UK - West London-based lighting rental company Colour Sound Experiment supplied site wide lighting, projection and AV for the Secret Garden Party festival - one of the UK's original 'boutique' style events, a celebration of music, arts, creativity and expressive fun. A cast of thousands is encouraged to engage with ideas and dreams for four days of imaginative freedom in a secret garden location in East Anglia near Huntingdon.

It was the first time that Colour Sound has worked for the event, and it was also the first outing for Colour Sound's new BT12 12 mm pitch LED screen, a new lightweight product that has been designed and manufactured exactly to their spec.

The investment is to cater for the growing demand for visual and scenic display surfaces that are becoming increasingly integrated into 'lighting designs'. For Secret Garden, a total of 210 panels of the BT12 screen wa

Germany - Sound engineer Joerg Grünsfelder has been using a Midas PRO6 live audio system for the Dolby 5.1 surround sound show, Jud Süß in Worms, one of Germany's biggest theatrical productions. The show, which ran during June and July, attracted 2,000 people each night. All audio and video equipment including the PRO6 was provided by German rental company Medienpark Vision from Worms.

The outdoor production, staged in the shadows of Worms Cathedral, tells the tale of great friendship between a duke and his adviser Joseph Süß in a moving drama based on love, hatred, prejudice, betrayal and an unprecedented judicial scandal.

"I use Midas consoles primarily because of the sound and their phenomenal cross-fade option, which allows me to create simple global cross fades and also very complex fades by using unique cross-fade-groups," says Grünsfelder. "M

UK - Systems integrator IVC Media, has announced that it has completed the installation of a video conference and IPTV system to help improve services for the charity Help for Heroes (H4H). As part of the deal, IVC worked to supply discounted equipment and arranged advantageous terms from suppliers and manufactures for the installation at the personal recovery and assessment centre for wounded servicemen and women at Tedworth House in Wiltshire.

H4H leases Tedworth House and is currently carrying out a £17m renovation project that will see the first group of personnel using it this month, and by September 2012, it will be operating at full capacity. The personal recovery and assessment centre will provide the facilities to support the two key parts of the recovery process; the holistic life skills course and the activities to get the wounded, sick and injured back out doin

Israel - SGM has appointed Tel Aviv-based Halilit to be its exclusive territorial distributor.

Operating as an importer, distributor and retailer, the company - set up by the Greenspoon family 70 years ago - is now in its third generation. They have worked for 20 years with SGM's parent company, RCF, which forms part of a strong portfolio of MI and pro audio brands - all represented on a sole basis.

Stated Halilit's Eitan Glickman, "The arrival of SGM within the RCF Group is timed perfectly with our plans to get into lighting. It is the natural partnership for our professional PA department."

In May, Halilit held a seminar at its facility providing the opportunity for the Italian manufacturers to introduce themselves to the local market and demonstrate their products, and the changes that have given them a competitive edge.

Said SGM area manager, Antonio Parise,

Olympic Countdown - A number of West End shows have extended their booking periods into 2012, in a bid to benefit from advance ticket sales in the run up to the Olympic Games.

According to the Society of London Theatre, more than half of all programmed West End productions are offering sales 15 months in advance in anticipation of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games in the summer of 2012.

Long-running shows that have announced an extended booking period include Disney's The Lion King, Les Miserables, Mamma Mia!, The Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, The Woman in Black, Legally Blonde the Musical, War Horse, Blood Brothers and Billy Elliot the Musical. New musicals for 2011 that have extended their booking into 2012 include The Wizard of Oz, Shrek the Musical and Ghost the Musical

UK - Chichester Festival Theatre is one of the UK's flagship theatres, with a reputation for producing a wide range of theatrical productions, from musicals and comedies, to classic drama and innovative new writing. Since opening in 1962, the theatre has established an international reputation as one of the UK's leading regional venues. The Festival Theatre was founded by Leslie Evershed-Martin CBE and its first artistic director was Laurence Olivier.

With 1206 seats, the Festival Theatre was the first modern theatre in this country to have an open 'thrust' stage with the audience seated around it on three sides, allowing it a close involvement with the actors. The emphasis of the theatre's programme is on the summer festival, which runs from April to September and includes the show Singing in the Rain, which is based on the classic MGM movie.

GDS were commissioned to d

USA / Belgium - After three years on the road and 112 live shows to over 6.8m fans, U2's record-breaking $700m grossing 360° tour came to an end on Saturday at Magnetic Hill Music Festival, California. The tour spanned five continents and saw U2 perform over 2,600 songs, and it was not just the band that grabbed headlines across the globe - the now-famous Stageco stage on which they performed captured many people's imagination.

Following the speculation across the international press last week that the stage, nicknamed the 'Claw', will be available to buy after the tour, stage design and manufacturer Stageco prepares to welcome the systems back to their US and Belgium headquarters.

Stageco was involved from the earliest stages of the Claw's planning and conception, working closely with U2, show director Willie Williams, set designer Mark Fisher and production manager Jake

UK - Hall Stage has added the range of hoists & control systems from long-term partners Maquinas Iberica. Offering a wide selection of tried & tested powered flying systems and control options, Maquinas systems complements and extends the Hall Stage catalogue to include zero-fleet and wire rope point hoist options "at very affordable prices".

Hall Stage has designed a specific entry level zero-fleet hoist - the DGZ - with a 350kg load on four lines & 15m travel, moving a stage flybar at 12m per minute - three times the speed of regular chain hoists or standard pilewind units. Designed for service use with lighting and technical equipment or basic scenery moves, the unit comes complete with all necessary drop pulleys and bar, wire ropes and local control for less than £5,000.

Additional options include programmable control, variable speed up to 1.5m/second, flyi

Australia - Canterbury College is an independent, co-educational, day school affiliated with the Anglican Church of Australia. The campus is located on 32 hectares in Waterford, between Beenleigh and Loganlea in Queensland.

The College is very pro music and sports hence their new Canterbury Events Centre caters to both disciplines. The footprint of the building is 75m x 45m with a stage size approximately 24m x 12m plus wing space and side of stage areas. In full seating mode the centre can host 2000 seats.

The building itself is a BER funded project whilst the sound, lighting, audio visual and curtains have been funded by the College via fundraising along with some government funding.

"The Events Centre is used for many presentations such as speech night for senior, middle and junior levels and recently a Disney mjusical Beauty & the Beast with three fully sold

UK - Earlier this year The Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST), along with 97 other architectural projects, won a much-coveted 2011 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Award. Six of the 97 projects went on to be shortlisted for the prestigious Stirling Prize; the RST was one of them. The team at Charcoalblue Theatre Consultants, the company responsible for the design and planning of the theatre auditorium and the technical facilities, both in the auditorium and backstage, is delighted.

Managing director Andy Hayles comments, "This is the fifteenth project that the Charcoalblue team has worked on to win a RIBA Award and the third that's been nominated for a Stirling Prize. From the moment the RST opened it quickly and emphatically showed its strengths. The single-space, thrust stage format is an exciting, intimate and aesthetically enchanting space to inhabit.

"I

UK - When Daybreak, a UK TV breakfast show, was launching at the end of last year, it wanted to do so with a flourish. Not only did the station spend a great deal of money enticing stars from other channels, but they knew the studio needed to look great.

The studio, on the south bank of London's River Thames, would have windows on three sides, and be facing the iconic St Paul's Cathedral. In winter time, when it first comes on air at 6am, it will be dark, with it gradually getting brighter until there would potentially be full sunlight streaming through the windows by the end of the programme at 9:25am.

Lighting director Matt Carter looked to technology to solve the lighting problems that presented. Employing Stage Electrics, he first had £130,000 worth of dimmable 2.5m high glass windows installed, which, when attached to an ETC Paradigm control system, automatic

Denmark - Danish Rental Network Agents have provided L-Acoustics WST line source systems for Roskilde 2011, one of Europe's largest summer festivals. Nordic Rentals deployed its K1 system for the Orange stage, while Moto Rental, also a Rental Network Agent, supplied a V-DOSC/dV-DOSC system for the Arena stage.

The extensive system on the Orange stage consisted of 72 K1 cabinets with 24 K1-SB subs, 48 SB28 subs, 26 KUDOs, 28 KARAs and six SB18 subs, all powered by 75 LA8 amplified controllers in LA-RAKs.

"The sound was especially designed for the broad range of artists who visited the Orange Stage," says Nordic Rentals' Thomas Christensen. "It was able to create an almost electronic club sound for artists like Deadmau5, as well as classic stadium rock for artists such as Kings of Leon."

Adds Paul Jensen, from the Stage Section of the Roskilde Festival, &qu

UK - Rental company HSL continues its busy concert touring season supplying lighting and video projectors to the latest leg of the Brit Floyd UK tour - a new show celebrating the musical legacy of progressive rock band, Pink Floyd - which plays London's O2 Arena this coming week.

Brit Floyd under the musical and creative direction of Damian Darlington boasts a Floydesque style lightshow which is equally as original in its own right, has been co-designed by Dave Hill and Neil Trenell, with Trenell going out on the road operating.

The project is managed for HSL by Mike Oates who says, "Supplying a Pink Floyd show of any description is a lighting company's dream, considering they were such great technical innovators and responsible for evolving the whole concept of integrated visuals into a powerful, emotive, experience. In the process, they put the whole idea of touring and

USA - Delaware -based Main Light Industries has added Clay Paky Sharpy moving beam lights, Alpha Profile 700, and Alpha Spot HPE 1500 fixtures to its growing inventory of rental equipment.

Main Light, which serves all lighting markets from theatrical to touring, has become one of the largest rental houses in the US. After initially purchasing Sharpy fixtures earlier this year, the company has reinforced its Clay Paky offerings by acquiring the Alpha units.

"The features and quality of the Clay Paky fixtures uniquely position them in the market," notes Randy Mullican at Main Light. "We like the speed of the Sharpy - the unit is extremely fast and the beam projects out of the Sharpy incredibly far. They have no problem cutting through 1500-watt fixtures on stage."

Mullican cites the low noise level of the Alpha 700, which enables it to be used in theatre en

UK - White Light, the exclusive UK distributor for the Robert Juliat range of lighting fixtures, has recently supplied 18 of Juliat's Lancelot 4000W followspots to two other lighting rental companies, HSL and Neg Earth.

With a 4kHTI lamp and a beam adjustable from 2-5?, Lancelot is a followspot designed for the largest of venues and biggest of shows, giving a high output and a precise, controllable beam over even the longest of throws. This made it the perfect choice for shows by JLS - which HSL supplied from 12 of their newly purchased units - and Take That, which Neg Earth supplied from their new stock of six Lancelots. Lancelots are also in use on Shrek at London's Theatre Royal Drury Lane and on The Wizard of Oz at The London Palladium, as part of a rig supplied by White Light.

(Jim Evans)

USA - Infusing the excitement and atmosphere of a big rock show into a largely speech based national meeting can be a daunting prospect. "During the awards segments of the show the dBC weighted reading reached 106-108 dB SPL," said sound supervisor Chas Gerber of Gerber Acoustics.

"The programme was underpinned by lots of upbeat dance music with plenty of low end." Add the 37,000 highly motivated sales people for Primerica that thronged the reverberant confines of the Atlanta Georgia Dome and it's not hard to imagine the challenges facing Gerber. "With two cross stage lecterns for the presenters reading off the award winners' names, I needed to be extremely careful."

Gerber Acoustics has managed the audio responsibilities of this annual presentation before, and called upon the services of frequent collaborator Florida based Beachsound to provide a

Austria - The Donauinselfest - or Danube Island Festival - is a huge, free annual event that attracts millions of visitors to Vienna each June. This year, rental company Concept Solutions provided two DiGiCo SD8s for the Festival's Front of House and monitor duties, supplied to them by DiGiCo's Austrian distributor, TON Eichinger.

Concept Solution's Raphael Rupprecht explains what was involved at this truly massive event. "This is a three-day festival featuring open-air stages around the island," he says. "We started working at 9am every day, bands arrived at 10am for soundcheck and the show itself ran from 3pm to 12pm. It was a huge workload - we had to set up our standard backline, plus the individual amps and instruments for each band and sometimes there were as many as four drum kits on stage waiting to be miked up - but all acts ran smoothly and the overall m

South Africa - Stage Audio Works exhibited for the fourth consecutive time at Mediatech, which took place from the 20th to 22nd July at The Coca-Cola Dome in Johannesburg. The stand's impressive aluminium double tier design showcased Stage Audio Works' manufacturing division - Stage Plus Engineering, Total Fabrication trussing and the impressive Tour Step staircase with all the components designed and machined and fabricated in-house and proudly South African.

Total Fabrications is manufactured under licence by Stage Audio Works in Africa, making this world-renowned truss design more easily available to the local market. The obvious benefits for local customers with local manufacture and back-up service, is that expensive international freight costs will be eliminated and time delays will be all but eradicated.

Members of the team were also spinning Black and White on the stan

Australia - For a couple of weeks every June, Sydney is transformed into a spectacular canvas of light and music as the Vivid Sydney Festival takes over the city after dark.

The festival features a rich international programme of music and arts events including a spectacular 3D illumination of the Sydney Opera House and an outdoor exhibition of interactive light sculptures.

This year also saw the launch of Skyscraper Illuminati, a theatrical transformation of Sydney's Circular Quay, in which the district's large facades are brought to life each night with choreographed light shows that play throughout the evening.

Behind the illuminations was Sydney-based 32 Hundred, one of Australia's most innovative event lighting and audio companies.

When 32 Hundred's managing director Iain Reed discovered that his company had won the tender to design, install and operate the production

UK - Nick Gray from London- based creative lighting design practice Renegade was commissioned to design a scheme for the recent Yojhi Yamamoto Fashion In Motion live catwalk show in the Raphael Gallery at London's Victoria & Albert Museum.

Gray was working for show producers Bacchus, a regular client with whom he works on many London Fashion Week events, and for whom he also recently lit Lagos Fashion Week in Nigeria and a concert performance by Beyonce. He has also previously lit a Fashion In Motion show at the same venue for Kenzo

The high profile Yamamoto event featured some classic men's and women's creations from the acclaimed Japanese designer which were also part of a major retrospective exhibition of his work on show at the V&A.

Gray's brief was open other than that the producer's preferred to work in a daylight colour temperature. He also decided to add in a

Russia - PA rental company the Live Sound Agency has deployed its L-Acoustics K1 WST line source system at Rock on the Volga, a one-day festival in the city of Samara.

Among international artists to appear at the festival were Finnish singer Tarja Turunen, UK rock band Skunk Anansie and Russian artists Aquarium, Kipelov and Peter Mamonov.

The Live Sound Agency's engineer Vitaly Grinevich deployed two hangs of 16 K1 cabinets with two hangs of eight K1s for out-fill, and two hangs of six K1-SB subwoofers per side flown behind the K1s. A further 16 per side SB28 subwoofers were ground stacked beneath the K1 system. There were also six delay towers with six V-DOSC cabinets each.

According to Grinevich, this configuration allowed all 220,000 audience members to enjoy optimum sound right across the festival site.

On stage, monitoring was provided via 18115XT HiQ active stage mon

USA - Prism Sound has consolidated its relationship with producer/engineer Leif Mases by taking on US distribution for his entire Mases Electronics Maselec range of analogue dynamic processors and custom consoles.

Prism Media Products Inc, Prism Sound's US sales and distribution company, already markets the Maselec Master Series MEA-2, MLA-2 and MMA4-XR processors. Under the terms of the new arrangement, Prism Media Products Inc will now also market the MLA-3 multi-band compressor; the MPL-2 peak and frequency limiter; the MDS-2 high frequency limiter (De-esser); the MTC-2 and MTC-6 mastering consoles.

"This new arrangement allows both companies to exploit the excellent synergy between our product ranges," Leif Mases says. "My relationship with Prism Sound has always been mutually helpful and it makes perfect sense to develop this in the US by using PMPI for my

UK - Showsec ensured the safety of the audience at the Batman Live world premier at Manchester MEN Arena, and the VIP party hosted in Manchester Cathedral on 19 July, 2011.

Rehearsals had taken place over three weeks in June at Capital FM Arena in Nottingham, another venue where Showsec is the contracted security partner. With huge media interest producers demanded the specifics of the show, including the plot, remained a closely-guarded secret. Showsec was engaged to ensure the venue remained a closed set throughout rehearsals, with only members of the production crew and cast having access.

Prior to the opening night an audience of 4,000 guests were specially invited to the Manchester MEN Arena; a final opportunity to fine-tune aspects of the production and ensure the venue staff understood how Batman Live differed from other shows.

Tim Chambers, Showsec's project m

Germany - From June 15-17, Straubing provided the setting for another edition of Dynacord's MI Dealers' Academy. This year the Dynacord team led by Frauke Jungbluth (sales manager Europe), Martin Traut (senior product manager), and Andreas Köstlinger (tech support) welcomed 40 participants from the EMEA region.

The programme for the two-day course of seminars included a presentation of the new PowerMate3 powered mixers, a practice-oriented 'hands-on' session and a special workshop on signal processing. Köstlinger presented inter alia the CMS mixing consoles and a variety of different types of loudspeaker in EVI Audio's Demo Hall.

"These 'hands-on' sessions are always very popular with participants as they are continuously picking up new tips and tricks," says Frauke Jungbluth. "Naturally Martin Traut's traditional amp show was another highlight of the Academy.

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