Lighting

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UK - Lighting control manufacturer Avolites shows its most popular theatre and performance consoles, its ART 2000i installation dimmer and its eDMX wireless control system at ABTT 2005 later this month.

The eDMX has been used in a variety of recent high profile events, including the production of Mary Poppins at the Prince Edward Theatre in London's West End.

The ART2000i dimmer is aimed at theatrical, architectural, leisure and retail applications. It is currently available in modules of 24 x 16 Amp units or 12 x 32 Amp.

The Pearl 2004 is Avo's most popular 'live' lighting console, and is used in all types of applications. The D4 Elite console is streamlined to offer "the maximum power and functionality in the minimum physical space".

The Azure Shadow 2000 console is a variation on the Azure 2000 which has enjoyed success in a variety of applications. For theatr

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UK - As part of Hawthorn's continuing expansion they have just launched a new design studio based around 'WYSIWYG' the lighting design and visualization software. "WYSWYG was the logical next step in our continuing expansion, giving us the focus to develop our 'brand new' state of the art design studio" said Hawthorn's general manager, Simon Wood.

Based in the East Midlands, with easy road access to all parts of the UK, the new facility is part of Hawthorn's ongoing expansion programme, which has seen its warehouse and office facility expand from 50,000sq.ft to just under 100,000sq.ft, with a continued commitment to new technology and equipment. "Clients can now see visuals of their sets with full lighting and AV, be more involved in the design stages and we can better tailor packages for clients' events," continued Wood.

As well as 'in-house' use it is exp

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USA - TMB PowerPAR lighting instruments are being used to highlight two rotating automobiles from a trim height of 85ft, while conserving fixture count, in a recently installed display in the lobby of the Renaissance Center General Motors HQ in Detroit. Tom Bagnasco, president of Lighting Design Services Inc, located in Harrison Township, Michigan, accomplished the job using only eight TMB PowerPAR luminaires in the 40ft x 100ft atrium at the Renaissance Center. The main entry lighting was designed by Bagnasco, utilizing TMB PowerPARs and other equipment purchased from Light Source Inc of Milford, Michigan.

"After much research, we found the TMB PowerPAR to be the perfect choice for this application. The entire room is stainless steel and glass so overcoming the glare problems required a versatile unit to control beam patterns and spread," says Bagnasco. "Furtherm

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USA - A technological tour de force has been installed in Chicago's Millennium Park. The Crown Fountain - thought to be one of the most expensive pieces of public art ever undertaken - is made up of two 15m glass towers, displays the faces of hundreds of people videotaped by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa. Each digitized face is projected via a Barco video server, which supplies added information to the ETC Emphasis control system which switches colour mixing LED fixtures on or off in each light tower in sync with the video images.

Each face appears for five minutes at a time, smiling and grimacing until it purses its lips like a playful modern-day gargoyle and spits out water. A signal is sent back from the Emphasis system to a Barco show controller to control the intensity and colour saturation of the towers' video.

At night, the towers' faces are supplemented by nature image

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USA - Coldplay's newest video, Speed of Sound, features the innovative use of LED lights and a novel approach to control: the video's backdrop - and its major source of light - is a wall of 640 Versa TUBEs. The Versa TUBE, from Element Labs, looks like a fluorescent tube but contains a row of pixels composed of red, green and blue LEDs. Designers can map pixels from a video signal directly to the pixels in the tube.

What sets Speed of Sound apart, however, is that production designer Michael Keeling used PRG's Mbox media server to provide the video to the LED lights. Mbox allows designers to manipulate source material - including video, still images and effects - directly from a DMX lighting console. Programmers instantly can change colour, scale, 3-D rotation, rate of playback, degree of transparency and other elements, all without waiting for rendering time, say

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UK - Strand Lighting is to supply the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) with five racks of the EC21 dimmer for the Courtyard Theatre development in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Courtyard Theatre will be the Company's main performance space while the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is redeveloped from 2007. Installation will start at the end of 2005 with The Courtyard Theatre opening in mid 2006 as part of The Complete Works of Shakespeare Festival.

EC21 is the latest high density modular dimming system from Strand that allows the user to mix and match Truesine sinewave, thyristor, fluorescent and non-dim dimmer modules, with no loss of density. Up to 96 x 5kW sinewave dimmers may be contained in each rack. The rack and dimmers are fully web browsable using Strand's ShowNet Ethernet network and support Strand Outlook and SWC architectural controls. They also support DMX512 and come ready t

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UK - The HSL Group is to exhibit at ABTT for the first time. HSL is currently supplying lighting to some major UK theatre tours including Blood Brothers, Joseph & His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy, as well as servicing other major arts events like the Holland Park Opera Festival and providing equipment to TV studios across the UK. HSL is also sponsoring the Bar in the mezzanine level of the Lawrence Hall throughout the show."

HSL is now streamlined into three divisions. HSL Rental is "fully committed to ongoing investment in the latest technology to offer lighting designers and specifiers all the cutting-edge creative tools". HSL Rigging provides bespoke rigging solutions to corporate, theatre and live music events and HSL Sales & Distributions is the sole UK and Irish distributor for Community Loudspea

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UK - Earlier this year, six famous landmarks around the UK were given a spectacular colour makeover courtesy of White Light and Crown Paints to mark Crown Colour Week - a nationwide celebration of colour.

In each of six cities, residents were asked to vote for their favourite colour via a survey in a local paper. The winning colour was then used to light the buildings, orchestrated by a White Light team and led by production manager Simon Jones.

The buildings chosen were Bristol Cathedral, St Martin's Church in Birmingham, Cardiff Town Hall, the Urbis in Manchester, the Theatre Royal Newcastle and Glasgow University. Each landmark was lit for six hours after sunset. The touring lighting rig included twenty StudioDue CityColor colour-changing floodlights and seven Mac2000 moving spotlights as well as sixty Source Four Pars, and four Philips ArenaVisions. The rig also included o

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UK - Tryka L.E.D. is exhibiting its high quality LED luminaires for the bar and entertainment industry at this year's bar show (7-8 June, Earls Court, London). The company's full range of lighting fixtures will be on display, with units including small MR16 fittings, strips in a variety of lengths and powerful projectors, to name a few. Most products are available for interior and exterior applications, with a variety of optics and either RGB colour mixing, or with a wide spectrum of single colour LEDs, making them adaptable to most project requirements.

Tryka will also showcase the Gorillaluce, a gorilla-shaped 50cm sculpture designed by Shiu-Kay Kan of SKK Ltd and lit with Tryka LinkLEDs, the flexible LED lighting source available in both single colour and colour-changing versions, as well as with optional optic lenses. The aim of this statuette is to raise awareness for the e

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Italy - The San Remo Festival is Italy's longest running popular song competition, bigger than Eurovision and Idol combined, and has Italy completely transfixed each March. It's been running for 55 years, each year starring some of the biggest names in popular music as special guests, performing alongside the home-grown talent. This hugely competitive song contest also attracts major established Italian music artists, and the winning songs become huge hits.

This year, the festival lighting in San Remo's Ariston Theatre featured 33 Robe ColorSpot 1200E ATs, used nightly by Rai Television for five days of live broadcast between 9 and 12pm. Lighting equipment was supplied by Arco Multimedia Group from Roma, owned by Luciano Vinciguerra. The lighting director was Giuseppe Quini, who also specified the Robe fixtures. Quini worked alongside his programmers, Fabio Roberti and Lorenzo G

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UK - The Scan Operator 12 Advanced Professional DMX controller for intelligent lighting controls up to 12 fixtures with up to 16 channels. With its two different layouts, it is specially designed for use with midi applications. Additionally, it has an Easy Mode, which simulates a 160 channel fader unit, which can be used as a standalone controller or to enlarge other DMX Controllers.

Meanwhile, the Scan Operator 12 PT Advanced is based on the Scan Operator 12 Advanced, But allows the user to control pan/tilt via jog wheels, and any channel can be inverted. A further feature is the programming of selective chaser overlays which can be combined with the normal chasers.

(Jim Evans)Scan Operator 12 Advanced/Scan Operator 12 PT Advanced.

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UK - TMC Ltd have devised a tricky design solution for the Birmingham Christian Centre - an Elim Pentecostal church situated close to Birmingham's Broad Street - with the help of architectural effects provided by Lighting Effects Distribution. Commissioned during the late 1980s, the building's ceiling is split into awkward asymmetric segments within a polygonal building shape. But the infrastructure had now become tired, and the visual and sound mixing aspects were in need of upgrade.

TMC's hire department had enjoyed a long relationship with the church's events department over the years. The contract sales team were consequently introduced to the project, and invited to work with the client to develop the scheme. It was evident that the existing low pressure sodium lighting, with its familiar yellow hue, was inadequate and TMC were asked to design a concept in which the moods c

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South Africa - Martin Professional's Maxedia recently took a leading role amidst some of South Africa's finest opera singers, including Sibongile Khumalo, Fikile Mvinjelwa and Derick Ellis, at the Aqua Opera in Cape Town.

The location for the Aqua Opera, directed by Angelo Gobbato, is exquisite: the stage is set on a barge at the V&A Waterfront and enables the audience, seated on land, to view the breathtaking backdrop of Table Mountain and the ocean. As the tide would cause the barge to steadily rise as the tide came in during the show, meetings with the Harbour Master established a perfect time for the Aqua Opera to commence with the least amount of interference from the ocean.

Once the natural phenomenon had been taken care of, the technical aspects could be put in place. André Rossouw, lighting designer for the show, had the mammoth task of ensuring a lighti

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UK - bar.05 will be Pulsar's fourth attendance of the Bar Show. Within the Koko feature bar Pulsar will be featuring a comprehensive display of its entire ChromaRange LED products and solutions. Also on display at the show, say Pulsar, will be the recent additions to the ChromaRange - the high-power IP65-rated ChromaFlood200 and ChromBatten200. These fixtures open up to possibilities for large-scale LED illumination projects, says the company's Andy Graves..

Pulsar can be found on stand C33.

(Lee Baldock)

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USA - Boston-based High Output put the Clay Paky Alpha Spot HPE through its paces recently to help launch the new Play Station Portable. High Output purchased the 575W Alpha Spot HPE at the beginning of 2005. "For their size and price, I think they are a really good fixture," said High Output's Peter Smith. "The animation wheel is a real plus, and the smooth dimming curve is beautiful."

For the launch of the Play Station Portable (PSP), High Output had to transform the lobby of the Sony building on Madison Avenue in New York City - which features an oversized Spiderman used in the Macy's parade. To complicate matters further, the lobby is a public space until 11:00p.m. "The whole event was a challenge because the space is really not designed for shows," said Smith. "Add to that loading into the room in the middle of the night while it's raining

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USA - Dave Keller has been named executive vice president of sales and marketing at Furman Sound. He assumes the role after having been with the company since July 2004 when he joined as vice president of the consumer electronics division, business development, and international sales. Keller's responsibilities will include overseeing the sales and marketing functions for Furman's consumer, professional, and international divisions.

"Furman Sound is in a great position right now," says Keller. "At a time when professional and consumer A/V users are just realising that they have to do something about the very real AC power problems they are facing, we've launched our next-generation technologies that address these issues better than anything else available. I'm looking forward to introducing our latest products to a much larger family of users."

(Jim Evans)

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UK - When Belinda King Presents approached LD Tim Routledge looking for new, flexible lighting products for new production shows onboard the world famous Queen Elizabeth II ocean liner - the new SoftLED video driven LED drape sprang to his mind. The custom SoftLED drapes were manufactured in 22oz cloth with 1,900 Color Kinetics tri-colour LED nodes and fibre optics sewn into them, and were fed by four Broadway Box power/data supplies hung behind the drape. For control, the Color Kinetics Video System Manager maps the video image across the drape, fed by the Hippotizer Media Server.

"I had worked on Belinda's shows onboard the QM2 and at that time we had a starcloth manufactured that had various images sewn into it. Having seen a brief video clip of the SoftLED I thought that this would be ideal for the QE2 projects, and this was proven in a full-scale mock up provided by Ar

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USA - City Theatrical, the Bronx, New York-based manufacturer of entertainment lighting accessories, has purchased the assets of A.C.T. Enterprises Inc, the Seattle, Washington based manufacturer of lighting hardware. Included in the purchase are all of A.C.T.'s lighting related product lines including the award winning Moving Light Hangers, Track Tamers, Safer Sidearms, and Vertical Extension Tubes, as well as their related patents, trademarks, production machinery and inventory, and an agreement for future product development. All equipment and manufacturing will be consolidated into CTI's New York production facilities.

CTI's president Gary Fails said: "I have admired Alan Crawshaw and his products ever since I met him. He's an inventor and innovator as well as being a well-known stagehand who knows the professional lighting world and its electricians and designers. This

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UK - Lighting company Siyan has purchased two new Avolites Diamond 4 consoles for the imminent Coldplay Twisted Logic world tour. Show designer Bryan Leitch has worked closely with lighting designer Nick Whitehouse to create a reportedly stunning show which promises to be "one of the most visually exciting and technically innovative of the year".

Of the Diamond 4, Whitehouse observes, "Apart from the fact it's one of the few consoles with the ability to run this many DMX Universes, It's also great for hands on work, and allows you to grab the elements you want and improvise immediately if you wish."

The D4 is fully loaded with 8 universes of DMX, including large quantities of moving and generic lights plus assorted video sources. Avolites made some specific software customisations for the console at the request of Whitehouse & Leitch, and Whitehouse

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UK - White Light's presence at ABTT will be bigger this year, with new products from Robert Juliat and Clay Paky and the award winning Digital Festoon System. White Light will also be announcing its appointment as a Prolyte distributor and also exclusive Arri Theatre Lighting distributor in the UK.

White Light will be showing examples of the latest lighting technology, including conventional lighting, automated lighting and LED lighting. Conventional lighting will include the Arri Studio Theatre 1K and Studio Theatre 2K fresnels. Moving lights will include the new, tungsten Alpha Wash Halo washlight from Clay Paky. LED lighting will take the form of the ChromaQ ColorBlock, which has been put to spectacular use on a number of recent projects lit by White Light's events team.

Also on show will be products from manufacturers for which White Light is the exclusive UK distributor,

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Italy - Continuing a busy year of overseas work for the projects team at Hawthorns, the team recently worked on a five-venue global dealer conference in Venice. A logistical challenge in itself due to the lack of roads! Having off-loaded the artic' at the docks, all the kit was loaded by crane onto a specialist barge then onto one of each of the remote venues and the same in reverse. "Not quite the romantic images that one normally conjures up sailing down the Grand Canal, but still great fun," said Hawthorn's Simon Wood. "We always like a challenge and something a little bit different and this certainly was!"

Hawthorns supplied lighting, sound and rigging and power distribution for the events with in-house personnel on site throughout.

(Lee Baldock)

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UK - Kave Theatre Services is returning to the ABTT Theatre Show, this year (15-16 June, Royal Horticultural Halls, London). Building on the considerable success of last year's show, the company says that this year's stand will be larger with many products on show. On the stand will be the renowned SFX sound playback software; RentalPoint, the leading asset management software for rental companies; and examples of Kave Theatre Services' wide range of flat kits. ABTT 2005 will also see the launch of KAVE's new webshop, the latest feature of the company's website.

(Lee Baldock)

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China - ETC has provided much of the entertainment and architectural lighting for the 50,000m2 Grand Theatre in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China. The system includes the largest ETCNet2 networked system in Asia. Internationally-known architect Carlos A. Ott and Petroff Partnership Architects (PPA) earned first prize in the International Design Competition for their vision of the Grand, which has been said to resemble a sculpture more than a building.

The 1,600-seat Opera Hall, the largest of the Grand's four theatre halls, premiered in August 2004. ETC Asia equipped the hall with a 4,600-channel Obsession II full tracking console system, which controls more than 300 ETC Source Fours lighting the massive stage. The 600-seat Concert Hall opened in early 2005 and has an ETC Express console for lighting control.

Later this year the Grand will open a mult

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Switzerland - Following the global launch of the Mercedes Benz M-Class, TLD Planungsgruppe GmbH was again called upon to provide the overall lighting for the debut of the B-Class at the Geneva International Motor Show, which also served as the platform for the European première of the company's M-class, the world debut of its redesigned CLK-Class and the unveiling of the Manufaktur Maybach 57S.

Tasked with making the lighting of an overall area of 2,200sq.m look stunning, TLD pulled out all the stops to ensure that the show was a success for Mercedes Benz' and Manufaktur Maybach's parent company DaimlerChrysler AG. TLD began work four months prior to the show's opening, when chief LD Richard Profe analyzed how the vehicles would look under the different colour temperatures of various fixtures. Profe then moved on to specify the lighting for the service areas, offices and confer

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