Projects

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Belgium - For the recent incarnation of the infamous Nacht van de Schlagers, organisers decided upon a ’90s music theme marrying ’90s pop hits with performances from the biggest pop musicians and bands of the decade.
Having provided production and set design for the Nacht van de Schlagers since its inception, Creative Rental Solutions was tasked once again with creating a memorable visual backdrop for 2018’s ’90s extravaganza. Aiding them in this endeavour was a collection of Chauvet Professional fixtures that included 12 Maverick MK2 Spot, 32 Rogue R2 Wash, 120 ÉPIX Strip Tour, 60 STRIKE P38, 6 MK2 Profiles, 22 Rogue RH1 Hybrids and 56 COLORdash PAR H12IP units.
In order to reinforce this central focal point while adding to the grandeur of the stage setting, Thomas Vandekerkhove, CEO of CRS incorporated the ÉPIX fixtures within the architecture of the comple

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UK - Martin Audio partner, Penguin Media Hire, recently provided production, including a Martin Audio WPC scalable resolution line array, for the main stage at the all-day Mutations Festival. The event took place at the 900-capacity Hansen Hall on the outskirts of Brighton, and was staged by promoters One Inch Badge and Small Pond.
Describing the venue as “a hidden gem of a venue, crying out for a day of live music,” Dylan Thompson, system technician and technical project manager, Penguin Media Hire, reports that the WPC line array was arranged in three ground-stacked elements each side of the stage, with a pair of Martin Audio SX218 subwoofers per side. The system, along with five Martin Audio XD monitors, was powered by four iKON iK42 4-channel amplifiers. An Allen & Heath mixing desk was used at FOH and a comprehensive mic, stand and cables package was also provid

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USA - Integration specialist MC2Solutions has completed the design and installation of a powerful new Community loudspeaker sound system for the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church in Memphis, Tennessee. The church’s impressive main sanctuary can seat a congregation of up to 4,000 and is built in the round.
Carl Woodard II, the owner and designer of MC2Solutions, explained, “The system was required to provide very high quality speech and full-range music, with intelligibility being key. With such a large space, more akin to a theatre than a traditional church, we designed a system based on wide dispersion column line arrays with under-balcony fill, to ensure absolute coverage with no dead spots.”
Woodard continued, “I chose Community based on previous experience and the new IV6 modular vertical array was the ideal solution. I prefer passive loudspeakers

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Australia - Australia Day is celebrated and every year on 26 January when the nation celebrates in spectacular style. The flagship event is Australia Day Live held at Sydney Opera House and in 2019 it was bigger and better than ever. Australia’s musical stars, including Kate Cebrano, Jon Stevens and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, took to the stage in a concert, featuring dazzling firework displays and a maritime extravaganza.
Australia Day Live in Sydney is produced by the NSW Government through the Australia Day Council of NSW and is supported by Big Picture. Big Picture is a part of the NEP Worldwide Network.
This year, Big Picture supplied a turnkey technical solution of outside broadcast facilities, LED screens, event communications and network backbone which included a significant amount of Riedel equipment with 68 Riedel Artist Panels across OB tr

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UK - The newly installed d&b audiotechnik permanent sound solution in London’s Royal Albert Hall made its public debut with last weekend’s Olivier Awards show (see LSi April).
Driven by a vision to provide its audiences with life enriching, unforgettable experiences, the hall has installed the world’s largest single room audio system with over 450 individual loudspeakers from the d&b audiotechnik range.
The Olivier Awards, celebrating British theatre, served as an appropriate showcase for the system’s coverage and flexibility, significantly enhancing the overall listening experience inside the auditorium.
“Previously, our control over the audio experience was limited and often didn’t meet our high standards,” explains Oll

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USA - A recent ballet production of C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at Pine Crest School, Boca Raton, Fl, featured a Clifford Spulock lighting design, anchored by a collection of Chauvet Professional Rogue fixtures.
“Lighting the ballet opened me up to a lot of different opportunities to make choices and looks that would not normally be done in the stage version of this story,” said Spulock. “Happily, the director of the show, Kimberly Vlcek, has a great understanding of production and gave me a lot of freedom. Along with a strong score and great dancing, my lights really brought a lot of energy and emotion to the show. I really wanted to bring out the precision of the dancers when they were wolves or the Ice Witch, etcetera to help portray their characters more.”
Spulock’s rig for the ballet, which was performed by Pine Crest Schoo

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Germany - #reflection is an innovative laser performance presented by tarm Showlaser in Bochum, which is based on an array of static and computer-controlled, motorized mirror surfaces and diffraction gratings, multiplying the full-colour RGBYC laser sources and creating a spectacular scenography that “plays with shapes and colours, dance to selected sounds and create sculptures out of laser light, far from traditional laser stereotypes”.
"Laser beam deflections via mirrors and diffraction gratings have been used for over 30 years, but so far only with small static tiles, usually in the format of 15 x 15cm. The use of motorised units and mirror surfaces of various dimensions and formats, however, opens up completely new design options for use at events and presentations of any kind,” says managing director Ralf Lottig.
This performance can be experienced li

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New Zealand - Literally the world’s first festival of 2019 saw over 30,000 festival goers brave the hot summer sun at Mount Maunganui to enjoy world class music entertainment.
Local and International artists including Peking Duk, Sticky Fingers, London Elektricity, Shapeshifter, Ladi6, Tash Sultana and rapping superstar Cardi B. In only four years, Bay Dreams has fast become one of New Zealand’s leading summer festivals. The event began in 2016 with 5,000 attendees to over 30,000 in 2019 for the North Island event. Due to the popularity, a second South Island location was added to the itinerary in the city of Nelson.
NZ Sound Reinforcement, a full-service production company deployed a JBL Professional audio solution for the second stage with a combined audio output of 500,000 watts RMS that included the JBL VTX A12 and new VTX A8 line array elements.
Bay D

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Australia - The beginning of 2019 saw the opening event of the UCI WorldTour, the Santos Tour Down Under. Held in South Australia, it is the southern hemisphere’s biggest cycling event attracting 750,000 visitors and is globally recognised. In pitching for the contract, Adelaide’s Novatech Creative Event Technology proposed some fairly innovative audio-visual ideas and deploying Brompton Technology’s Tessera SX40 LED processors helped them deliver.
“We wanted to improve the spectator experience on every level,” says Ashley Gabriel, director of sales and marketing at Novatech. “We deployed our ROE CB3 and CB5 LED screens at the start and finish lines, with signal transported over fibre via Riedel’s MediorNet.”
At the Tour Down Under Village in Adelaide’s Victoria Square, Nexstage built a custom 18m wide by 8m high Layher scaffold structure for team pr

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UK - White Light is supplying the lighting equipment for the musical Hairwhich is currently touring the UK.
Having first debuted Off-Broadway in 1967, Hair follows a group of youngsters in New York’s East Village as they begin to question the world, authority and the American flag. Having been revived several times on both Broadway and in the West End, this is the 50th anniversary production and has already received a WhatsOnStage Award.
Lighting designer Ben M Rogers comments: “I previously lit this production for its immersive incarnation at The Vaults, Waterloo so this is an evolution of that design into a proscenium format for a national tour. The key design choices and looks remain but are expanded to fill these larger spaces and the enhanced scenic elements.”
Ben worked closely with director Jonathan O’Boyle to discuss the aesthetic he

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UK - Absolute Motion Control is bringing live moving light tracking, using LightStike, to The Bridge Theatre for their latest production. A German Life stars Maggie Smith, who returns to the stage for the first time in 12 years.
Over the course of the evening the set moves continuously and almost imperceptibly, taking one and three-quarter hours to reach its final position. The play is staged in a kitchen set, formed by four trucks which move diagonally off-stage. As they move off-stage, slowly gaps appear in the walls as they move apart. In addition to the four trucks, a large floor pallet moves downstage, carrying with it the star of the show.
Because of the constantly moving set, the lighting and scenery need to be synchronised precisely to ensure that the performer and the set are perfectly lit over the course of the long running cues. As an example, the flo

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UK - Ozzy Osbourne, Jimi Hendrix, Guns N’ Roses and Motörhead have sold millions of albums, inspired fans around the world and won bushels of major awards. Now these rockers share something else in common as well – each is featured in a licensed slot from NetEnt, the supplier of digital games to the online casino industry.
At the ICE London show in February, NetEnt announced that former Black Sabbath frontman Osbourne is the latest rock hero to be featured in its NetEnt Rocks series, joining Hendrix, Guns N’ Roses and Motörhead. Setting the tone for the big announcement on the Osbourne slot was an attractively designed stand that featured 60 Chauvet Professional ÉPIX Bar Tour fixtures from BigFish SRL, arranged to resemble guitar strings.
“This was the fourth year running that we were contracted by 2lk Design, the stand’s designers, to do the light

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China - Opera star Zhang Jun’s recent production Shuimo Xindiao featured JBL VTX Series loudspeakers and Crown amplifiers, which delivered premium audio to an arena packed with 10,000 music fans.
As a UNESCO Artist for Peace, Zhang Jun strives to keep the 600-year-old tradition of KunQu opera alive. His latest production, Shuimo Xindiao (New Tunes of the Water Mill), reinvented classical melodies with modern pop instrumentation, including guitar, violin, saxophone and electronic elements. The performance took place at Shanghai’s Mercedes-Benz Arena.
To convey the subtlety of KunQu with the intensity of pop music, the production required “a cutting-edge sound system with unparalleled power and clarity”. In order to deliver world-class sound for the performance, event crews deployed a JBL VTX line array system consisting of VTX A12, V25 and V20 lou

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UK - This year the producers of the Brit Awards took a bold step and encouraged show designer Misty Buckley toward some blue sky thinking (not that she’s ever needed any encouragement on that score). This presented new challenges for audio delivery at London’s O2 arena.
“The set this year differs fundamentally in that there is now a large set element flown above stage and out over the B stage into the audience,” explained Josh Lloyd of Britannia Row Productions who have provided the audio for many years. “Think orchestral reflector in a classical music venue and you have the form of it.” Lloyd has been Britannia Row’s audio designer and principal FoH engineer for the Brits for the last nine years and knows more than most how profound this change would prove to be.
“That change has inadvertently made it more exciting. You might say that year on year, ev

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UK - Technical production specialist CPL provided a production design plus sound, lighting and video equipment to Pandora Events for Tropic’s massive spring 2019 ‘glambassadors’ event, staged in Hall 9 at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham, UK.
Tropic Rocks offered a hi-energy festival / rock theme to energise the 2500 delegates, for which a look and feel to match was needed. This was delivered by CPL’s Mike Radford who led a crew of 40 for the get in / out and show sections of the one-day event, for which they had one rig day and a second for tech and rehearsals.
The event’s format encompassed a lengthy achievement recognition and awards section, new product launches and upcoming incentives, wrapping up with a lively evening party, so the design had to cater these various requirements and practical enough to transform from the conferen

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UK - This year’s National Finals of The Prince’s Trust and TK Maxx & Homesense Awards marked the fifth consecutive year that Anna Valley has provided AV for the annual event. The Awards ceremony was held at the London Palladium on 13 March 2019 and was run by communications agency, Blueprint Partners.
This year’s Prince’s Trust and TK Maxx & Homesense Awards were hosted by Phillip Schofield and Fearne Cotton and attended by HRH the Prince of Wales and celebrities including Brian May, Tinie Tempah, Luke Evans and Michael McIntyre.
Blueprint Partners have produced the national awards ceremony since 2015 and have relied on Anna Valley to help realise their creative vision for the event each year. The video element is critical to the award show’s success as the creative displays form an intrinsic part of the set design and staging, and video is used exte

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USA - Country music superstar George Strait beat his record-setting 2013 RodeoHouston NRG Stadium attendance with his March 2019 show, treating over 80,100 fans to a 32-song set spanning decades of chart-topping hits. The massive concert draw set an attendance record outnumbering any event in NRG Stadium’s history. An Allen & Heath dLive Digital Mixing System provided monitor support for Strait’s 11-piece band in an in-the-round stage configuration.
Mixed by veteran monitor engineer and Allen & Heath USA live sound / touring manager Mike Bangs, the stadium show relied on the same dLive-centric monitor system design Strait has used on his string of sold-out Las Vegas T-Mobile Arena shows. Configured to address the challenges of a 50sq.ft stage with limited sight lines, additional dedicated on-stage mix control was provided via networked Allen & Heath IP8 Remot

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USA - High End Systems’ Sola Series products have replaced part of the lighting rental inventory in the Kauffman Centre for the Performing Arts. The Kansas City, MO venue needed upgrading and required the wide range of features and benefits of the LED automated luminaires.
Kauffman Centre’s production services manager Eric Miller found the right lighting solution with the flagship SolaFrame 3000s and compact SolaFrame 750s after discovering them at a recent trade show. The purchase was made through locally-based Harvest Productions.
“The LED engine influenced the purchase,” Miller explains. “The top two lighting requirements were that it had to be LED and it had to have framing shutters.” Other features needed were for it to “be quiet, have a wide variable beam angle, and colour temperature that closely matches the tungsten lamp of the VL1000s”, he say

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USA - The current North American Death or Glory tour by EDM stars Adventure Club, began on 8 March at the Hollywood Palladium and runs through May.
Backing up the popular Canadian duo is a light and video show by Ryan Warffuel and Max Koehler of Antic Studios that is anchored by Chauvet Professional Rogue fixtures and PVP S5 LED panels.
Antic Studio’s design team manages to be both broad and tightly focused at the same time. Shooting crossing beams of light in multiple directions, it immerses the whole room while pulling the crowd into the custom-content centre-stage video display that breaks with convention by being interwoven with lights. By turning on different panels at different times, Koehler and Warffuel change the size and shape of their video wall to create different looks throughout the show.
With help from their business manager Ian Prock, who put

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UK - At this year’s Cheltenham Festival, one of the key meetings in the UK horse racing calendar, upwards of a hundred Martin Audio loudspeakers were on duty throughout the event.
The Jockey Club once again turned to their regular sound and lighting supplier, Unique Sound Systems (USS) to fulfil the brief. The company was informed that in addition to the many regular venues and pop-ups on the site, there would be a new venue, the Gin and Jazz Lounge. The Lounge would need feeds divided between live racing commentary, background music, DJ performing on a pop-up pod and live jazz bands.
This was also one of the first deployments of Martin Audio’s ADORN A55, with four speakers in the Magners Bar and six in the Gin and Jazz venue, where they were accompanied by six Martin Audio XD12 and four SXP118, handling the live inputs.
Explaining his investment, company dir

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UK - 9 to 5 the Musical is getting down to business playing to packed out audiences at the West End’s Savoy Theatre. Full service technical production provider Hawthorn was chosen to supply lighting equipment to the show.
Starring Louise Redknapp, Caroline Sheen, Amber Davies, Natalie McQueen, Bonnie Langford and Brian Conley, the musical features a book by the movie’s screenwriter Patricia Resnick and a score by Dolly Parton.
Hawthorn worked closely with the show’s award-winning lighting designer Howard Hudson to supply lighting equipment to his specification. Drawing on Hawthorn’s vast inventory, the rig features a combination of moving lights, LED fixtures and generic lanterns. This included Martin MAC Viper Performance, Martin Mac Aura XB, Claypaky Sharpy Wash 330, ETC ColorSource Spot and ETC Source 4 Profile fixtures.
Hudson said, “It was d

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UK - Adlib supplied sound, lighting and video to the recent tour by Liverpool indie rockers The Wombats. Tour manager Simon Fuller used to work for Adlib and knows many of the staff and crew. “Their way of working is excellent, and I always like to try and rent kit from Adlib when possible, fully confident that we will be well looked after.”
Adlib was the sole production supplier for the previous Wombats UK tour back in March 2018, and the set-up was similar this time around, so it made sense to keep the continuity.
Adlib’s Rob Bickerstaff looked after video and lighting for The Wombats lighting and video designer Dave Jackson from Creative Productions and was also out on the road with them this time and during the 2018 tour.
Adlib supplied a lighting floor specials package and a 5m by 3m upstage video wall comprising Adlib’s new Unilumin UpadIII H5 5mm

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UK - The fire at Battersea Arts Centre in 2015 sent shockwaves through the local community and the performing arts sector. However, fast forward four years and Battersea Arts Centre has been rebuilt and reopened with the fire contributing a notable and visible chapter to the venue’s colourful history and the overall look of the venue’s re-design.
Acousticians Gillerion Scott required variable acoustics to serve the wide programme of events planned for the Grand Hall of Battersea Arts Centre. Theatre consultants Theatreplan had the task of engineering a solution and explored possible product options with Triple E whose roller banner solution emerged as the most practicable solution. The design and manufacturing challenge was not insignificant but was one readily taken on by Triple E.
“One of our areas of expertise is the provision of variable acoustic solutions,

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Qatar - Qatar’s remarkable new National Museum launched in spectacular style at the end of March, offering visitors an immersive and experiential journey through the country’s rich history, current identity and aspirations for the future. Much of its 430,000sq.ft. of indoor space is made up of cinematic display zones, onto which specially-created film content is projected.
The result is the world’s biggest ever permanent video installation – the result of a collaboration between RES, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) and MAN Enterprise / EMPTY Joint Venture. London-based visual technologists, RES, started work on the project in 2014, providing technical consultancy and video media system expertise to The Doha Film Institute (DFI) on technical realisation and pre-visualisation of each film.
As part of its ambitious ‘Art Film’ project, the DFI commissioned nine
  1. Albion rises from the ashes with CDD
  2. Community chosen for Great Mosque
  3. Tamino shows go Mega in Belgium
  4. CT enables live video for Special Olympics
  5. Chauvet colours NZ drama school shows
  6. Christie projectors in Mexico City multiplex
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