Australia - The poet W.B. Yeats once described the vast skies as "the heavens' embroidered cloths". Taking its title from Yeats' vision, Vivid Festival's Heaven's Cloth created a canopy of light, colour and sound - thanks to Arup MAS.

The installation was an active and porous ceiling that displayed projected light via LED RGB architectural luminaires to create intricate colour change effects based on the theory of complementary colours. Enriching the piece was a soundscape composed using synchronised harmonious musical intervals.

"The circle of fifths - which depicts all 12 tones and musical key signatures graphically in the form of a circle - is like the musical analogy of the colour wheel," explained Christopher Sims, Arup's acoustic and theatre consultant. "Just as complementary colours are visually harmonious, the musical interval of a fifth is mat

USA - Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas presented its lighting designer Christopher Lose with the ultimate challenge: find a strong and stable fixture that could be hung at the pool-side stage all year round. Chris' answer quickly resulted in an order for 10 G-Spot LED moving heads for movement, beam versatility and patterns and four Q-7 RGBW for wash and strobing.

Chris explains, "The Pool Stage is a treacherous environment for lighting gear. It is an outdoor stage in Las Vegas. The temperature reaches 120 degrees [Fahrenheit - equal to 50 degrees Celsius] in the summer and below freezing in the winter. Las Vegas rarely rains but when it does it comes without notice. There is no time for crew to be dropping lighting fixtures on short notice. We needed 10 spare fixtures to service our 10 previous moving lights and I was looking for a fixture that we could hang all year

UK - ETC's UK dealers have now installed over 28,000 Sensor power control channels across central London, making ETC the most popular choice in the capital. If all the modules were stacked on top of one another, they would reach 980m, making them significantly taller than the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa - practically Lilliputian at just 820m - whose nightly strobe light shows are controlled by an ETC Congo control system.

The latest recipient of Sensor is the Prince Edward Theatre on Old Compton Street. The theatre's dimmers were last updated in 1993, and were due for renewal in time for the hit production of Miss Saigon. In keeping with other theatres in the Delfont Mackintosh group, which The Prince Edward is part of, five ETC Sensor3 power-control racks fitted with 240 modules, including ThruPower modules, were specified and installed. That gives a

UK - Lighting specialist White Light has recently supplied production solutions for the George Benson 2014 UK Tour. The Grammy Award winning artist performed some of his greatest hits including Give Me the Night and Turn Your Love Around during the tour which visited venues across the UK during June of 2014. The tour made stops in Glasgow, Manchester, London and Bournemouth.

White Light provided a complete lighting package for the tour, which was designed by LD Simon Tutchener. He described his approach to lighting the tour:

"I wanted to include a lot of colour and texture into the lighting. This was my third George Benson tour, so I was able to incorporate my previous experience and knowledge into this tour and have some fun with it."

The lighting rig is based around a core of Martin Professional fixtures - namely the MAC Viper Profile - while also i

UK - Lighting designer Steven Bewley is using a primarily Clay Paky rig to light renowned trip-hop trio London Grammar during the band's current UK tour.

The delicate lighting design created by the Newcastle-based designer weaves the band's haunting music into a web of theatrical glamour and is already earning itself industry praise.

"The brief from the band was that they wanted every song to look different," explains Bewley. "So the creative concept for the lighting design came from the idea of merging looks from a TV show, a stage show and a gig. We wanted to create a real mix - there's some old-style lighting mixed with video as well some new styles layered with some cutting edge LED technology."

During the past six months Bewley has worked with the band on their UK and American tours, deciding to change up the rig during this current UK tour by specif

Italy - Superstar singer / songwriter Vasco Rossi staged seven stadium shows in Rome and Milan this summer playing to over 400,000 fans, complete with a lightshow to match the occasion designed by his long term LD, Giovanni Pinna.

Pinna used 68 Robe Robin LEDBeam 100s which were used as specials and for highlighting the ebullient audiences that flocked to see Rossi whose controversial and hugely successful career has spanned four decades, spawned 27 albums and several spats with authority. He is one of the great Italian showmen who is passionate about his performances and famous for his live interaction and very strong bonds with the crowds when onstage.

For these shows Pinna took the set design by Gioforma based on the album artwork as his starting point for lighting. The stage was custom designed for the show and he crammed every available centimetre with lighting fixtures -

Future-proof Theatre - The Chichister Festival, one of the largest theatres in southern England has officially reopened after a £22m revamp. The first play in the main 1,300-seat auditorium is a new production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, starring Rupert Everett as Salieri and Joshua McGuire as Mozart. Artistic director Jonathan Church said the theatre had been "future-proofed" for audiences for the next 50 years. "This building wasn't built by a politician or the Arts Council," Church said. "It was built by local people - and that engagement has been what enabled us to celebrate 50 years."

Change Of Plan - Microsoft's plan to compete with Netflix and Amazon by producing its own TV shows has come to an early end, as the firm announces 18,000 job cuts. Xbox Entertainment Studio will close by the end of the year, Xbox chief Phil Spe

UK - Sonisphere Festival made a triumphant return to the UK in July, celebrating 40 years of rock music at Knebworth Park. Co-headlining the Bohemia stage, alternative metal band Therapy? played their 1995 classic album Infernal Love, accompanied by a stunning light show featuring a selection of fixtures from Chauvet Professional and trussing structures from TRUSST, backed by Chauvet.

Lighting designer Pete Davies prepared an impactful yet compact, tour-friendly package, primed for easy transportation across Europe for a series of festivals. Low-energy LED fixtures were the natural choice for both Davies and the band, keen to minimise their carbon footprint, without compromising the quality of the audience experience.

The creative solution incorporated eight TRUSST truss uprights, in a combination of 1m and 2m lengths, each with a Chauvet DJ SlimPAR QUAD 6 IRC at its ba

China - PR Lighting's initial brief when planning its new LED Studio 3205D was to develop a fixture purpose-designed for lighting up large scale automobile shows around the world. But with its inherent power, derived from a single 500W LED source, coupled with a stable colour temperature and high CRI, its high specification makes it applicable to any large-scale application - particularly TV studios, theatre, commercial and multi-functional situations.

In addition to its two available colour temperatures it also boasts enviable energy levels, with luminous flux measurements of 9000 lumens (43°) and 17500 lumens (71°), with its CRI of 90 further enhancing the vivid colours.

The LED Studio 3205D contains a 0-100% linearly adjustable DMX dimmer, linear motorised zoom and electronic strobe, with flexible beam angle from 43°-71° further boosting its versatility.

H

Europe - The Rolling Stones have just finished the European section of their 14 On Fire tour with another spectacular lighting design by Patrick Woodroffe of Woodroffe Basset Design (WBD) which included 54 Robe Robin Pointes amongst 200 plus other moving lights.

The 54 Pointes - the first to be incorporated into a design for the band and the first time that Woodroffe has used Pointes on a major concert touring show - were provided by award winning UK lighting rental company, Neg Earth.

They were located on 12 sections of HUD truss running upstage / downstage either side of the massive stage.

The Pointes were used extensively thought the show to create high impact washes, gobo looks and big beam effects shooting right out into the audience.

WBD's design associate Terry Cook explains that the team particularly liked the brightness, the linear prism, the zoom and the a

USA - Little Big Town is hitting the road with a bigger production than ever before with new technology provided by Bandit Lites. Bandit added the Ayrton Magicpanel-R to its ever expanding inventory, providing its clients with the latest technological advances to give audience members a brilliant show.

The Magicpanel-R is comprised of a 6x6 matrix that boasts continuous double rotation on two axes while generating clearly defined beams. Each fixture offers 11500 lumen and a centre beam intensity of 1,350,000 candela, but only consumes 450 watts. The result is a stunning look twice the size of a 45mm optic with 30 percent less power consumption.

Lighting designer (and recently nominated CMA SRO lighting director of the year) Chris Shrom is utilizing 28 Magicpanel-R panels on Little Big Town's summer tour in a four column, seven row set up that can be adjusted on gripple ladders

USA - American alternative rock band Third Eye Blind (3eb) is taking its Festival Tour to venues across America, and Clay Paky's A.leda B-EYE K20 LED-based moving lights are hitting the road with them.

3eb's production and lighting designer Mitchell Schellenger, of I Like Lights in Denver, created a look for the band that echoes the sunset set times of some of their gigs. "The band doesn't always have a headline slot, and when that happens they don't have the luxury of performing in complete darkness," Schellenger explains. "So we decided to mimic the look of sunset with warm pretty light on stage. To do that we needed really bright fixtures."

Enter Clay Paky B-EYEs, which Schellenger had read about and seen in video clips. "I wanted to get my hands on them - they looked really awesome," he recalls. 4Wall Entertainment Lighting's Nashville office

Japan - The newly-opened Vanity Osaka nightclub in Osaka features a bold lighting design by Michael Meacham that draws upon the brightness, colour and pixel mapping capabilities of over 400 fixtures from Chauvet Professional.

Meacham of iDesign Productions (Miami) has designed some of the highest profile clubs in the world. He faced a special challenge when lighting Vanity Osaka. "This is a single level club with both sides of the dance floor elevated for VIP seating, so my design was going to be broad, horizontal and expansive," he said. "The challenge I faced, though, is that there are these huge structural columns that land right in the centre of the dance floor."

Instead of trying to "work around" the wide columns, Meacham used EPIX 2.0 bars and EPIX 2.0 strips along with some adroit pixel mapping to incorporate them into his stunning design.

UK - Blue Peter is one of the longest running shows in television history. So much history, it is a national treasure. Richard Martin Lighting (RML) has been involved in the show for a long time now and continues to support lighting designer Lee Allen, who is always keen to try out the latest innovations on his shows.

This was the case when RML invested in the new Clay Paky A.leda B-EYE K20. What makes interesting and different is a completely new feature: the front lens may be rotated to create lots of small bright compositions, which may be opened and closed like petals. By adding colours and dynamic graphics, the B-EYE generates never-seen-before graphic light effects.

Blue Peter was one of the first RML shows for the B-EYE's and Lee reports, "The great beam effects are very quick to achieve with the shape function, this mode keeps the number of channels

USA - The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), better known as the Detroit Auto Show, is one of the largest automotive shows in North America and annually features many national and worldwide introductions from the world's most renowned auto manufacturers.

Perennially held at Detroit's Cobo Center, the 2014 NAIAS showcased the industry's latest innovations to more than 800,000 attendees over the course of nine days. As a critical component of the show's experience, over 1,400 Martin Professional lighting fixtures were deployed by a number of leading production partners and lighting-provider Christie Lites across the entire show, including booths for Chrysler, Nissan, Infiniti, Ford, Lincoln, Acura, Volvo, and more.

Chris Wojcieszyn of Lighthaus Design teamed with Bruce Spillman, onsite lighting designer, who oversaw the execution and focus for Chrysler's booth, to d

Canada - Wanting to showcase its charms, Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook commissioned Moment Factory to create Foresta Lumina, an illuminated night walk through the forest.

After nightfall in summer, visitors are invited to discover an enchanted trail winding 2 km through the woods. As they walk through the mysterious forest, visitors meet characters inspired by the area's myths and legends, who draw them into an immersive adventure.

The scenography, combining projections and lighting, is accompanied by an ethereal soundtrack. The result is an unparalleled sensory experience. The Moment Factory team custom-made the entire experience, including perforated metal panels resembling ancient manuscripts, lighting units designed to look like fairies, video mapping on natural elements and more. The multimedia installations are seamlessly integrated into the surroundings, creating an all

USA - Wireless Solution Sweden AB's award-winning W-DMX was recently part of the famed Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival with Visions Lighting once again supplying a superior lighting scheme for the show. The festival featured many past and current legends of music including Muse, Motorhead, Pharrell Williams, The Cult, Pixies, Beck, and Fatboy Slim, just to name a few. The two-weekend festival hosted more than 500,000 attendees.

Todd Roberts was on site as the overall production manager for Visions. Canin Campbell of Visions Lighting led the onsite team for set up of the system. Canin was supported by Daniel Baca and Steven Calley.

Roberts and his team were looking for a replacement of the Xenon searchlights used in previous years. The solution was the new Platinum Beam Extreme from Elation. Roberts and his team used eight Platinum Beam Extreme fixtures on each of the

Germany - Rental and staging specialists Cassiopeia Veranstaltungstechnik has supplied Calibre UK LEDView530 Universal Rental/Staging/Events scalers to the annual German School Award ceremony aimed at raising the profile of primary and secondary schools across Germany.

Taking place in July, 2014 at the historic Heilig Kreuz Kirche und Passionskirche Church, Berlin, the event was jointly organised by Robert Bosch Stifung, Stern magazine and German broadcaster ARD.de, supported by local politicians and attended by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Minister of Foreign Affairs and representatives from over 100 shortlisted schools.

The event was broadcast live on Phoenix television network ending with the presentation of a 100,000 Euro grand prize to Anne-Frank Middle School, Munich for winning the prize of School of the Year.

Cassiopeia's technology manager, Martin Heuberger said, "

USA - Parkview Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is an active and growing church that reaches out to its local community through a number of activities and ministries. Throughout their mission, they maintain an eye on the future while also keeping a focus on savings in their daily operations. The church recently sought to update their main sanctuary's lighting system to energy-efficient LED lights, both house lights and stage lighting, and chose an Elation package of low power consumption LED fixtures.

The lighting upgrade includes Elation TVL Series white light LEDs, colour changing Opti Par LEDs and Design LED Par lights. The main driver behind the design was the TVL F1WW and the Design LED Par Zoom, says Jay Cid of Elation rep firm PSLP (Professional Sound and Lighting Products), who demoed the Elation products, worked together on the design and provided product and l

France - Laurent Chapot, French rocker Bernard Lavilliers' long-standing, faithful and talented lighting designer, has come up with a creative, ingenious lighting design at the legendary Olympia in Paris. It is almost completely based on low consumption lights, provided by the French audiovisual equipment supplier Dushow.

Laurent Chapot has recently become "energy saving aware" and has started favouring "cleaner" light. However his choice is also motivated by a desire for a greater variety of easy-to-transport and easy-to-install lighting equipment, without ever compromising on light quality for any reason.

With this in mind, the French star's favourite lighting designer chose 24 Clay Paky Sharpys: 12 Sharpy Beams, whose success and quality need no proving, and 12 new Sharpy Washes, which he uses to create a stage backdrop and illuminate an elegant, sober c

Slovenia - The first 12 Robe ParFect 100 fixtures in Slovenia have been purchased by the Španski Borci Culture Centre in Ljubljana, a high profile venue run by EN-KNAP Productions which is the largest privately managed facility for cultural activities in the country.

It is also home to Slovenian Contemporary Dance Company EnKnapGroup. Named in honour of the volunteers who sacrificed their lives in the fight for freedom during the Spanish Civil War, the venue was originally built in 1981 and extensively refurbished in 2009.

It features an up to 400 seat main hall and a 60-80 capacity flexible studio space with a lively programme of performing arts designed to be widely accessible. It stages around 400 shows and performances - including exhibitions - a year.

Luka Curk, the venue's technical manager, instigated the ParFect 100 purchase, with the units supplied by Robe's proact

Lebanon - An all Robe moving light rig was specified for the 2014 Beiteddine Art Festival in Lebanon - a vibrant, high profile annual summer music and cultural event with an all-star line-up of local and international artists that is staged against the magnificent backdrop of the 2000 year old Beiteddine Palace.

The venue is ensconced in the mountains about 70Km South of Beirut and this year's diverse range of performances included Joss Stone, Katie Melua, Kazem Al Sahir, Bel Canto tenor Juan Diego Florez and a collection of special performances and collaborations including world famous Lebanese director, Wajdi Mouawad's unconventional adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone. The event was opened by a show-stopping set from Lebanese diva, Magida El Roumi.

The lights were supplied by Sound On Stage Events, a leading technical production company based in Dubai and actively work

UK - Lighting designer James Bawn specified the strong beam of the Clay Paky Sharpy to crown his colourful lighting design for Kirklees' Arqiva Tower, known locally as the Emley Mast, during the opening of the Tour de France celebrations in Yorkshire.

The 10 Clay Paky Sharpy fixtures, supplied by Blackburn based hire outfit HSL, beamed out from the tower's 272m high control room creating dramatic aerial effects across the skies above Yorkshire's Emley Moor that could be seen for miles around.

"As part of the 100 day Yorkshire Festival, Kirklees held a local week long 'Hypervelocity' festival to celebrate the Leeds opening of Tour de France," explains Bawn. "As part of the festival resident artists and designers were asked to light up famous landmarks. As I grew up round here and know the area well I was asked to put together a design for the Arqiva Tower on Emle

UK - PLASA London delivered its biggest ever visitor promotion campaign over the last 3 days, generating almost 3,000 new registrations and setting a record for registrations, meaning the show is now up 10% y-o-y on visitor pre-registration.

Commenting on the positive news, PLASA's director of events Christopher Toulmin says: "PLASA London continues to prove its relevance as demonstrated by the phenomenal take up over the last three days. PLASA London is a must attend event for the live entertainment technology industries. The show is in great shape and on track to grow in both floor space and visitor numbers in 2014."

To celebrate the positive news, PLASA London has extended free registration (saving each visitor £20) for another 48 hours, closing on Wednesday.

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