Brazil - UK based lighting designer Sam MacLaren was happy to be using Robe moving lights on his rig for two high profile back-to-back shows in Brazil which concluded the UK indie rockers Arctic Monkeys AM world tour, which had been on the road for 18 months.

Robe fixtures were supplied for the shows - Anhembi in Sao Paulo, an open air space famously utilized for their Carnival, and Rio's HSBC Arena - by leading Brazilian lighting rental company LPL, project managed for them by Erich Bertti.

Robe has been one of the 'preferred manufacturers' on the Arctic Monkey's rider throughout this tour which was originally designed by the innovative Paul Normandale, and has been lighting directed on the road by Sam.

Sam has also worked with LPL before - first on a Placebo tour and most recently at the start of 2014 with David Guetta.

"Knowing the high quality of the Robe products

USA - Emmanuel Baptist Pastor Wade Burleson described the results of Paragon 360's recent renovation project at his church in Enid, Oklahoma - by saying "Paragon hit a homerun with this one". To extend the baseball analogy a step further, one impressive result of that renovation is that Emmanuel Baptist can now make the transition from a traditional service with a choir to a band-led contemporary service in about the same time it takes Major League teams to complete one innings of play.

Springfield, MO-based Paragon 360 accomplished this feat at the 35-year old-church by adding new architectural elements and upgrading the audio, video and rigging system, in addition to installing an impressive collection of lighting fixtures from Chauvet Professional. As a result of these changes (and the hard work of church staff) Emmanuel Baptist is now able to change its sanctuary s

UK / The Netherlands - Lighting and visual control expert Avolites has appointed South Holland-based Improve as its new Digital Media Reseller in The Netherlands.

The announcement comes just weeks before Avolites and Improve team up at the Amsterdam tradeshow Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) to exhibit Avolites' range of control consoles and servers and unveil the new features of its Ai V8 software.

In May 2014, Avolites appointed Fairlight as its sole distributor for The Netherlands, and they will also be represented at ISE by Menno Appelhof, who will be on the Avolites stand. Improve will act as Avolites' exclusive Dutch dealer.

Improve's core business is the design and implementation of integrated lighting and video concepts for the corporate and cultural events market, sourcing industry-leading control consoles and media servers push the boundaries of what can be achieved

Switzerland - The merger between the HB-Laserkomponenten GmbH and Laserworld (Switzerland) AG, which concluded in mid 2014, has been awarded Deal of the Year for Europe by Acquisitions International, a magazine specializing in the analysis and evaluation of company mergers and acquisitions worldwide.

"We're very happy to have received this award," says Norbert Stangl, sales and marketing director of the Laserworld Group. "The potential that arouse from this deal for the whole company group is huge and we already see the significant synergies and benefits.

"The Laserworld Group is continuously expanding, and there are more deals to be expected in our industry soon. There are already many other companies where Laserworld is involved in one or another way, especially the US market which has high potential."

(Jim Evans)

Mexico - Elation Professional's Mexican partner, Adimsa, is involved in a large variety of projects throughout the course of a year and often turns to Elation products to fulfill the demand for dynamic lighting. Recently, dimsa has supplied Elation LED lighting fixtures to several top clubs in Mexico including Republica-DF in Mexico City and Press Club in Monterrey.

Last fall, Adimsa supplied and installed Elation LED lighting in one of the bustling city's newest hotspots, Republica club. The 800-capacity club, inspired by the old house design of the Republica age, features a colonial style with chic explosions of colour, yet with delicate touches. Architect Filipao Nunes designed the space with the interior concept completed by Javier Díaz Ceo from Fortuna Lab in cooperation with Adimsa. Adimsa's's Edson Rivera was responsible for the lighting design.

One of the club's outst

Australia - UK based folk singer / songwriter Passenger's recent Album tour campaign, Whispers, is drawing to a close with the acclaimed penultimate leg of the tour in Australia, featuring a show design by James Scott of UK based visual design collective Okulus, a new collaboration with LD / Visuals designer Louis Oliver.

In Australia, James was able to take advantage of Robe's latest BMFL Spot moving lights for the first time as part of the rig, which were supplied by MPH Australia, a leading lighting rental specialist. The rig contained 22 x BMFL Spots and 12 x Robe LEDWash 600s.

The BMFLs were used extensively throughout the performance for key and back lighting, with some positioned on the floor for eye-catching 'aerial sculpture' moments.

It was the first time that James had used BMFLs on one of his own shows - having first seen them demonstrated by Robe UK's Amy

Russia - Every year, farmers, milk lovers and music fans flock to Ufa - the dairy capital of Russia - to celebrate the Milk Music Festival. Festivalgoers can learn about the dairy industry, interact with farm animals, take a spin on amusement park rides, and - of course - enjoy locally sourced dairy products. One of the biggest draws to the festival is an open air stage featuring folk singing, dancing and musical groups. This year, the lighting for the performances was controlled by an ETC Cobalt 20 desk.

The Cobalt console was supplied by Kilowatt Rentals and Staging, who thought the desk's exceptional busking capabilities would be perfect for the Milk Media Festival. It controlled a rig full of moving lights, LED luminaires, audience blinders and strobe lights.

The festival was the first time that lighting designer Yan Prokofyev had used a Cobalt desk. ETC console trainer Vl

France - On the banks of the River Seine, between the bridges Pont de la Concorde and Passerelle de Solférino, and close to Musée d'Orsay, lies a part of Paris that is always buzzing with pedestrians, day and night, and known as Berges de Seine. In this urban centre, Mairie de Paris (Paris City Hall) organised a special Christmas lighting installation, which ran from mid-December until the end of January.

Lighting designers from LightLab were looking for a solution evoking a permanent vertical flow, to create a special 'city life' impression. They introduced rental company, Lumière et Son, who last year brought the Hermès flagship store at Champs Elysées to life during Christmas using LB-100 LED Balls from SGM. Their suggestion to create a 3D graphic volume to inspire city movements was met with great enthusiasm by the client.

Lumière et Son prepared a

UK - Registration for the fifth European RDM and sACN Developers Conference and Plugfest is now open.

The event will run Wednesday 22nd, Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th April 2015, in the UK, at Gatwick Manor, London Road at Lowfield Heath, just south of Gatwick Airport.

The Developers Conference provides a European forum for manufacturers, designers, consultants and prospective users to discuss and learn about the various control protocol standards emanating from the PLASA Technical Standards program, and aims to ensure that the adoption of these new standards achieves desired levels of interoperability and reliability.

Conference sessions will cover the use and implementation of the published RDM, sACN and ACN standards, together with other projects in the current PLASA Technical Standards Program such as "E1.33 : RDMnet".

The "Plugfest" is a hands-on o

UK - School Stage, the performing arts installation company offering exclusive provision to schools, colleges and universities - recently completed a project using Chauvet Professional fixtures to add colour and 'wow' factor to a multi-functional assembly hall in the newly built Lees Brook Community School in Chaddesden, Derby.

The new school building was commissioned by the Education Funding Agency (EFA) because, in direct contrast to the high standard of teaching, the school buildings were in poor shape - described by officials as being in the worst condition in the city.

However, no provision had been included for sound and lighting systems in the multi-functional assembly hall or drama studio. With the budget already stretched and sensing this was a real opportunity to create the hall as a spectacular performance space, the school's former head teacher came out of retireme

USA - When you have only one trailer for a high-profile tour, every fixture you load into it had better count. Butch Allen, the 2014 Parnelli Award Lighting Designer of the Year who has toured with a long list of superstars from Van Halen and Jennifer Lopez to Metallica and Usher, demonstrated this principle in stunning fashion recently when he created a maximum "bang for the inch" rig for the sold-out Dancing With The Stars Live! tour.

"We had to fit everything - and I mean everything -- from costumes and props to the show's famous mirror balls into a single trailer for this tour," said Allen. "Ray Woodbury of RK Diversified Entertainment did an amazing job helping me put together a rig that delivered all the lighting punch we needed, while not taking up an inordinate amount of space in the trailer."

The "workhorse" of this rig,

UK - With Colette Carter having recently joined Stage Electrics as sales manager with responsibility for developing growth in hire, Colette has been swift to act by restructuring the customer facing hire team.

Based at the company's headquarters, Colette brings a wealth of experience to the Stage Electrics London and Bristol operations, having worked for more than 20 years within the engineering and distribution industries.

Previously, Colette was branch manager at Buck and Hickman, one of the UK's leading distributors of tools, maintenance and health and safety equipment. Prior to that she had moved up 'through the ranks', holding a number of key management positions.

On joining Stage Electrics she was tasked by Adrian Searle, head of technical & hire operations to re-focus the company's hire sales team.

"My background is predominantly in people management and develo

Australia - Melbourne Airport welcomes over 30m travellers each year, with that number set to grow over the next few years. A team of visionaries at APAM (Australia Pacific Airports Melbourne) decided that these travellers, and those who come to greet them, deserved a better experience.

LumenRadio's long-term OEM partner, ENTTEC together with Mint Lighting Design, was brought on-board to provide custom lighting solution to realize the vision and design proposed for Melbourne Airport.

Mint Lighting Design and ENTTEC transformed the forecourt and main terminal façade with a dynamic lighting installation. The project has 12 individual sites programmed as one to create an intricate, synchronized light show with more than 40,000 pixels requiring 57 universes of control. The project involved more than 2,140 individual components.

In order to distribute DMX data to the difficult l

USA - When it comes to big stages, there are few with as many operational complexities as the annual Super Bowl. Months before knowing which teams will play in the game, teams of production experts are busy planning all of the technical aspects of the event. This year the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl played on consecutive weekends at the same stadium, adding to the logistics issues. Having worked with the Super Bowl decor teams since 2005, Dall Brown knows as well as anyone about the challenges of this year's event at the University of Phoenix Stadium.

Wireless Spectrum Challenges

NFL Frequency Coordination - controlling who uses which radio frequencies, when, and for what purposes - is carefully planned and enforced. This is to accommodate varied technical requirements of everything from hundreds of two way radios, wireless microphones and cameras, to ticket processing and

UK - SGM's award-winning LED technology can be found in a diverse range of applications around the world - with its eye-catching 3D pixel tubes typically found zipping across dancefloor ceilings.

But in a completely unique deployment, 68 of the LT-200 2m tubes now form a pulsating sculpture in a brain science institute. This is at the heart of designer Bob Crowley's set for the new Tom Stoppard play, The Hard Problem at the Dorfman Theatre, part of the National Theatre on London's South Bank.

It was a YouTube video of a spinning cube that first set Crowley's creative juices flowing, and faced with the task of emulating this effect in order to represent brain pulses, the theatre's lighting operations manager, Marc Williams and control supervisor, Daniel Murfin tracked down SGM's 3D pixel tubes after visiting the PLASA Show, and seeing them displayed on the website of Madrix LED

South Africa - Johannesburg-based DWR Distribution will be hosting Avolites training sessions this month, with a one-day Titan One training session on 24 February, followed by a three-day Basic to Advanced course from 25-27 February. The training will be presented by DWR's Gareth Chambers.

Nick Britz from DWR comments: "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."

The Titan One DMX USB Dongle allows the user to output one line of DMX with the full functionality of Avolites Titan Software. Users are able to access powerful features such as Pixelmapper, Quicksketch, Media Clip Select, Attribute Control-Blades and ShapeGenerator. Titan One allows unlimited usage providing unin

USA - Every music festival offers fans a chance to get away from it all, but few do this quite so dramatically - or literally - as Jam Cruise and Holy Ship! Produced by Cloud 9 Adventures, these floating festivals serve up hours of live music on the decks of cruise ships plying their way through the warm Caribbean waters to exotic ports of call like Half Moon Bay, Bahamas and Roatán, Honduras.

The Design Oasis (Davie, FL) created an engaging environment at both nautical music fests with a lightshow designed by Cris Kuroda that's anchored by 72 MVP 12 LED video panels from Chauvet Professional.

"Jam Cruise and Holy Ship! both feature big-name artists, and both draw large crowds expecting to have the time of their lives," said Abbas Ritscher of The Design Oasis, the cross rental house that supplied the lighting and video gear for both cruises. "Cris and video eng

South Africa - The first Robe BMFLs have been in action on a variety of events in South Africa, utilized by some of the country's leading lighting designers, the new multi-purpose fixtures have certainly been put through their paces on a wide variety of shows.

The very first South African based LD to use them was production designer Tim Dunn of Gearhouse South Africa (GHSA) on the Krone Music Festival at the Grand Arena, Grandwest Casino, Cape Town. The event is one of the most popular SA showcases for Afrikaans music, and this year Tim's in-the-round concept brought a new standard of presentation to the 5000 capacity venue.

Tim positioned the four BMFLs on trusses above the stage and used them throughout the show mainly for a variety of interesting gobo looks onto the white stage floor.

"It's an absolutely beautiful light," he declared. "I think Robe have lis

Canada - The award-winning W-DMX technology by Wireless Solution Sweden AB was once again used on Canada's prestigious Grey Cup Halftime Show, held at the BC Place in Vancouver. The game decides the champion of the Canadian Football League. The halftime show was designed by Vancouver-based Electric Aura and featuring rock band Imagine Dragons.

W-DMX was hard at work high above the stage and over the audience. Production designer Robert Sondergaard of Electric Aura explains, "We used the W-DMX to get from the field level up to the jumbotron. We had some Martin MAC III fixtures there for backlight on the band and luckily there was 100 amps of power in there. There was no physical way to get cable there so W-DMX was the only option if we wanted these lights. We also had a number of moving lights high up in the audience. We used W-DMX to control these as there would have been n

Israel - Located about 500m from the beach in Israel's fifth largest city, Ashdod, Leonardo Plaza Hotel got a stunning lighting makeover before it's opening in September last year.

LumenRadio's distributor in Israel, Danor Theatre and Studio systems Ltd, supplied and installed 13 units of Studio Due's City Beam LED 12 at the front façade of the hotel prior to the opening.

The City Beams have been fitted with integrated LumenRadio's wireless CRMX OEM DMX receiver modules allowing remote data control, which is especially useful for outdoor applications, for convenience of operation as well as saving on cabling. Going wireless also makes it possible to very easily move the units around the hotel area as needed.

The City Beam LED 12s are used to wash the columns of the hotel with a beautiful appealing variety of color effects. In order to wirelessly distribute DMX data to the C

UK - Tenor Alfie Boe's career has only gained strong momentum ever since he was famously discovered polishing cars at Blackpool's TVR Factory at age 17. He recently undertook a major UK tour, where Martin Professional's newest MAC Quantum Profile fixtures proved that they are perfectly at home in live arena-sized productions.

Running from 29 November 29 to 13 December, 2014, the 11-show tour stopped at most of the UK's major arenas. Lite Alternative supplied lighting, with the rig including five Martin Professional MAC Quantum profiles and 15 Mac Vipers.

"We were trying to create a 1930s club scene," said John Ginley, Lite Alternative Project Manager and Alfie's Lighting Designer. "Alfie wanted to keep it Art Deco, with lots of shadows and shapes in the light. We decided to use the MAC Quantum Profiles and MAC Vipers together because they are both very efficient

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

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

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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