Lighting

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South Africa - Gearhouse South Africa (GHSA) became the latest rental company in the country to invest in Astera wireless LED products by purchasing 48 Astera AX3 ‘Lightdrops’.
Ever since DWR Distribution was announced as Astera’s distributor in June, Gearhouse SA’s then sales manager, Bill Lawford, lost no time in placing an order with Duncan Riley and his team for the fixtures required for a series of high-profile weddings in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Johannesburg-headquartered GHSA supplied the full technical production for these events in conjunction with, and working for, Israel-based event producer Tali Yacobi.
In total, there were nine events related to three different weddings spanning a five-week period, for which it was decided to source all the kit from SA.
One of the specific needs was table centre lighting for the banqueti

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Belgium - Voted by the Dutch public as the “most beautiful painting in the Netherlands”, Johannes Vermeer’s 17th century masterpiece, Girl With a Pearl Earring, is renowned for its subtle use of colours and interplay of light and shadows. These attributes made the painting (or more accurately replicas of it) a suitable prop in the successful theatre lighting education session held by Chauvet Professional Benelux in September.
Taking place at the CC De Schakel Cultural Centre, the one-day session featured a stage with three different scenes, each of which contained a print of the painting on an easel, along with a sofa, a small wooden table, and a white vase with flowers. The stage that housed the three scenes had a lighting rig that included traditional tungsten fixtures, stationary Ovation LED fixtures, and moving Maverick LED fixtures.
As part of the day

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USA - Verge Aero, the specialist in high performance drone light shows, has placed its drone technology at the heart of new music video by Australian dance music trio PNAU, featuring American singer Ollie Gabriel. The project marked the first use of a large-scale drone light show in a music video.
PNAU’s Nick Littlemore and video director Benjamin Kutsko came up with the concept for the All Of Us video shoot, after Littlemore witnessed a drone light show at a festival. “We wanted to do something that felt like a psychedelic ‘Close Encounters’ with this singer out in the desert,” says Kutsko.
Kutsko’s research led him to Verge Aero CEO Nils Thorjussen, who was able to answer his questions about the drones’ performance and reliability, including how well they deal with winds. “When Benjamin called me about his idea, I knew there was really nobody e

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Canada - One of Canada’s leading motorcycle museums was given a striking, colourful new appearance this summer, thanks to high performance LED lighting fixtures from Vari-Lite.
Entertainment technology specialist ShowTech AVL was called in to upgrade the existing window lighting scheme for Deeley Motorcycle Exhibition’s 100 Years of Motorcycling exhibit. “Museum director Brent Cooke asked us to redesign the lighting and ‘give it some punch’,” says Brian Konechny, president of ShowTech AVL.
Konechny knew he could get that ‘punch’ from Vari-Lite’s high brightness SL BAR 660 and the attributes of its RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) LED source. “With the Vari-Lite fixtures we get not only the pastels we need, but also the saturated colours that you don’t get from many RGBW fixtures. The SL BAR 660s surprised us - we got some great deep, rich col

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USA - Following a year-long renovation project, the former West Nashville United Methodist Church re-opened last year as Clementine, a space for weddings as well as corporate, fundraising and music events. The venue offers a ‘blank canvas’ for hosting bespoke gatherings and that includes an expansive all-LED, all-ADJ lighting system which allows custom-coloured illumination of every part of the space.
Owners Dan and Brenda Cook are no strangers to projects that involve breathing new life into previously closed historic buildings. In 2011 they bought a shuttered church in the Hillsboro Village area of Nashville and lovingly restored it to create a boutique event venue they named Ruby. Since then the location has proved popular for a wide range of private functions, while Dan and Brenda have been on the look out for another suitable building to transform into a similar ven

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Spain - In 1994, the city of Madrid built a new stadium in its bid to be named the site of the World Athletic Championships. Although the city eventually lost out to Athens for the honour of hosting the games, its effort ultimately led to the creation of one of Europe’s most critically acclaimed stadiums: Wanda Metropolitano.
The 68,000-seat stadium serves as the home to Atlético Madrid, but on Saturday 29 June, it played host to another of Spain’s national treasures when it welcomed singer Manuel Carrasco who appeared there as part of his 35-date The Cross of the Map tour. Fans who packed the stadium were immersed not only in the emotional power of the star’s vocals, but also by the sweeping visuals that Jvan Morandi ran from a control centre powered by six ChamSys desks including two MagicQ MQ 500 Stadiums, two MagicQ MQ100s, and two MagicQ MQ80s.
With its lar

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USA - One of the largest rental houses in the United States, Main Light Industries of Wilmington, Delaware, has added Elation Professional’s Artiste Monet and Artiste Picasso LED profile luminaires to its rental fleet. Both award-winning theatrical-grade luminaires, the Artiste Monet recently won a PLASA Award for Innovation at the 2019 exhibition in September.
The investment in Elation’s Artiste Series adds to a significant amount of Elation products in Main Light’s rental inventory. Most important in the decision to go with the Artiste luminaires, says Main Light operations manager Randy Mullican, was the quality of build. “We have been working with Elation for over 15 years and again went with Elation for the quality of the product, as well as the after sales support,” he says. “We were looking for a line of products that would cover a good portion of our cli

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USA - John Featherstone of lighting and visual design practice Lightswitch worked as part of the XD Agency team to help create a high-impact environmental design for Cisco Live! 2019. Featuring a series of light-based artworks, this project was conceived to catch the eye and quicken the pulse of delegates entering the main presentation space at San Diego Convention Centre.
To do this, Lightswitch used over 400 Robe moving lights - 200 Pointes, 180 MegaPointes and 24 Spiiders.
The massive four-day event welcomed more than 25,000 Cisco ‘power users’ from around the world who came to learn about the latest products, services and ideas, to network and be entertained.
The central ‘general session’ space was located across two halls of the Convention Center’s extensive floorspace, configured to seat around 16,000 people with the presentation stage in-the-rou

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USA - After a nearly 10-year hiatus, the reunited Jonas Brothers have embarked on a new world tour, which will play 74 dates in North America and 16 in Europe, in support of their fifth studio album. Accompanying the Happiness Begins tour are some 200 Ayrton Khamsin LED profile fixtures.
Burbank’s silentHOUSE is providing the lighting design and tour production for the show, which features a curved LED videowall at the back of the stage, an LED floor and a talent walkway to VIP seating. The Jonas Brothers kicked off Happiness Begins in Miami in August and will wrap the tour in Paris next February. The artists have sold more than 17m albums worldwide.
“The show’s lighting design works in tandem with the video production,” says silentHOUSE CEO and producer, Baz Halpin. “The truss configurations frame the main statement of the LED screens, and there are no trus

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USA - Elation Professional is offering three new luminaires in its Paladin series of versatile wash/blinder/strobe lights. The Paladin Cube, Paladin Brick and Paladin Panel - all with IP65 protection - are compact and powerful outdoor flood lights useful for a wide variety of applications from stage/set washes to dynamic uplighting and eye candy effects.
Using 15W RGBW cells - 9, 24, and 50 respectively - they add vibrant colour to outdoor events while individual cell control and strobe make them flexible effect lights or audience blinders. RGBW colour mixing gives a full spectrum of colour options, including high-impact white light, for beautiful floods or accents. For added dynamism, multiple pixel zone control can be incorporated for spectacular pixel mapped and eye candy looks.
The Paladin Cube houses nine 15W RGBW cells with 3 x 1 cell control. Output for such a

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UK - Adlib supplied full technical production to the 2019 Vitality Netball World Cup staged at the 11,000 capacity M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool.
Adlib’s rental departments implemented a fully integrated video, lighting and audio package linking in with broadcast elements for BBC and Sky. The spectacle took place over 10 glorious days of top sporting action which delivered world class netball to an international TV audience and many thousands packing into the court-side seats which were sold out for the duration.
This quadrennial event featured two distinctive criteria. First, a spectacular opening ceremony which wowed the crowds and got everyone in the mood for the sports to follow.
Adlib’s technical team worked closely with curators of the ceremony Culture Liverpool and Iluminos. Adlib provided six Panasonic RZ21K 20,000 lumen laser projectors mounted v

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Spain - Florida Retiro is a popular downtown Madrid club. Adding to the vivid images that make this venue memorable are the swirling, colourful lightshows that accompany the dinner and post meal entertainment. House designer Fernando Rodriguez-Berzosa creates the stunning spectacles, and powers them with his ChamSys MagicQ MQ80 console.
Having been responsible for programming visuals at Florida Retiro since 2016, Rodriguez-Berzosa works with director Juan Ramos to create shows that reflect the passion and style of the popular venue. "The biggest challenge of designing for the dinner show here is to ensure that the light always matches the audience's experience," he says. "In addition to supporting the entertainment, we must create the right atmosphere to accompany different dishes.”
Inspired by the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, one of the first artists to outline the

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USA - High End Systems’ TurboRay made its TV debut on NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The entertainment talk show is using eight of the new fixtures onstage for its musical guest performance segments.
TurboRay’s deep saturated colours along with aerial beams - with twinkling rays of light, digital breakups and dynamic effects from the animation and gobo wheels - enhanced the Zac Brown Band, Mark Ronson (featuring Yebba), Bastille, and more to come in its Studio 6B location in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Centre.
WorldStage provides all the gear - including the TurboRay - for The Tonight Show. HES East Coast regional sales manager Bobby Hale says, “We are happy to work with Fred Bock and the Tonight Show team to showcase the new TurboRay. It is a fantastic scenic LED effects wash. The combination of four RGBW LED engines and the r

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France - There are three Café Oz locations in Paris and one in Bordeaux. Each has décor suggestive of the Land Down Under with Australian flags, posters and artwork. Setting an engaging and friendly mood at the clubs is a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures. Each venue has its own rig of lighting fixtures depending on its design and the general nature of its customer base according to Remy Zakine, artistic director of Café Oz.
Zakine, who began working at Café Oz 15 years ago as a DJ, believes that lighting is essential to creating an inviting atmosphere at Café Oz locations, which draw large crows of French locals as well as tourists from Australia and many other countries.
“I have always been passionate about the technical side of club design and what it can contribute to our guests,” says Zakine. “We place the projectors on the ceiling above the d

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Indonesia - The seventh Ubud Village Jazz Festival (UVJF) was staged at the Arma Art Museum in the Bali Uplands, welcoming a host of local and international artists.
They and an enthusiastic audience embraced the true spirit of jazz presenting a wide range of genres and styles, celebrating the art of improvisation in a peaceful and harmonious setting, tagged Certainly! Indonesia.
As the event has gained status in the jazz world, the production values have steadily increased. This year, event curator Yuri Mahatma, gave a clear brief about the ambience he wanted to see and achieve on all of the stages, which was interpreted by set designer and artistic director Klick Swantara who also co-ordinated the production lighting design for the main Giri Stage.
This involved several Robe lighting fixtures - with 24 LEDWash 300+s, six Pointes and six PicklePATTs - su

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Italy - The Rossini Opera Festival (ROF) is an international music festival held in August of each year in Pesaro, the birthplace of the opera composer Gioachino Rossini. The festival and its technical team have always paid close attention to technical innovation, often leading new trends in the field of operatic lighting.
“Here we’ve experienced the whole journey of theatrical lighting, starting 40 years ago with analogue systems, incandescent or discharge sources. Then there was the transition to digital, the advent of the scroller, the first scanners, the yoke, the moving head and now we have LEDs used to their full capabilities,” says Fabio Rossi, head of the festival’s lighting department.
For an event like the Rossini Festival, where almost all the shows are like intricate works of art, the technical equipment used is of utmost importance. “The products

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France - Modulo Pi has released KineMotion, an optical tracking module designed for creative and interactive visual experiences. Available now as an option for the Modulo Kinetic series of media servers, KineMotion has been fully developed by Modulo Pi to provide “unparalleled performance and reliability”.
KineMotion consists in an add-on software designed by Modulo Pi, beacons, as well as a calibration kit made of a wand and a square. Based on KineMotion and OptiTrack tracking cameras, Modulo Kinetic masters the whole calibration process.
Combined with the extensive capabilities of Modulo Kinetic - 3D particles engine, nodal editor, timeline sequencer, KineMotion “unlocks new opportunities for creative and interactive visual experiences such as projection on moving objects, particles drawing and tracking, automatic follow spot, light painting, and more”. Pos

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USA - Altman Lighting has announced the Siren Sferies AFS-500 and AFS-700 followspots. Designed to be a powerful yet economical solution for any theatrical design, the followspots provide the full functionality of a traditional followspot but are packed with powerful new feature sets and operator enhancements.
“Understanding the need for high-performance LED luminaires in today’s theatrical environments, we are very excited about the introduction of our new AFS-500 and AFS-700 LED followspots,” explains Nicolas Champion, Altman Lighting vice president of sales and marketing. “Along with the recently released AP-150 LED Par luminaire, our SIREN Series of cost-effective theatrical solutions were engineered to meet and exceed the expectations of lighting professionals worldwide.”
The most compact of the Siren Series LED followspots, the AFS-500 is a lightweight

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South Africa - Unlimited Events Group has purchased 16 Astera Titan Tubes through DWR Distribution with plans to double up in the future. They also invested in two ART7 AsteraBox CRMX, the interface between lights and controller.
“I had been looking for a product like this for several years,” says Marius van Rooyen from Unlimited Events, head of technical for one of the largest décor providers in South Africa. “The cabling and processing of some of the other systems I had seen made them complex, high risk for technical failure and time consuming to install.”
The Titan Tubes have already been incorporated into a range of events, from exhibition spaces where they were used at AutoMechanika Johannesburg held at Nasrec, to the Midstream Spring Fest, an outdoors event. The units were utilised at the TrendVision Awards hosted at Emperors Palace and the Afri Group Aw

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Canada - Punjabi music star Gurdas Maan is guided by a simple theory when pursuing his art. People, he says, listen to songs “from their hearts, not just their ears”. Appreciating this, he makes it his mission to touch the emotional core of his audience, leaving them feeling better about their lives and the world around them.
This spirit was evident as soon as Maan took the stage at The Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on 22 September with his trademark tambourine in hand, and dressed in traditional Indian costume. His audience erupted with an outpouring of affection, and he proceeded to treat them to stirring performances of his classic songs like Sajna Ve Sajna and Heer while also weaving in inspirational stories and sharing heartfelt emotions.
Underscoring the deeply moving tone of the evening was an immersive Roosevelt Dsouza lightshow that fe

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USA Rock back Halestorm are out on the road with a lighting system supplied by Bandit Lites, blasting audiences with both lead singer Lzzy Hale’s powerful vocals and a deluge of light that matches the ferocity and energy that the Grammy-award winning band is known for. The tour recently wrapped a co-headling tour with Alice Cooper and is now out with Godsmack on a fall run.
“As the co-headliner, we had access to the whole air package, however Alice Cooper had a large set piece that needed to be covered,” said lighting designer Craig Richter. “We had to trim the blackout truss low enough so that I could shoot over it with the US lighting truss, but high enough to not give away the Cooper set.”
To that end, Richter crafted a design with an old-school, massive wall of light behind the band. Using custom-built set carts made by Gallagher Staging on a mast in a

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USA - Lighting director Tellson James is using a High End Systems Hog 4 lighting console to drive Mark Knopfler’s Down The Road Wherever Tour 2019. The 10 band members backing the former Dire Straits front man collectively play 49 instruments - from guitars and whistles, to saxophones and fiddles.
“I’m doing lots of pixel mapping of the eye candy in this show,” James notes, “and the Hog 4 is great for that. It is so easy to do on a Hog.”
This is James’ second time as lighting director for Knopfler. Lighting designer Mark Henderson drew the lighting plots for the 2015 and 2019 tours, while James programmed both. The 2019 tour kicked off in April, and is more scaled down for the North American leg, which started 16 August.
“The Change Type cloning feature (for swapping fixtures) is a lifesaver when working club/theatre tours, where you are faced wit

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USA - Those fans lucky enough to see horror-punk pioneers Misfits on their sporadic 2019 US tour not only get to see a band that literally invented an entire genre in 1977 - they also get to check out a plethora of “rad tricks” from the lighting and video toolbox of lighting director and designer Jon Eddy, who is serving up his visual magic on an Avolites Arena console.
One of the stops on Misfits’ limited tour included headlining Psycho Las Vegas, a three-day music extravaganza held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, that featured acts ranging from Electric Wizard and Opeth to The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, in addition to Lodi, New Jersey’s favourite punks. Eddy was the LD and designer for the entire festival, where he not only spec’d the rig and did the overall design but was the console jockey for all of the acts - more than 60 total - who were n

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USA - ADJ has announced the immediate availability of its Allegro Z6 motorized linear fixture with zoom. It features six individually controllable 30W quad colour 4-in-1 LEDs; each LED offers a lifespan of approximately 30,000 hours, effectively preventing the need for lamp replacement even if the fixture is used extensively for many years, says the company.
The unit also features a motorized zoom function, allowing the angle of the six independent light beams to vary between 4°-32°. In addition, the bar on which the LED apertures are mounted is fitted with motorized tilt movement, while the precision motors allow for 16-bit smooth sweeping motion.
Rounding out the Allegro Z6’s feature set, the unit also offers variable speed strobe and pulse effects, flicker free LEDs suitable for filming (1200Hz PWM frequency) and 16-bit dimming. In addition, the unit f
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