USA - Looking to create a new stage ambience for country legend Toby Keith, long-time LD Seth Jackson has become the first production designer to use GLP's new impression X4S LED wash light.

He has specified 83 of the compact 'S' fixtures, which introduce a new level of functionality, incorporating RGBW homogenous colour mixing, a 7 to 50 degree zoom range and high output level within a smaller footprint than the original X4. Supplied by Bandit Lites, they dominate the set for Keith's current Hammer Down tour.

Jackson had been seeking a fixture with the ability to travel in the new Bandit GoGo Truss, a modified version of the 20.5" standard truss, developed by Dizzy Gosnell and Mike Golden (hence 'GoGo'). "We needed the lights to sit in the center of the truss and keep our vertical towers centred with weight," he explains. "GoGo allows the lights to

South Africa - New Robe lighting fixtures have been installed in the Cape Town home venue of South Africa's renowned and innovative Zip Zap Circus School.

Zip Zap is a registered non-profit organisation, a circus school, a performance and technical training facility as well as being active in a number of youth outreach programmes, all aimed at taking the magic of circus and performance - together with all the elements involved with its presentation - and encouraging, enhancing and enriching people's lives with the possibilities of confidence, inspiration and self-development.

The new lighting in the Zip Zap Dome has been made possible by Robe and its South African distributor DWR, who have come on-board as technical sponsors.

Robe's CEO Josef Valchar, who is passionate about supporting the arts and particularly programs and companies interested in training and sharing skills

USA - This summer's premier North American '90s group tour -- Under The Sun - is aptly named, since the five-band show plays in just about every type of venue 'under the sun' during its marathon 36-city sweep. Travelling on tour buses with limited space and having to quickly set up gear to illuminate stages of all shapes and sizes presented some tricky challenges for Ian Staer of Circuit Six, lighting designer for Smash Mouth, headliner of the show, which also features the Gin Blossoms, Sugar Ray, Vertical Horizon and Fastball.

"We're playing a lot of differently sized venues all over North America, and it's important to me that no matter whether we're on a free-standing outdoor stage or in an amphitheatre, the band looks BIG," said Staer. Although bright, dynamic lights were a must for Smash Mouth's performance, the LD also needed fixtures that were lightweight

Belgium - Lighting and visuals designer Luc Peumans from Genk, Belgium based creative practice Painting With Light was commissioned to design lighting for the renowned Summer Opera Alden Biesen's 2013 season

They performed Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto - to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Italian composer's birth - in the beautiful environs of the moated castle of Alden Biesen. The season ran for a month and was, as always, completely sold out.

It was the first time that Peumans had lit a show for the company, which has a great reputation for producing quality works featuring international casts and a leading orchestra. This year's production was directed by the acclaimed Carlos Wagner.

The performance space is covered by an elegant tensile roof with four large vertical king poles, so these and the metal superstructure of the roof to some extent dictates where the

Denmark -Martin's new MAC Viper Beam is a beam fixture with linear zoom system that projects a very narrow pencil beam of high-intensity light. The final fixture in the MAC Viper family, it is available as an easy-to-install front lens replacement kit for any standard MAC Viper AirFX.

Designed for high-impact, big beam effects and longer throws, it houses the same high-quality feature set as Martin's MAC Viper AirFX, including a vibrant colour mixing system and "stunning aerial effects". It has also inherited the same compact form, impressive speed and light quality using the same 1000 W source as the other Viper Family luminaires.

With 80 percent greater intensity than the MAC Viper AirFX, the MAC Viper Beam can cut through all forms of ambient lighting. Its linear zoom creates a tighter beam and the auto-linked focus means that hard-edge effects hold their focus th

The Netherlands - Aalsmeer, Netherlands based technical solutions and rental company Eventec has recently invested in over 80 new Robe moving lights, including Pointes, LEDWash 300s and MMX WashBeams ... all to keep pace with their busy schedule.

This includes the supply of lighting, video and audio to the Aalsmeer Studio complex for United Broadcast Facilities (UBF) which produces a slew of leading TV shows including So You Think You Can Dance, its junior version The Next Generation, the Dutch Junior Eurovision Song Contest, IQ Test and numerous others.

Eventec's MD Wijnand Mol and his co-director Frans Mulckhuijse also head up the very successful events production operation Liberty Entertainment, for which Eventec is also the principal technical supplier.

In 2012, Eventec purchased 24 Robe LEDWash 300s and six LEDBeam 100s to service that series of

USA - City Theatrical is hosting a series of free webinars on wireless DMX. The first of five webinars in this series is What You Need To Know About Wireless DMX (27 August). In this session you will get a general overview of wireless DMX.

The second webinar in the series is on the SHoW DMX SHoW Baby 5 (24 September) where you will learn how to set up a simple, plug and play wireless DMX system. The third webinar is on City Theatrical's professional SHoW DMX Neo system (29 October). In this session, learn how to set up a complex multi-universe wireless DMX system and to tune it to meet the needs of a professional show.

The fourth webinar is on the SHoW DMX Vero and Vero Net where you will learn how to set up a permanent outdoor architectural wireless DMX system (10 December). The last webinar in the series is Using Specialized Antennas With Wireless DMX

Europe - Hi energy UK drum 'n' bass duo Chase & Status has taken the European festival circuit by storm this summer, with a lightshow designed by Neil Carson, based on a floor 'specials' rig of over 160 lights - with 60 x Robe LEDBeam 100s at its core!

Forty of the LEDBeams are attached to two custom pre-rigged trussing dollies wheeled onstage for lightning-quick deployment behind the band, forming a retina-burning 'wall-of-death' effect.

The other 20 LEDBeam 100 fixtures are rigged ten each on two 5m high towers positioned either side of the stage flanking the LEDBeam dollies in the middle

The high-impact effects that Carson has created with the LEDBeam 100 wall have impressed everyone, particularly in relation to the miniscule size of the units, which make them ideal for being toured in large quantities whilst taking up very little truck space.

The design also utilises e

UK - Utopium supplied festival lighting rigs for 11 stages at this year's Boomtown Fair held at Matterley Estate near Winchester, 8 - 11 August 2013.

The fifth instalment of Boomtown Fair, a live music and arts festival, attracted audiences of around 30,000 each day to see performances from headlining artists including David Boomah, Dub Inc., Mad Caddies, Babyhead and Slamboree.

For the third consecutive year Utopium supplied lighting and rigging installations for the elaborately themed and creative Boomtown Fair. This year Utopium was approached to provide festival lighting rigs for the large stages, including Lions Den, Town Centre, Devil Kicks Dancehall and Circo Baile.

Will Howie lighting designer and production manager for Utopium commented, "Boomtown Fair was a very unique project for us. The festival was split into 12 districts, each one its own theme to represen

UK - LSi Online has learned the sad news of the death of Derrick Saunders, for many years one of the best-known figures in the UK's professional lighting industry. Derrick passed away on Friday 16 August after a long illness. As sales and marketing director of Pulsar Light of Cambridge, Derrick was a familiar figure from 1970 through until his retirement from the company in 2000. Even in retirement, he remained actively involved with family business Adda Super Cases, alongside his wife Monica.

Derrick's funeral will be on 30 August at St. Andrews Church, Oakington, Cambridgeshire, CB24 3AN. All who knew Derrick are welcome to attend. The family has asked for donations in lieu of flowers to be sent to St. Andrews Church fund.

(Lee Baldock)

Sweden - This year's Eurovision Song Contest production featured a design element requiring very special lighting; an element that demanded "the brightest LED fixture on the market: The Solaris LED Flare".

Flanking the sides of the main stage, extending overhead to meet above centre-stage, were two eight-ton, 46ft tall super-arches. The arches, located midway between up - and down-stage, required internal illumination to achieve proper depth perception. Exterior lighting just wouldn't do. Layers of plexi/acrylic sheets in each arch were toned and darkened for effect, which posed additional problems: the illumination had to be bright enough to blast through the layers with potency, even on camera.

Ola Melzig, Eurovision's technical director for the last 11 years, explains, "The arches were intended to have stand-alone value, independent of external lighting. We t

Sri Lanka - PR Lighting fixtures were out in force at the recent Derana Veet Miss Sri Lanka 2013 pageant in Wadduwa.

Held at the five-star Blue Water Hotel luxury hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean, the ballroom stage was imaginatively lit by technology company, The Lighthouse (Pvt), who handle the lighting each year for this event.

The company's Dinusha Perera based his lighting plot entirely on LED and discharge fixtures from PR Lighting, which form the core of Lighthouse's rental stock, to complement the opulent stage set conceived by Madawa Madawala from Derana TV.

Chosen for their bright output, advanced featureset and good colour referencing, Perera selected 16 XS1200 Spot, with their fast and intense beams, and 13 XR200 Beam, a high output moving beam light - along with some LED washes and par cans. These were used stridently and dynamically, under the control of an A

Europe - Bruno Mars has been out on the road supporting his platinum Unorthodox Jukebox album - one of the fastest selling albums in 2012.

His production design team once again on this arena tour is Cory FitzGerald and LeRoy Bennett, who have worked with the artist since the 2011 Hooligans in Wondaland tour.

Stepping up to larger arenas this time around, production has upscaled accordingly, and Fitzgerald has again turned to GLP's impression LED moving heads. Having had wide experience over a number of years, this time he has built 27 of the impression X4's, supplied by VER of Glendale, into a retro-style set redolent of the '70s & '80s, including a 6ft mirror ball.

The designer has worked through several generations of GLP's premier LED fixtures down the years - starting with the original impression 90 and RZ 120 zoom. The profile of these was raised when they

USA - Calling a nightclub Light can be risky business. You're basically telling clubbers they should expect a mind-blowing illumination experience every time they step through its door. Setting the visual creativity bar this high could be perilous for some, but not for developer/partners Cirque du Soleil and The Light Group, or for John Lyons Systems (Hollywood, CA), which provided the lighting design for this new nightspot at Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Judging from the reception it's getting from Las Vegas nightlife reviewers, Light doesn't have to worry about living up to its name. Part Cirque show and part dance club with 38,000sq.ft. of space and a 35ft high ceiling, Light features acrobats spinning overhead and world-famous EDM DJs spinning up front. To add to the multi-layered sensory experience, video is everywhere; 6mm video panels line the club's massive walls, its ceiling and

UK - Lighting designer Declan Randall has used ETC Source Four LED Lustr+ to light Dennis Kelly's Love & Money, starting at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff before going on tour.

"The Source Four LEDs were invaluable in creating the look of the lighting," says Randall. "I used them both as a backlight and as an front-of-house fill, and their ability to subtly mix colour and shift from a cooler tone to a warmer one was incredibly helpful. It meant that I was able to achieve a seamless blend between the projections and the lighting for each scene.

"They also offered me the ability to adjust the colour balance during the scenes to be able to underpin the emotional tone of the scene by making small colour adjustments, with the changes almost imperceptible."

ETC's range of LED fixtures, which includes Selador Classic and Desire, as well as Source

Mexico - GLP German Light Productshas appointed Rocketerias Distribuidores S.A de C.V. as its exclusive distributor for Mexico.

Rocketerias has offices and facilities across Mexico, including in the capital Mexico City and in the Yucatan peninsula, which hosts one of the country's largest tourist destinations.

Peter Hald, GLP's sales director for Latin America, said, "We are very happy to have Rocketerias become our distribution partner in Mexico. They have a very focused and dedicated team of people. As the GLP range has grown and become more successful, we have been looking for the right partner to work with and Rocketerias fits the bill perfectly."

Hald will work closely with Rocketerias director, Alejandro Barbosa Calderon, who said, "It is great to add GLP to the range of brands that we represent in Mexico, and we look forward to bringing them to the mark

In The Open - A new performing arts consortium formed from six outer-London venues has been launched to tour large-scale outdoor productions within the venues' resident boroughs. The Albany theatre in Deptford, Artsdepot in Barnet and Millfield Arts Centre in Enfield have joined forces with Watermans in Hounslow, Harrow Arts Centre and Tara Arts in Wandsworth to create Circulate, the new consortium. Arts Council England has provided the group with a three-year grant of around £500,000 from its strategic touring programme, which aims to bring more shows to areas in the UK with limited access to the arts.

The group plans to take one major show annually to six high street locations close to each venue, which will be free for audiences to attend. For its first year, Circulate has commissioned London-based Emergency Exit Arts, which specialises in site-specific work, to create

UK - SGM UK has recruited experienced lighting professional, Matt Wiseman, as sales manager. He most recently spent two years in European sales at Rosco and prior to that served seven years at PRG where he was in charge of gobo sales for Vari-Lite - specialising in the film and TV sectors.

Wiseman said he was drawn to the new position by the pedigree of SGM CEO, Peter Johansen and SGM UK MD, Ian Kirby, and the partnership they have forged. "Ian was looking for someone to lead the sales operation, dealing with SGM customers face to face. SGM has made a huge impact in concert touring and I want to further develop this.

"At the same time the entire LED product range is innovative and the build quality is amazing. With a lot of the products IP-rated I also envisage further penetration in the architainment market as well as TV."

Commented Ian Kirby, "The growt

USA - Elation Professional is making it easy for lighting professionals to get 'on board' with the next step in LED technology. The company has introduced the Cuepix Series, a collection of blinders and strip lights powered by advanced Chip On Board or COB LED technology.

The Cuepix Series will debut with four models: Cuepix Panel- 25 x 30-watt COB LED Tri Color RGB matrix blinder; Cuepix Strip WW- linear strip with 5 x 30-watt warm white COB LEDs; Cuepix Blinder WW2- blinder with 2 x 100-watt warm white COB LEDs and Cuepix Strip Tri-- linear strip with 5 x 30-watt Tri Color RGB COB LEDs.

COB LEDs differ from surface mount (SMD) LEDs in that the multiple LED diodes are directly mounted on and electrically connected to its circuit board as one lighting module. Since there is no conventional device SMT (surface mount technology) packaging, interconnection lengths are shortened a

Germany - Wonderland Open Air is an annual Trance Festival, held at Waldfrieden, in the Stemwede community of Wehdem in Germany. The music is electronic - mostly 'Psytrance' or 'Goa" - and this year the 17th edition of the event welcomed a record number of visitors (in excess of 7,000).

A top class line-up came to this special forest location, which was impressively decorated, and received the full approval of the festival-goers.

The challenge of lighting the location was represented by the large split main floor and the second stage, known as the Backyard. This challenge was accepted by the team of Provisuell from Bielefeld under the direction of Mathias Schindler.

In order to satisfy the dynamics of both the different dance genres and the corporate designs, the production company decided to deploy premium products from PR Lighting.

According to Pascal Vieregg

UK - High Wycombe-based Dry Hire Lighting (DHL) has become the first UK rental house to take delivery of Showline's new LED linear SL BAR 640 luminaire - and will soon offer the SL BAR 660 as well.

Dry Hire Lighting's Nic Tolkien first became interested in the SL BAR 640 during the 2012 PLASA show in London: "We had been looking for the 'next generation' of LED batten fixtures for some time and the Showline SL BAR 640 seemed to tick all the boxes. We've had tremendous success over the past couple of years with the Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlaze and ColorBlaze TRX fixtures but felt that now was the time to enhance our offering and get into some of the newer technology and add a fixture with the homogenized RGBW. Of course we were very happy to be able to do this with another Philips product. The SL BAR 640 looks fantastic as a direct view fixture and is phenomenally power

Belgium - Around 250 Robe moving light fixtures were deployed site wide for the 2013 Tomorrowland EDM festival, staged in the normally sleepy town of Boom, Belgium, which saw 180,000 EDM fans entertained at the De Schorre National Park site for three days.

This was presented across 14 live stages with visual environment designed by Event organisers ID&T under the technical and artistic direction of Jurgen Nuytemans and Christophe Van Den Branden.

The Robes were supplied by several major Belgian rental companies, and production lighting designs for all the stages - mostly hosted by different clubs, people and organisations across the three days of the event - were created by a combination of the best LDs in the country.

The Creative Factory (TCF) provided their mobile visualisation suite on site, which was at the disposal of all guest LDs and operators to programme their show

UK - Bristol UK creative visual design practice SMASH Productions provided technical production, stage and architectural lighting and video designs for the Electric City area of the 2013 Eastern Electrics Festival, staged at Knebworth Park in Hertfordshire.

They collaborated closely with the George Made That collective to meet the brief which was to make Electric City look and feel "amazing, be as environmentally sustainable as possible and work to a tight budget".

All these challenges were relished by SMASH's Tim Smith and his team whose ingenuity and lateral thinking produced some remarkable results.

There were two main aspects of Electric City - an outside collection of impressive palette pyramids designed and constructed by George Made That ... and a Marquee housing the Secret Stage.

The structures needed to come alive at night, and with the area being called

China - The location was especially selected, the scenery perfectly prepared: FAW-VW Audi Sales Division China celebrated a spectacular show for their annual Ice & Snow Experience event with a spectacular outdoor staging. This year it took place in the Chinese ski resort Changbaishan in 1'500m above sea level in January 2013. Nearly 500 spectators from Europe and Asia were present and enjoyed the outdoor snow performance - at -30°C air temperature.

For the presentation of different Audi cars of the Q and Quattro series, a complete slope was prepared with snow-hills, big illuminated brand and car model signs and a gigantic lighting setup. This helped in changing the scenery quickly and put additional focus on the very model presented.

A central element of the performance, however, was the use of especially controllable snow cannons: Not only did they provide a special refle

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