USA - Fall Out Boy just wrapped The Boys of Zummer Tour co-headlining with Wiz Khalifa, and once again Clay Paky fixtures were along for the exciting cross-country ride. A.C.T Lighting, Inc. is the exclusive distributor of Clay Paky products in North America.

Robb Jibson of So Midwest, Inc. continued his relationship with the pop punk band, this time as production designer for the US amphitheatre tour. Fall Out Boy released its sixth studio album, American Beauty/American Psycho this year; it swiftly became the band's third #1 album.

An enthusiastic proponent of Clay Paky fixtures, Jibson specified 68 Mythos for the tour. Upstaging was the lighting vendor.

"I'm a fan of Clay Paky; they seem to really do things right," he declares. "I had demo'd Mythos but hadn't had a chance to use them just yet. The light is versatile enough I knew if we spec'd them we

UK - A.C. Special Projects (ACSP) has specified, supplied and installed cutting-edge performance lighting systems for two separate drama studios at Buckinghamshire New University's High Wycombe Campus.

Having previously supplied lighting systems for several other performance areas on the campus, the university approached ACSP to deliver solutions to meet their latest studio technical needs.

For the campus's main Drama Studio 1, which is utilised by a variety of performing arts courses, the brief was to enhance the existing conventional tungsten lighting system with a range of the very latest LED solutions, as well as upgrading the existing lighting console to cope with the new rig.

The university was keen to invest in LED technology, to help improve the campus's overall lighting and heating energy efficiency rating, and thus reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, they w

UK - Technical production expert, Hawthorn's install team has completed the installation of a new house light system for the Hawth Theatre in Crawley.

The specialist permanent installation team was tasked to replace over 200 tungsten fittings with the latest ArcSystem fittings from GDS; a once in a lifetime opportunity to upgrade the quality of the house lights at Hawth Theatre and reduce the ongoing maintenance and lamp replacement costs.

Crucially, the new fittings also deliver a reduction in electrical running costs. A mixture of Arch System MR16, Pro-Fixture 1 cell and Pro Cell 4 were used along with the new 24v Arc Lamps. Kev Sanderson, team leader at Hawthorn, and his expert team had a tight 10 day window to complete the changeover, but completed the task ahead of schedule.

Quentin Whitaker, the Hawth's technical manager, commented, "I am extremely happy with the

UAE - Protec was delighted to support its client, SNAP, with lighting, video and rigging for the Games15 Middle East event, held at Dubai International Marine Club from 10-12 September 2015.

The premier gaming event in the region, hosted by ESL, saw more than 20,000 eager gaming fans brave soaring temperatures to watch global teams from ESL go head-to-head over three days, competing for the US$250,000 prize.

The Main Arena was rigged using Protec's EHD (extra heavy duty) ground support structure which held three LED screens rigged off the 18" sub-truss. The stage was considerably smaller than the arena shows that ESL regularly produces, so Protec took the challenge of making the stage look like an arena show for TV without the space of an arena. Protec's project manager Simon Travis explained: "The main issue was the width of the Main Arena rig. We had to make it sma

UK - Each year, education organisation PiXL holds an awards ceremony that celebrates the significant achievements of students from all across the UK. This year, PiXL's Celebrating Success took place on 23 September at Central Hall Westminster. As production service partner at the historic venue, White Light provided the lighting, audio and video production support to help create what was a spectacular celebration.

PiXL provides over 1,500 schools with access to vibrant, purposeful conferences and networks of people, alongside resources, training schemes and development programmes. The organisation also gives opportunities and support to all young people, regardless of their background or ability, in order for them to achieve their potential - something which was highlighted at this year's Celebrating Success event.

The awards were presented by food-entrepreneur Levi Roots, whi

Chile - Clay Paky Mythos fixtures illuminated the Costanera Tower in Santiago, the highest skyscraper in Latin America, with a light show to celebrate each match in the Copa América 2015 football tournament.

The award-winning Clay Paky fixtures were part of a lighting design by Toni Amoros, who also lit the tournament's opening ceremony. Each time a player scored Amoros employed the Mythos to wash the building with the team's colours and a variety of textures, surprising and delighting onlookers.

The fixtures also projected custom gobos such as the word 'GOOOL' (GOAAAL), supplied by Iluminación Profesional VALOOK, up the entire 300m length of the tower.

"The Mythos was the perfect tool for this ambitious project," says Fabian Cortez Lopez of VALOOK. "Its incredible optics meant it could illuminate the whole building with ease. The custom gobos were pro

The Netherlands - Dutch Rock band Di-Rect from The Hague celebrated their 15th anniversary in great style with a special concert on the beach at Scheveningen in front of 12,500 enthusiastic fans. The beach is one of the most visited public spaces in the Netherlands and is renowned its vibrant ambience.

Lighting designer Nick van Balen ensured that the spectacular lightshow fitted the sense of achievement after 15 years at the sharp end of the music business, and as a confirmed Robe advocate, included 99 x Robe fixtures on his rig - 46 x LEDWash 300s, 44 x Pointes and nine PATT 2013s - a vintage style fixture designed by Tim Routledge, and now being manufactured by Robe.

Nick had an open brief for the show, and the main objective was to make it look awesome - which of course he did with a good deal of finesse, attention to detail and some magic touches to ensure that a great ni

UK - Rosco, a major manufacturer of products for the entertainment industry, has once again shown its support for the new charity Behind the Scenes UK by donating the year's proceeds from sales of Rosco 313 Light Relief yellow.Mark Engel, CEO of Rosco, stated, "Our industry is constantly changing. Designers and technicians move from show to show, and technology advances by the moment. Ours is not a community that sits still. In such an environment, stability is critical. Knowing you have a safety net, that your friends are there for you, is essential. Behind the Scenes UK is that safety net, and we are so pleased to be able to help fill that net year after year. This year's contribution, thanks to every designer and technician who used Rosco 313 Light Rlief Yellow, is £1,398.51."Upon receiving the cheque presented by Cristian Arroyo, director of sales for Rosco EMEA, John

USA - Electric Zoo is New York City's premier electronic music festival, attracting over 100,000 fans to Randall's Island Park each Labour Day Weekend. This year, the festival's Main Stage featured a spectacular phoenix-themed design outfitted with Elation Professional lighting gear, including Lumina Strips, Cuepix Blinder WW2s and the debut of the new Elation ACL 360 Bar, all supplied by Burst Sound & Lighting Systems of Detroit.

Now in its seventh year, Electric Zoo was revamped this year in an immersive zoo-themed atmosphere that included bigger stages, brighter lights and an overall recharged production. Their first year doing the festival, Burst provided lighting and rigging for all five stages, a 15 truck pull that included some 2000 moving lights and over 2000 feet of truss.

A highlight of the event and one of the animal-themed aesthetics that raised the bar at this yea

UK - Clay Paky's beam light, the Sharpy, has proved the ideal festival lighting tool on The Great Stage at Secret Garden Party (SGP), one of the UK's most popular independent arts and music festivals.

This year's SGP saw over 30,000 revellers hit Mill Hill Field in Cambridgeshire for a long weekend of festivities ranging from performances by big name music acts such as Angus and Julia Stone to theatre workshops and boat rides.

London-based event supplier Colour Sound Experiment was responsible for kitting out the festival with "the perfect technical package", under the direction of Jonathan Ricketts, head of lighting for SGP's production team, The Dark Horses.

Choosing 18 of the award-winning Clay Paky fixture, Ricketts knew the Sharpys would be suitable for the numerous designers making use of the main stage's rig over the four days.

"The Sharpys were put o

Italy - Francesco De Gregori has appointed lighting designer Andrea Coppini to design the lighting at his concerts for several years now. In recent years, Coppini has often relied on Clay Paky equipment.

How did Andrea get to know De Gregori? "I have been working with Agorà for more than ten years. I met De Gregori in the summer of 2008, when I stood in for his previous lighting operator, who was no longer available. From that moment on, I started working continuously with the artist and the production team. This means I present new designs whenever a new tour starts. I have been designing the lighting for De Gregori for six years.

"I have grown together with Francesco. In the early years, Francesco had a minimalist idea of show aesthetics: he preferred a plain stage, with no particular special or lighting effects. Over time he developed the idea that stage design a

USA - Le Maitre will be unveiling two new special effects technologies at this year's LDI at the Las Vegas Convention Centre, booth 455.

Le Maitre's G300-Smart is a professional smoke machine, designed with the future in mind. This innovative new machine features IoT capability via Wi-Fi, wireless set up and diagnostics, and an easy to read backlit LCD display.

Building on the solid foundation of Le Maitre's flagship smoke machine, the G300, the G300-Smart retains all the features that have made the G300 the industry-leading unit it is. It is rugged, versatile and durable, with an extremely high output of dense white smoke. In addition, the G300-Smart has a user-friendly LCD display, DMX in and out, 0-10V control, as well as fluid out and fluid low reporting.

Having Wi-Fi on board gives the user a whole new level of flexibility, being able to set and change the configuration

USA - D.T.S. will showcase the new EVO at LDI 2015, stand 217, Las Vegas Convention Centre, from 23-25 October.

D.T.S. will also feature a range of architectural projectors, including the Delta, FOS and Drivenet lines.

(Jim Evans)

USA - Parasol has been working tirelessly for the last six months to create brand-new miniSTAR. This new product is the smallest system in the Parasol family by far. Measuring a convenient 47 inches in diameter, this system can fit in the back of an SUV for ultimate portability.

This system is the first in the Parasol family that can be mounted traditionally (i.e. horizontal) with a 300 pound payload or rigged vertically with a 150 pound payload (or anything in between). Plus, this system has 20 AMPs of power and can work with your existing moving lights, LEDs, or other electronics).

Hermann Fruhm, CEO of Parasol Systems says, "The market place demanded a more affordable system, so we did our best to deliver that with the miniSTAR. It's smaller, more affordable, and has a quicker lead time. You are basically getting a big-screen effect for a fraction of the cost."

USA - Bandit Lites is supporting lighting design firm Pulse Lighting in supplying lights for Grace Potter. The multi-instrumentalist powerhouse is currently touring the country with songs her from her newest album, Midnight.

Pulse Lighting specializes in designing rigs that provide big looks with the most bang for a buck and a small trailer footprint. Lighting designer Preston Hoffman redesigned Potter's summer floor package with 12 GLP X4s for a compact wash that double as a beam when focused tightly, eight Robe Pointes for versatile graphic and textural looks, and 12 Cuepix Blinders.

Four towers of truss each features three X4s, two Pointes and two Cuepix Blinders, giving Hoffman the opportunity to build large looks both behind and through the band.

"Grace conveyed to me that she was looking for a highly versatile rig that can provide lots of different feels, a

Belgium - Creative lighting, video and visual design specialist Painting with Light brought their imagination and flair to six special live recordings of popular Belgian comedy / impressionist TV show Tegen de Sterren Op, designing the set, lighting and visuals for producers Studio 100 and DEDS IT. To be broadcast on VTM, the action took place over three days at the 6000 capacity Lotto Arena in Antwerp.

The Painting with Light team was led by Luc Peumans, who has also designed set and lighting for the most recent series of Tegen de Sterren Op studio based shows.

Wanting to replicate key visual elements from the TV show, but enlarged to capture the scale of the arena sized production, the design featured a striking LED screen portal / pros arch measuring 8m high by 16m wide.

Upstage was a 9m high by 18m wide LED screen made up of two sections which tracked apart

USA - Robe underlines the importance of the American market by announcing a major new product launch at the 2015 LDI expo in Las Vegas - the BMFL Wash and BMFL Wash XF (Extra Features).

There will also be a host of other exciting new products making their US debut at Booth 2521 at the Las Vegas Convention Centre 23-25 October.

BMFL Wash and BMFL Wash XF are the ultimate 1700W lamp based wash lights, and the latest fixtures to be added to Robe's 'game-changing' BMFL range of luminaires. These are powerful workhorse wash lights, packed with innovative and creative features.

A large 200 mm diameter front fresnel lens provides a high quality traditional wash output ranging from a punchy and tight 4.5° to a super-smooth 55°.

Custom interchangeable frost filters offer three grades - light, medium and heavy - giving an extremely subtle and natural 'soft touch'.

Both CMY

USA - The new ACL 360 Roller from Elation Professional is a 4-bar moving head luminaire that casts an array of continuous 360° high-speed multi-coloured effects and is the newest luminaire in Elation's ACL Series of high-output narrow-beam LED effect lights.

The ACL 360 Roller houses 20x 15W RGBW 4-in-1 LEDs positioned equally across four bars and features fast and precise 16-bit continuous 360° pan and tilt rotation, perfect for adding eye-catching ACL beam looks to any stage, show or venue. Its advanced collimator optic lens produces a laser-like homogenized 4° color-changing beam from each LED, which combined produce a 21° beam angle from each bar.

Individual pixel control gives greater design options and built-in effect / chase macros make the unit quick to program when needed. Strobe effects and full-range dimming with dimming curve effects add to the desi

USA - Avolites' family of consoles, dimmers and networking products will be showcased at LDI Las Vegas on booth 2004, hosted by Group One Ltd. Avolites Media will be on booth 2216, exhibiting its industry-leading range of Ai media servers which work intuitively with the entire Avolites family of products.

Key members of the Avolites team, including MD Steve Warren and sales director Koy Neminathan, will join Group One, its distributor and US partner.

One of the stars of the showcase is the Avolites' Arena console with Optical Titan Net Switch, both of which are now shipping. In addition, new software in Titan version 9.1, featuring enhanced pixel mapping functionality, fully custom Key Frame Shape engine and fully featured theatre functionality.

"The Arena console has attracted a huge amount of attention since launch - we've been inundated with lighting designers, renta

Denmark - Cirkus Dannebrog is a circus with much history dating back to the second half of the 19th century and thus holds an important role in the Danish circus traditions. However, this circus is following the technological developments and hence using the latest innovations within lighting.

Since 2001, Cirkus Danneborg has been focusing and working with lighting as an important element for the audience experience in relation to artists, animals and the overall circus tent atmosphere. Lighting designer Liza Van Der Voorn has been working with the circus troupe for the last three seasons, designing and programming light for a circus solely deploying LED technology.

As a new acquisition this year, Liza Van Der Voorn has introduced six SGM G-Spot moving heads to the circus lighting rig. She is very enthusiastic about these luminaires, their quality and flawless operation, night

USA - NBC's 2015 Sunday Night Football Open with Carrie Underwood features 34 x Robe BMFL Spots which were specified by Los Angeles based LD Benoit Richard from Millennium Lighting Design, Inc. who was charged with creating all the theatrical and effects lighting for the shoot. This follows his success utilizing Robe Pointes and CycFX 8 fixtures for last year's intro.

The high energy 2015 SNF Open features another new and rousing rendition of Waiting All Day for Sunday Night sung by Underwood. The shoot location changed this year as the production team took over one of the large sound stages at Warner Brothers Studios in L.A.

The creative concept revolves around showing numerous behind-the-scenes situations including player interactions with Carrie and even a cameo of Benoit weaving his magic at the lighting controls. The build-up leads to Carrie's exciting perfo

USA - Drew Carey mentioned it in his autobiography. KISS mounted their comeback by playing on top of its bar. Jamie Foxx liked to celebrate New Year's Eve there. Ben Affleck was a regular. Even by the standards of Las Vegas nightspots, the Center Bar at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino has been a celebrity magnet. Perched under a domed ceiling in the middle of the hotel's 30,000sq.ft casino, it has long been the place to see and be seen.

However, even icons need updating to remain fresh and vibrant., which is why this June the Hard Rock Hotel had a "Final Call" party for its famous bar, and promised to reopen the 20-year-old landmark with a new design that would make its future as glittering as its past. This goal was accomplished in stunning fashion, thanks to a massive and dazzling abstract design by LD Robert Athey of All Things Integrated that drew on the pixel mapping

Italy - The Fraschini Theatre in Pavia, Italy, has recently purchased two dot2 consoles (a dot2 XL-F and a dot2 core) to use for their touring shows. The theatre hosts several visiting companies and is also an opera house. Furthermore, like most Italian theatres, the venue is hired out for dance exhibitions and other events during the season.

The technical staff decided to look for a solution which could meet their many requirements, namely a versatile console on which they could programme complex cue lists even when programming time is very short, or that was ideal when the operator has to improvise a show in a professional manner. Therefore they decided to invest in the dot2.

Intuitive operation is at the core of the dot2 philosophy, and with a comprehensive set of connectivity hardware on all console models, the dot2 range is suitable for most theatre, touring, corporate, t

UK - Edinburgh-based rental and event production specialists Blue Parrot have continued their investment in world class equipment across a busy summer. The company has now added a GrandMA2 Light as the flagship desk for lighting rental and a DiGiCo SD10 fulfilling the same role in sound.

The MA2 was busy across August as the Scottish capital welcomed the world to its Fringe and International Festivals. The desk was used on shows at the Playhouse theatre and Magners Summer Nights concerts in Princes Street Gardens.

Headline acts James, Flaming Lips and The Waterboys all specified MA2 and Blue Parrot supplied a robust control system with a fully tracking back up MA2 onPC fader wing. The Flaming Lips show also saw the company provide a stunning 96 panel 5mm pitch video backdrop using their Chauvet PVP modular system. The band and crew were particularly impressed by the brightness

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