boys live since its very first theatre tour in 2000, and since then it’s become a multi award winning TV show and a massive arena live show phenomenon.
The show has continued to invest in production values and technology to keep everything moving forward along with the humour. Adlib’s director and account handler Dave Jones looked after the audio elements alongside senior account manager Dave Eldridge who oversaw the lighting & video requirements. Jones comments: “We are immensely proud to have worked with Brendan and the cast over the years and to see the concept grow and develop. We’ve

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UK - Old Barn Audio has completed its third Martin Audio CDD installation within Olympic class venues owned and operated by Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA).
Following successful fit-outs of the Lee Valley White Water Centre and Lee Valley Ice Centre, they have now completed a challenging installation at Lee Valley Athletics Centre in Edmonton.
This required the company to install a 30m-long roof truss section down the middle of the 200m six-lane oval track, six and a half metres up in the air, to support over half a tonne of Martin Audio’s popular CDD 12, CDD 10 and CSX sub woofers.
Built 10 years ago at a cost of £15m, the Centre plays host to a wide range of athletes - operating as an elite venue for Olympians as much as a walk-in facility for the general public. Boasting 4,000 admissions a week, it is the busiest indoor athletics facility in the

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UK - Live Recording’s Rob Baldock took himself and his six Audient ASP880s up to Nottingham’s Splendour festival last month, to capture multi-track recordings of all the artists on the main stage, including Gabrielle Aplin and Busted.
Hired by local TV station, Notts TV, Baldock is in his fifth year at Splendour - where this year a record-breaking 25,000 people partied at Wollaton Park in the rain - and wasn’t fazed by the increased audience, or the weather. Indeed the eight-channel ASP880 mic pres from the British manufacturer continue to serve him very well. “The patch at a festival changes with every band, and the advantage of having the same mic pres across every single channel means that I can rely on that sound quality and gain without compromise - regardless of what microphone or line signal I'm being given,” he says.
“It did rain this year at Splend

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Brazil - A personal dream to bring state of the art recording facilities to the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre has led producer/engineer Rafael Hauck to invest in PMC MB2 XBD monitors for his new studio, Audio Porto.
The monitors have been installed in the facility’s main control room, which links to five recording spaces including a large live room with a fibre optic internet connection for live streaming. Audio Porto also has a second, smaller control room and a 250-capacity lounge area with a stage for live gigs, presentations, courses and events.
Rafael Hauck chose PMC monitoring after hearing the MB2 XBD system at Metropolis in London and subsequently visiting PMC’s facility in the UK for further demos.
“I was immediately hooked,” he explains. “It didn’t take long for me to realise that this system was exactly what I wanted for Audio Porto. It

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UK - Miss Saigon has recently embarked on a major UK tour, taking the full West End production to every corner of the UK. The show opened at the Curve, Leicester in July before moving to Birmingham Hippodrome, from where it travels to Ireland, Wales, Scotland and back to England, culminating at Norwich Theatre Royal in September 2018.
Travelling with the show, with its lighting design by Bruno Poet, are two MDG ATMe haze generators, purchased specifically for the tour by White Light.
“My Associate LD on this show, Warren Letton discovered the ATMe hazer and recommended that I take a look at them,” says Poet. “I have used MDG’s Atmosphere machine many times before and love the fabulous haze they deliver. And we used two Atmospheres on both the West End and Broadway productions of Miss Saigon where they stood the test of time.
“But it was the extr

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Europe - Robbie Williams’ latest European tour takes in all points east and west of the continent throughout the summer, culminating in two shows in the Russian cities of St Petersburg and Moscow in early September. Touring in support of Williams’ 11th studio album, The Heavy Entertainment Show, the production reflects the nature of both the artist and the album, mixing full-on schmaltz with in-your-face entertainment in an atmosphere that is cheeky, loud and proud to be brash.
In a design set to dazzle in keeping with the effervescent star, lighting designer, Mark Cunniffe, opted to use 200 Ayrton IntelliPix-XT LED matrix fixtures to line the front edges of the stage, which is – what else – star-shaped. “One of the major challenges of a stadium show is that 50%-60% of the show is played in daylight, before transitioning into night-time later on. The further

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Europe - Lighting and production designer Mark Cunniffe knew what he wanted to create his vision and met up with SGM to provide the right luminaire. Besides this newly developed G-4 Wash-Beam, a vast amount of Q-7 and SixPacks are to be found in his design.
When creating the plot for the Robbie Williams Heavy Entertainment Show Tour, or for that matter any other lighting design, Cunniffe is very much driven by the artist, for whom he is working.
“I try to achieve something out of the ordinary and wherever possible something thought provoking, but at the same time I stay clear of any approach that could be considered to be overpowering the performance.
“I still believe very strongly that the role of a lighting and production designer is to be supportive and sympathetic as opposed to overpowering. I consider myself to be nothing more than a support act for th
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