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UK - The Association of British Theatre Technicians 2013 Annual Awards, sponsored by two of the organisation's Silver Industry Supporters Group members, Stage Electrics & Triple E, took place on Wednesday 12 June, following the first day of the ABTT Theatre Show.

With the Awards' jury judging throughout the day and final deliberations taking place late in the afternoon, winners were presented with their individually engraved hook-clamp trophies at London's Truman Brewery, in front of exhibitors, guests and ABTT members.

The winners are as follows:

ABTT 2013 Lighting Product of the Yea : PRG V276 manufactured by PRG

The judges felt this product offered a way to get high-end and high-definition results from a media server & control desk at a more budget conscious price.

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UK - Championship water skier Jeremy (Jez) Harford commissioned 5 Star cases to design and build a custom lightweight flightcase for his slalom skis, to ensure that they can safely be transported overseas for training and competitions - without costing a small fortune in excess baggage!

Packing the skis for travel has always been a challenge explains Jez, and it was time to move permanently on from bubble-wrap, soft bags and keeping fingers crossed that they arrived in one piece ... to something more serious!

Water skis are constructed from hollow fiberglass resin materials which are brittle on the outside and a fall onto concrete, even from a short distance, can damage a ski beyond repair, so protection during transport is imperative.

UK based Jeremy was recommended to 5 Star, where he met Keith Sykes and the design team, who listened to his requirements and set to work to

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UK - Unusual Rigging has forged a working relationship with Dutch company DTS2 (Dutch Theatre Systems) to introduce a new line of automation systems to the UK market.

DTS2 manufactures and installs a complete range of winch, hoist and control technology. In an announcement made at this year's ABTT show in London, the two companies have joined forces to provide permanent installations in new build and refurbished theatrical, event and exhibition venues.

Speaking about the collaboration at the show Mark Priestley, capital projects manager for Unusual, said, "This development is an extremely exciting step for Unusual, as it allows us to broaden our range of services in the installation and capital projects sector to enhance our stage engineering offer. None of our installations are off-the-shelf: rather, using DTS2's outstanding control technology, we will add the Unusual 'm

featured content

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 - Out Board have posted five TiMax SoundHub Tutorial videos at their new YouTube TiMax Media channel.

Each short video runs about 4-6 mins and the set provides a fast-track training course for the versatile PC/Mac software used to program and control the powerful TiMax SoundHub audio matrix, playback server and showcontrol unit.

Titles include The Mixer basics, through Files and Cues, Triggers and Events, Cues and The Timeline up to a final System and Utilities roundup.

Following detailed briefs from Out Board, the videos have been compiled and narrated by Canadian sound designer and post-production engineer Alan Hardiman as he demonstrates the software's comprehensive feature set.

Rendered in full HD, the videos look like the real thing when watched full-screen, and ProTools was used to help edit and balance sound effects demonstrations and also for mastering the narra

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France - The nuclear blast at Hiroshima in 1945 is often described in Japanese as a flash (pika) followed by a bang (don). Last year, a performance lit with ETC Source Four LED Lustr+ fixtures aimed to represent the unexpected terror of the pika don through the medium of dance. Un Coup de Don, by dance company Ariadone and led by Carlotta Ikeda and Ko Morobushi (Japan), was part of the Festival Automne in Normandy, France.

Lighting director Eric Blosse says, "We all agreed that we needed to restart from the beginning, rather than seek to replicate the actual flash itself: we were left with a blank white space focused on the body in a trance."

The style of dance, Butoh, is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, which is well suited to trance-like movements and subtle colour shifts.

Says Blosse, "The

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Hungary - Christie projection is at the centre of what is believed to be the first permanent outdoor pixel mapping project ever staged in Europe.

The initiative of saving the small early 19th century Breda Castle, situated close to the eastern border of Hungary, by developing it into a new tourist attraction is the result of a collaboration between owners, the Megyeri family, and the initiator, Informax Ltd. Working with Bordos.ArtWorks and Invited Artists (run by Budapest-based 3D artist László Zsolt Bordos) and András Schmid (of Christie technical partner DNN|360) they have mapped the façade in a series of animated tableaux.

From 15 June onwards, an artistic video mapping show will be projected every day (and every hour) after dark, using the 3kW xenon light engine of a Christie Roadster HD18K (18000 ANSI lumens) projector, equipped with 1.8-2.6:1 HD zoom lens. And it is

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Australia - The recently opened, and largest flagship restaurant for the Hurricanes group, Hurricanes Grill Brighton Le Sands is an expansive venue which overlooks the beach.

When deciding upon a suitable audio solution for the venue, Steve Sidd (general manager) wanted great sound but was under the impression that a JBL/Crown/BSS solution may have not been within his budget. Fortunately Con Constantinou, managing director of Constant Technology Pty Ltd, recommended a quality JBL audio solution which the client was delighted to learn was affordable.

"Steve's perception of the JBL brand was that it would be too expensive," explained Constantinou. "Once we presented the quote to the client he was really surprised how much of a cost effective solution it was."

The main challenge was that the client didn't want the speakers to be visible and so Constantinou h

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Fundraising Fellowship - The Arts Council is to fund a new fellowship programme to train arts fundraisers of the future. The Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy Fellowship will offer 11 places for entrepreneurial graduates at organisations including Opera North and Tate Liverpool. The programme is the first of its kind in the UK. With continuing spending cuts it is thought fundraisers will be increasingly important for the arts. A recent study by the charity Arts & Business suggested a growing divide in donations to the arts between London and the rest of England. Philanthropic giving to theatres and galleries rose 10% in London between 2011 and 2012. while donations elsewhere fell 3.5%. The trainee fundraisers will take part in an intensive 12 month training programme and it is hoped that they will go on to be leading directors of arts organisations in the future.

Budget Cuts<

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UK - Members of PLASA attending the 2013 European AGM at BAFTA in central London recently were presented with the Association's Strategic Plan for the next five years by Matthew Griffiths, PLASA's CEO, and Ed Pagett, Managing Director of Panalux Broadcast & Event and current Chairman of PLASA's European Regional Board and overarching Governing Body.

The Strategic Plan is a blueprint for PLASA's future growth and will inform the tactical and operational plans needed to transform this collaborative document into a reality. It was clear that effective implementation would only be possible with the full support and involvement of the membership and, with this in mind, a concise version of the Strategic Plan would be delivered to all members during the summer.

PLASA worked to set the scene through 2012 in support of launching the plan and members were informed that the most signifi

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USA - The submission deadline for the fifth annual Rock Our World Awards is one week away; all nominations need to be in by 21June 2013. The awards, which recognize extraordinary achievement of products, projects or product application by PLASA members, were designed to acknowledge the genius of both the creator of technology and the designers or integrators who apply it. The process is easy and helps make your colleagues shine.

Anyone may nominate a PLASA Member for an award, so if you've seen something revolutionary that has rocked your world in the last year, now is your chance to tell us. It could be a piece of equipment you worked with, something you saw at a trade show, read about in an industry magazine, or an event you experienced. It could also be something your company created. Nominations for the 2013 awards must have been available in the market or premiered between

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UAE - Barco LiveDots, a Barco company, has entered into a strategic partnership with Dubai-based audiovisual expert Venuetech.

Venuetech will be the exclusive distributor of LiveDots' full LED portfolio in Saudi Arabia and a non-exclusive reseller for the GCC (Kingdom of Bahrain, Kuwait, Sultanate of Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates). LiveDots is confident that Venuetech will help to expand its business in the Middle East market.

Venuetech provides both system integrators and local channels with a wide range of products and services - from consultation, design, supply, training through to after-sales services. Its team of qualified system designers and in-house engineers is committed to ensuring total customer satisfaction through expert advice and support.

"Distribution partners can help us increase the number of customer touch points and improve our customer s

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Belgium - Hifi-Center Melis and Jan Geerts have completed the installation of a new Community Entasys sound system for Sint-Leonardus Church, located in Aartselaar on the southern outskirts of Antwerp.

With its oldest parts dating back to 1792, and additions in 1861, Sint-Leonardus Church is a traditional building with a beautiful interior, but its dimensions and highly reflective surfaces presented difficult acoustic problems.

The supplier Hifi-Center Melis, and installer Jan Geerts, worked closely with Olivier Massart of Community's Belgian distributor, M-Pro BeNeLux, to determine a solution that would provide the wide coverage required for the congregation with the very narrow vertical dispersion needed to avoid reflections.

Calculations showed that the entire area was best covered by just two Community Entasys FR full-range column-line-array loudspeaker systems positione

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Australia - Canberra's National Science and Technology Centre Questacon has become the first Australian institution to invest in Philips Selecon's fully tuneable high output LED PL1 luminaires.

The centre - which attracts more than 420,000 visitors each year - has purchased 20 of the PL1s, which draw on Philips' pioneering technology to meet the everyday challenges of illuminating the museums, art galleries and stages.

"As an interactive Science Centre our requirement for lighting is based on more of a theatrical approach than traditional museum lighting," says Christine Hendry, creative manager at Questacon. "We use a combination of focused light and colour washing luminaires and needed to have an integrated approach to our gallery lighting with a plan for implementation over several years. The PL1s were seen as the perfect solution for us.

"Our main cri

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UK - White Light has announced the appointment of Rebecca Fellows as venue relationship manager, providing a key contact for events venues in London and across the UK. Fellows, previously events administrator at White Light, joined the company in 2011. She sees her new role as an opportunity to further develop White Light's ties with established venues while also seeking to connect with new and emerging events spaces.

"White Light has a strong history with many venues across the UK," she said. "My role will be to help those venues and clients make the most of our services and to understand how we can better serve them. I will also be investing time with newer and smaller production spaces, looking at how we can help achieve great events in any space."

"We are very excited to have Rebecca move into this new role," said Stuart Crane, head of events

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India - Leading south Indian rental company Nitin Speakers & Electrical has invested in Robe moving lights to upgrade their lighting inventory.

Run by Sachin Naik - who has connected with many politicians, dignitaries, VIPs and celebrities in the course of his work - the Pune based operation supplies technical production to events of all types from vast political rallies for half a million people or so to concerts and musical extravaganzas to corporate presentations.

Known for many years as a high quality audio rental company and also for building large portable venue superstructures, Nitin Speaker's & Electrical opened its Intelligent Lighting division a year ago.

"We were being asked more and more frequently if we could supply lighting," explains Naik, "So we decided to do it properly and make a substantial investment so we could stock and supply the very be

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Europe - "Basically what we've got here is a massive TV screen," says Andy Tonks, video crew chief from Chaos Visual Productions on the current Muse production doing the rounds of European stadiums this summer. Made up of WinVision 12mm, there is a total of 1092 active tiles, each one measuring 56cm x 56cm. That makes a total screen surface of 450sq.m..

Flown off 25 x two-ton motors, the panoramic screen surface is split into five units and rigged across the rear of the stage, upstage of the drum riser which is itself clad in active tiles. As Tonks says a lot of thought has gone into making the logistics of rigging a screen of this size manageable in a touring environment: "Where we can the points are pre-rigged or in some cases we load in the whole screen system the night before the rest of the production.

"When broken down, the interlocking panels fit int

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Russia - Moscow's Teresa Durova Teatrium na Serpukhovke performance venue has invested in Philips Selecon's colour changing PLCyc1 luminaires in a major upgrade to its lighting equipment, replacing 121250W asymmetric tungsten cyc floods.

The Theatre's head of lighting, Vladimir Evstifeyev, invested in the PLCyc1s after testing them in the venue in early 2013.

"Vladimir and I were amazed at the PLCyc1's brightness and homogeneous filling without coloured shadows, and also absence of visual crossings of the light flows from adjacent fixtures," says Andrey Isotov, lighting designer at the Maly Theatre. "I was keen to be able to use the latest in LED lighting technology while working on The Scarlet Flower show, and the PLCyc1s do the job perfectly."

"Each PLCyc1 LED luminaire can replace the equivalent of a traditional four-colour, 500W per circuit cyc l

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UK - Independent Studio Services reports that the company enjoyed a 'fantastic, busy, vibrant' ABTT 2013.

"The visitor reaction to the products on our stand was fantastic," says CEO Simon Caldwell. "The Zoom Stage 200 went down very well, powered only by a standard power drill. The diea was acknowledged to be brilliant and highly practical."

ABTT put Independent Studio Serrvics on the map as UK distributors for Milos and Tuchler.

"The truss systems and staging from Milos and Tuchler are being requested more and more in the UK and we are happy that this trend was reinforced by the obvious interest they generated on the stand," says Caldwell.

(Jim Evans)

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Denmark - Just in time for the shipping of Harman Martin's new flagship lighting console, the M6, Martin has released a new software version for M-Series consoles with hundreds of improvements and a new user-interface, built from the ground up to make programming performances easier and more efficient.

The new v3 software is all about speed with faster start-up time, show loading and more efficient access to functions. The clean and modern user-interface has been optimized for touch and gesture technology, which allows the user to work in an environment where everything is accessible from a single finger touch. Users can simply swipe to move from view to view, access other playback banks quickly or change parameter selection. Double tapping on playback status accesses its functions and options. Additionally, users can enlarge the quick slide out for visual parameter control.

&

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UK - For the third consecutive year, Adlib Solutions supplied an L-Acoustics K1 PA system for the popular Capital FM Summertime ball event, staged at Wembley Stadium, London, which this year seriously upped the ante with line up hosted by Justin Timberlake, and featuring Robbie Williams, Taylor Swift, Lawson, Jessie J, Disclosure, Rudimental, Ellie Goulding and more.

The K1 was tuned by KSE & systems engineer Tony Szabo, who was joined by an Adlib crew of 16 including crew chief Marc Peers, and Dave Kay who worked as RF Co-ordinator.

Ian Nelson operated the presenter console, Michael Bernard Flaherty supervised the patch while Adlib's project manager Phil Stoker collaborated closely with the event's technical producers Production North, specifically their sound supervisor Andrew 'Baggy' Robinson and production manager Sarah Hollis, on the logistics.

Time was super-tight. The

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South Africa - Philips Vari-Lite's LED VLX Wash luminaires have been used to deliver 'breathtaking' lighting to celebrate the launch of Samsung's Galaxy S4 smartphone in Johannesburg.

Event production manager Victor Vermaak and lighting designer Renaldo Van Den Bergfrom AV Unlimited (AVU) specified 12 of Vari-Lite's 14,000 lumens output VLX luminaires for the spectacular show at the city's Sandton Convention Centre, which was attended by more than 2,500 guests.

"We used the VLXs in the Presentation area to light the Honeycomb roof. We chose them because of their colour richness and punch," says Vermaak. "The VLXs were used to create colour and mood changes and worked perfectly. The lights were positioned quite a distance from the roof and no other LED wash light in our company would have created what we were looking for over that distance. Plus the awesome zoom

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