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Lighting

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Europe - When American R&B/Hip-Hop star Usher set out on his 50-date The UR Experience US and European tour to promote his latest album UR, his touring LD Eric Wade (of FOHShow) was carrying an inventory that included no fewer than 216 of GLP's compact and highly flexible X4 S LED spots.

They form a focal part of the design conceived by production designers Baz Halpin and Chris Nyfield (Silent House) and Wade himself. Coincidentally, all had been early adopters of the X4 S platform.

On the UR Experience Tour, these are mainly deployed on the upstage wall of the automated ladders. Wade confirmed, "I wanted a wall of light from the very beginning and Baz and Chris made the space. The lighting system is a combination of asymmetrical and symmetrical. However, the GLP ladders are symmetrical and run on automation up/down/stage left/stage right and we could get ma

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USA - The new Platinum FLX from Elation Professional offers a three-in-one hybrid luminaire with exceptional power that has flexible use as a spot, beam, or wash light. Designed for a wide variety of professional stage and special event applications, its 470W Philips MSD Platinum 20R lamp can emit up to 23,000 lumens, an output comparable to 1200W fixtures and powerful enough to cut through bright LED displays and sizable rigs full of lights. It performs exceptionally well in a variety of lighting applications thanks to its full-feature design including CMY and variable CTO colour mixing.

Featuring new lamp technology and an innovative optical system, the Platinum FLX does the work of three luminaires in one. Using the same patent-pending dual optical design as Elation's Platinum SBX, Beam mode and Spot mode perform under their own independent optical systems resulting in a narr

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Denmark Martin Professional reports that the VC-Grid and VC-Strip LED Video family is now shipping in 15, 30, and 60 mm pixel pitches. Designed for architectural installations, stage design, and television set elements, Martin's VC family ensures design freedom for lighting designers and integrators on any creative LED Video project, says the company.

Martin's VC-Grid is a compact and powerful LED video panel that offers individually controllable pixels in RGB and cool, medium and warm white colors. The VC-Grid can be controlled via DMX or Martin's awarding-winning P3 protocol that provides high-quality image processing that eliminates the need for DMX pixelmapping, loose power supplies, and cabling. A hybrid power/data cabling systems also allows multiple VC-Grids to be easily daisy-chained for more creative designs.

"I'm really excited how these products make working wi

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South Africa - Johannesburg based rental and production company Lucidity has just invested in its first Robe moving lights - with the purchase of six Pointes and six LEDWash 300s from Robe's Robin series. These were delivered by Robe's South African distributor DWR.

Lucidity - founded in 2000 by Paul Newman - also has a presence in Cape Town and Durban, and has built up a reputation for servicing a portfolio of high end corporate clients plus a selection of other premium live events.

Initially Lucidity's focus was on audio and AV, also acquiring rigging and trussing along the way. Although this was Paul's first major lighting purchase, his 25 years of experience which includes international touring and working in some of the country's busiest venues, he appreciates the value of buying quality.

The decision was prompted by increasingly paying for lighting cross rentals for va

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South Africa - Lighting designer Francois van der Merwe will present Vectorworks Training during March at DWR Distribution, Johannesburg. There are four different courses to choose from, all of which will include training notes and lunch.

A Basic One Day Training course takes place on 9 March. Subjects include Basic Fundamentals, Layouts, Pallets, Basic Tools, Classts & Layers.

The Intermediate Two Day Training will be hosted on 10-11 March. Topics include Preferences, Workspace, Basic Spotlight, Basic Renderworks and Intermediate Tools. The cost is R1 500.00 incl. VAT.

The Advanced Two Day Training will be held on 12-13 March. Subjects include Working Planes, Advanced Modelling and Advanced Renderworks.

Alternatively, delegates may prefer attending all of the above-mentioned dates for Full Vectorworks Training Week held from 9-13 March.

(Jim Evans)

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USA - GLP could hardly have picked a more auspicious event than the Halftime Show at Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona for its new X4 Bar 20 LED batten to make a spectacular North American debut.

For the duration of the 12-minute segment, at which Katy Perry headlined, experienced LD Bob Barnhart (of Full Flood) used 12 of the new X4 Bar 20, as well as 16 of another recently introduced fixture, GLP's large format impression X4 XL.

For Barnhart, who has used various generations of the impression at other high profile events over the years, this was his 17th outing at the Super Bowl Halftime Show.

GLP US's president Mark Ravenhill recalls his early conversations with the LD when he introduced the new X4 Bar 20, GLP's new zooming and tilting batten unit. "Bob was looking for something new for the upstage portion of one of the stages - a low profile fixture that would ad

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South Africa - Avolites Titan One Training will be hosted at DWR Distribution, Johannesburg, on 24 February 2015. Gareth Chambers will present the course.

The Titan One has proved to be a cost effective solution for lighting applications. It offers fast and intuitive control of intelligent lighting, dimmers and LED effects from one on screen console.

"The Titan One is a small but powerful lighting solution," commented Nick Britz from DWR. "Gareth Chambers hosts regular training sessions which are well received by the industry. He has a great knowledge on lighting and control, having formally worked in the rental market. He is also very passionate about sharing this knowledge."

"Once delegates have a better understaind of how the software works, it helps build confidence when running shows," added Britz.

Delegates are requested to provide lapto

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UK - Philips Entertainment has been announced as the main sponsor of The Fresnel Lecture - a special free event organised by the Society of Light and Lighting (SLL) that will take place on Tuesday 10 March at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

The talk is to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Augustine Fresnel's Wave Theory of Light, which also coincides with UNESCO's International Year of Light 2015. Fresnel's findings are the basis for the lecture, which will discuss: '200 years of Fresnel: Why everything we light and look at today depends on what he said' and will be presented by Peter Phillipson.

"I am delighted that the Society of Light and Lighting Fresnel Lecture is being sponsored by Philips, alongside the International Association of Lighting Designers," says Phillipson. "Thanks to their support it means that 200 years of Fresnel's wave theory wi

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UK - Collecting together his experiences working with technology as a programmer, writing about old technology in his Classic Gear column for LSi, and trying to save some of that technology with the Backstage Heritage Collection, Rob Halliday will be talking about the history of computers in entertainment lighting at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley, near Milton Keynes on Thursday 12 March. Bletchley Park is perhaps most famous for hosting the World War 2 code-breakers. The National Museum of Computing houses a collection of historic computing equipment; perhaps in time it might provide a home to some of the Backstage Heritage Collection's historic memory lighting controls! Rob's talk is one of the museum's regular series that covers everything from the history of visual effects at the BBC to ultra-high resolution digital photography. He'll be focussing mainly on the

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Saudi Arabia - An array of Showline's LED luminaires have lit the launch of a national Saudi employment initiative following Riyadh-based event producer Maestro's investment in Showline stock.

The award winning company purchased Showline SL BAND 300 RGBW, SL STRIP 400 (both RGBW and Tunable White) SL BAR 520 and SL BAR 620 luminaires. The units were employed to deliver stunning lighting for the function, which was attended by members of the ministry, members of the Shoura Council and top executives from the companies involved in the scheme.

"We came across the Showline products at Prolight and Sound last year, and were extremely impressed," says project manager Nawal El Masri. "We decided to purchase them as the quality was so high - the standard we offer our clients."

Maestro has an impressive portfolio, with experience managing a broad range of events f

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World - Kylie Minogue recently completed the first leg of her Kiss Me Once tour, which included stops throughout Europe. The second leg of the tour begins in March 2015 with five shows in Kylie's native Australia. Following the successful tour of Europe, lighting designer Rob Sinclair and lighting director Louisa Smurthwaite provided insight into the creative processes behind the tour's extensive lighting design, which prominently featured fixtures from Martin Professional

Very early in the process, even before the new music was available, Sinclair had a meeting with Creative Director William Baker and Set Designer Alan Macdonald, during which it was decided that 'precise geometry' and 'Bauhaus aesthetics' were to be the key themes for the set design, inspired by the lines of the set and the early costume ideas. Baker then created a very detailed and instructive style gui

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The Netherlands - Dutch rockers BLØF have an enthusiastic and eclectic fanbase as well as earning serious respect for the musical integration of sounds, styles and genres from a diversity of cultures into their work, so the ability to 'paint' with light when constructing their live shows is key to evolving the look and feel of the visual environment.

For BL°F's recent show at Amsterdam's 17,000 capacity Ziggo Dome lighting designer Patrick Kramer did exactly this ... with a little help from over 200 Robe moving lights including 26 of the new BMFL Spots.

Patrick cut his professional lighting career teeth in the theatre and has always liked to work as part of a creative team. On this one, he collaborated with set and video designer Bart van Rooy and between them, the concept of building geometric shapes, squares and rectangles evolved. These were based on a Layher sca

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USA - James Schipper of Kinetic Lighting wanted something special to draw attention to the stage at the after-meeting party area during What's Next, a high profile, high-tech NBC Comcast conference on the future of television. "This was a crowd of visionary people involved in looking at new ideas that will one day shape the world of media, so they weren't going to be very moved by a bread-and-butter display," said the LD. "We knew that if we wanted to dazzle them, we would have to go with something bold."

Schipper got the look he was seeking with a massive diagonally slanted overhang array of high-output Nexus 4x4 LED panels from Chauvet Professional. Starting close to ceiling level upstage, the truss overhang formed a descending wedge of rich and varied colours as it moved down stage. The movement of the lights on the array, along with their intense o

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USA - Known by many as the best kept secret in the entertainment world, the Stagecraft Institute of Las Vegas provides professional level training by some of the most well-respected minds in the industry, on the most powerful equipment, such as ETC lighting desks. "The Stagecraft Institute of Las Vegas is a total immersion experience," explains faculty member and lighting designer Brian Gale. "It's where you get the muscle memory that is required to work efficiently in stagecraft disciplines."

The non-profit Stagecraft Institute began in 2006 and provides an immersive education to around 70 people each summer, 90 per cent of whom receive either a full or partial scholarship. All of the topics of study revolve around disciplines within the world of stagecraft and live entertainment, including lighting design and programming, media programming, sound, costumes,

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UK - As part of the design and development of their World Duty Free store in Heathrow's new Terminal 2 - The Queen's Terminal - travel retailer World Duty Free Group (WDFG) commissioned a remarkable LedGo FLEX curved LED solution to provide a highly adaptable fascia for their tax and duty free store - creating one of the UK's largest fixed-installation LED walls.

Concept visuals of the new store revealed curved surfaces running along the front of the entire shop fascia. This gave World Duty Free Group and Blynk Digital Media's Neil Muir the idea to fill the surfaces with LedGo's innovative FLEX curved LED panels, to display eye-catching, moving content, visuals and tailored messaging to visitors in the new terminal.

Blynk Digital Media approached A.C. Video, a specialist sales division of A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) Ltd., to supply them with the LedGo FLEX curved L

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UK - Since launching back in September 2014, over 250 rental businesses in the AV, lighting, events and broadcast sectors are now signed up to Current RMS, quickly identifying the benefits of cloud rental management software.

At the end of January 2015, Current RMS officially became a partner of the popular cloud accounting software Xero, offering seamless integration with this easy to use product, streamlining the rental cycle that one step further.

Prior to launching Current RMS, rental experts came onboard to test the system, working with the team to ensure it was entirely ready for launch. The same process took place for the Xero integration. One of the testers, Steve Lucas, owner of Soundbite Productions, has quickly seen the benefits of operating his rental business entirely in the cloud.

"Current is a must have for rental and hire companies, especially for those

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UK - Avolites has appointed London-based Annalisa Terranova as its new Ai support engineer and trainer and Pratheepan Vigneswaran moves to Ai Sales as Ai launches its revolutionary V8 software.

Terranova has been freelancing with Avolites Ai as a programmer, operator and beta tester, before a permanent position arose. She has a degree in Stage Design and a Masters in Performance Design and Practice from Central St. Martins, where she also works as a guest lecturer. In the past two years, she has experimented with various programmes for live video manipulation, such as Isadora, Quartz Composer and Processing, and also the Kinect infrared sensor for motion tracking.

Terranova has worked with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Science Museum, designing interactive installations and sound reactive visuals.

"I saw the ama

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UK - The lighting design for the final arena tour of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds - The New Generation was created by Tim Routledge, in the process adding his own distinctive stamp to the stage adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 classic sci-fi masterpiece - with a little help from Robe's new BMFL Spot fixtures.

When Tim took over lighting the epic live show in 2010, it underwent a complete redesign. The production toured again in 2012 before this final run, where he again reworked the lighting, this time due to swapping out several older fixtures for newer technology that had come onto the market in the last two years.

He retained all the classic looks and styling that had helped make WOTW such a visual tour-de-force, whilst new elements - not previously possible - were added to help ramp up the drama for this landmark finale.

The six BMFLs replac

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Russia - Established by Russian Radio in 1996, the Golden Gramophone Award is the most prestigious music award show in the country. Recently celebrating its 15th annual event at the Ice Palace in St. Petersburg, rental company (and technical partner) Euroshow played the leading role, developing a design conceived by the company's Alena Morozova.

Incorporated in the set were no fewer than 480 strings of SGM's pixel product, the LB-100 LED balls. Each string contains seven semi-transparent balls with a sphere of 28mm and a pixel pitch of 120mm viewable in 360?, creating alluring 3D graphic displays.

Demonstrating the magnitude of this show, the award itself is a golden gramophone statue, comprising gold and silver mounted onto a platform of optical glass with laser engravings. Experts estimate the cost of a "gramophone" to be around $1.4,000 US. On top of this, the Gol

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UK - Metronomy completed a year of touring their Love Letters album with a show stopping gig at London's Alexandra Palace venue with lighting and set designed by Ed Warren, one of an innovative 'new wave' of lighting and visual designers making an impact in the world of live stage presentation.

The floor lighting package throughout the tour had in fact featured Robe moving lights, and more were added for the finale show, making a complete count of 14 x Pointes, six LEDWash 300s, 39 x LEDBeam 100s, 17 x LEDWash 600s and 26 x Robin 600E Spots, all supplied by Southampton based rental company, GLS.

The stage design was based on a 'futuristic' 1970's TV show concept, the visuality of which was partly inspired by the work of Ed's two favourite light artists, James Turrell and Dan Flavin, and their experimentation with block colours and the bold vibrancy of neon.

The result

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USA - The annual excitement of the Pepsi Super Bowl XLIX Halftime Show raged around the University of Phoenix stadium, Arizona on 1 February, broadcast to the world by NBC. International superstar Katy Perry headlined the much-anticipated Halftime Show supported by Lenny Kravitz and Missy Elliott.

Ayrton LED fixtures played their part once more in the dynamic lighting design by Bob Barnhart of Full Flood, Inc., with the new, compact MagicRing-R1 and NandoBeam-S6 helping to wow the crowds.

Five-time primary lighting designer for the highly anticipated telecasts, Barnhart delivered a spectacular show, overcoming many of the logistical difficulties of lighting a full-blown, large-scale production in the middle of a football stadium by mounting his lighting equipment on sixteen mobile lighting carts and four band carts.

Twelve Ayrton MagicRing-R1 beam projection fixtures were in

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USA - The Winter Jam Tour Spectacular is back on the road for their 2015 leg of jaw-dropping performances and worship. Pollstar reported Winter Jam as #1 in 2014's First Quarter Year To Date Worldwide Ticket Sales chart, and this year looks to be even bigger with performances by Skillet, Jeremy Camp, Francesca Battistelli, Building 429, Family Force, Newsong, For King & Country, Blanca, About a Mile, Veridia and speaker Tony Nolan.

Bandit Lites once again worked with production manager Jerry Holcomb to provide the lighting for this ministry. Equipment included Clay Paky B Eye K 20 wash lights, Martin Vipers, Vari-Lite VL 3500 washes, Clay Paky Sharpys, Martin Atomic 3000 Strobes, 4 lite inline moles, Color Force 72 wash lights, 60ft black A type circle truss divided into 3 sections all lined with 12 mil LED product.

"I really like the arch that we've created on stage,&quo

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USA - There are many good reasons why women's soccer has become one of the fastest growing sports in the US: it's colourful, intense and it makes a great visual presentation. The same can be said of the Nexus LED panels from Chauvet Professional, which have also become exceedingly popular lately. It's only fitting then that these two stars crossed paths recently at the Women's World Cup Kickoff Celebration on Fox Sports 1 and Timer Warner Cable.

Lighting designer James Schipper of Kinetic Lighting used 40 Nexus 4x4 panels to create a dynamic stage backdrop for the celebration's main entertainment event: a concert by the hip hop rapper Flo Rida backed up by DJ Blaze. The Nexus panels on stage not only matched the Grammy nominated People's Choice-winning star's performance; they also reflected the upbeat mood of the televised celebration.

Schipper arranged the Nexus panels 20 un

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The Netherlands - At ISE 2015, Martin Professional introduced the Rush Par 2 CT Zoom lighting fixture, the latest addition to the Rush by Martin line for the installation and entertainment markets. The Rush Par 2 CT Zoom is a bright single-lens LED par can that offers fully pre-mixed white colour temperatures for a range of applications.

"I am pleased to announce the launch of the Rush Par 2 CT Zoom, which will be an ideal companion to our highly successful Rush Par 2 RGBW Zoom," said Mark Buss, product manager for Rush by Martin. "The ability to pre-mix white light ranging from 2700K to 7200K will offer lighting designers full flexibility for installations ranging from nightclubs and theatre applications to conferences and exhibitions."

With 12 10-Watt WW/CW (warm white and cold white) LEDs and a motorized zoom ranging from 10 to 60 degrees, the Rush Par 2

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