UK - The exterior of the Southampton Mayflower Theatre brings an extra dazzle of warmth and vitality to a usually busy city centre, illuminated with an Anolis lighting scheme which was installed by Lighting Technology Projects (LTP).
Built in 1928, the venue is a Grade II listed building with a prominent central location and seating capacity of 2300, making it the largest theatre in the South of England.
Anolis products were recommended for the architectural installation to the theatre’s Chief LX Neil Kingston and their head of technical operations, Rachel Fox, by several people, including those running the O2 Guildhall, another leading Southampton live performance venue - which is also externally lit with Anolis - as well as by contacts at cruise company Carnival UK which is headquartered in the city.
With these references, Kingston was confident that Anolis

France - Nestled 50km southeast of Paris in Maincy, the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte is famous for its beautiful gardens dating back to the 17th century and its place as the largest private estate listed as a historical monument. For the last 15 years, the estate has hosted a Christmas show, named Vaux-le-Vicomte’s illuminations, which sends guests on a festive exploration around the 100-acre grounds. In the previous two years, the estate has featured video mapping in its celebrations, and ends the event with a projection on the front of the Château.
This year, the team behind the expansive illuminations, French integrator and rental stager BS Technology, chose to rely on Digital Projection’s M-Vision Laser 21000 WU for the projection mapping of Vaux-le-Vicomte’s façade.
“Digital Projection’s recent ground-breaking technologies, like the remote laser

UK - West End theatres must once again close their doors as London moves into the highest tier of COVID-19 restrictions from midnight tonight (Tuesday 15/12). Many shows – including Pantoland at the Palladium, Six and Les Miserables: The Staged Concert – had only just opened and were following strict COVID-safe measures.
The Society of London Theatre (SOLT) said the move would cause “catastrophic financial difficulties" for venues, producers and thousands of workers.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber issued a statement saying: “I feel devastated for all those in theatre who have tried so hard to provide entertainment for the Christmas season. Theatres have worked tirelessly to make themselves as COVID-safe as possible. It does seem arbitrary and unfair that people can jostle uncontrolled in crowded shops yet orderly socially-distanced theatre-going is banne

UK - SLX Hire and Events, a Bristol-based technical event supplier, has designed and installed over a dozen festive events across the UK already this winter from Swanage to Scotland.
Says Alastair Currie, CEO of SLX, “This year has been beyond challenging for the event industry, but we were lucky enough to have maintained, or in some cases procured, winter project contracts. These are mainly outdoor events, where a wonderful immersive light trail is installed to bring a bit of magic to those who visit – and importantly revenue to historic buildings and estates who have had a similarly difficult year.
“When the second lockdown was announced, we were slightly anxious about what that would mean for these projects – including the Trains project that sees five heritage steam railway lines and the trains illuminated for immersive rides across the Christmas pe

UK - For Adam King, Shakespeare’s Macbeth was a welcome opportunity to jump back into lighting design after seven months of being idled by the pandemic. “My work calendar for the entire year was wiped out because of the lockdown,” said King. “I missed doing the thing I love.”
Eager to get involved in theatre, King approached Mountview Drama School and asked if he could be of any use lighting shows for livestreams, pointing out that he had experience in lighting for theatre and as well as the camera. Much to his delight, Mountview responded by offering him the opportunity to light a series of shows starting with Macbeth.
“This show was a new experience,” recalls King. “There were only eight people in the theatre due to social distancing, so our main audience was online. We did three days of normal tech rehearsals and then three days of came


Italy - Luxury car manufacturer Maserati launched the MC20, the first super sports car of its Trident brand, in an event format powered by disguise xR.
Milan-based Feelrouge Worldwide Shows staged a two-day hybrid event held at the Autodromo di Modena race-track, and broadcast live around the world. The setting included a huge open-air, installation stage with 630 square meters of LED video screens on three different axes, which hosted a series of anamorphic visual effects and augmented and mixed reality content, powered by three disguise gx 2c media servers.
The visual narrative was complemented by a live performance, light show, sound system and original soundtrack. A fleet of 50 Maserati cars from across the years were showcased in the grandstand, creating an evocative drive-in theatre setting for over 500 live guests, accommodated in socially distanced sea

Portugal - The Cultural and Congress Centre (CCC), the leading performance and conference venue in Caldas da Rainha, has announced it is one of the first venues in Portugal to acquire specific technical equipment to sanitise its performance and public spaces, by installing new, fully-certified UV products from GoldenSea UV in an effort to ensure maximum safety for its spectators, artists and employees.
The CCC has invested in two types of GSUV sterilization and disinfection products, after careful consultation with Portuguese distributor, NAN of Lisbon. The venue procured four units of UVL150, a high-powered mobile UV lighting fixture for the sterilization of large interior spaces. These are rigged on stands and therefore easily transported to any desired location within the CCC’s auditoria and performances spaces. The resident team also chose a compact UV4C-H ultraviolet

UK - When event management, lighting and creative design company, Absolute Events was asked by Global Street Art to light up a series of advertisements painted on walls around London, Doughty Engineering was brought on board to help secure the lighting firmly and safely in place.
Global Street Art is known for its hand-painted advertising campaigns with well-known consumer brands. Jonathan explained: "We've been working with Global Street Art to light up their amazing advertising artwork for a number of years now and we rely on Doughty to help us secure the lighting effectively.
“I have known of their products for my entire professional life and was keen to make sure their kit was used on this project so I brought Rigging Services on board who handle the specialised side of fixing the relevant products in place. Initially I approached a couple of companies who said t

South Korea - Elevating the ambiance in its main theatre, the Daejeon Arts Centre hired Hansam System to install a Harman Professional lighting solution that features Martin Professional fixtures.
Opened in October of 2003, the Daejeon Arts Centre has brought a new horizon of culture and arts to the city of Daejeon. Housed in a five-story building across a property size of 100,000sq.m, the centre features four premier event and meeting spaces, including the large-scale Art Hall, Ensemble Hall, Conventional Hall as well as outdoor amphitheatre.
Beyond hosting a wide range of productions such as theatre and opera performances, Daejeon Arts Centre also offers a Music Academy and arts cultural programme, which are designed to inspire and educate the future generations on performing arts. To enhance the 1,546-seat Art Hall, Hansam System provided a Martin Professional light

Spain - The 2020 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid (MBFWM)’s SS21 season show went ahead in its regular venue – Hall 14.1 at the Feria de Madrid – to a 30% capacity socially distanced live audience together with thousands more joining a livestream.
Lighting designer Juanjo Saunier chose 38 Robe MegaPointes, 20 LEDWash 800s, 12 Spiider LED wash beams and three BMFL Follow Spots running on three separate remote control BaseStations to assist him with creating the show.
Juanjo has worked on Spain’s premier biannual fashion show for around 10 years, both lighting the main show-space and various ‘off-site’ venues, and enjoys the buzz, vibes, and challenges of this seminal fashion event.
This year, Juanjo started with three different catwalk lighting configurations in the multipurpose room, all of which offered the 60 different shows designers a good and d

UK - Production Park has secured a £12million Government loan which it plans to use to expand and develop its Wakefield campus over the next decade.
Production Park is one of the latest 11 major arts and heritage organisations across the UK to have received loan offers from the £1billion Cultural Recovery Fund, a combination of grant and loan cash from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), targeted to support a culture sector that has been devastated by the effects of COVID-19.
Other organisations to have benefitted from the £165m in repayable finance – and a further £58m in capital funding for ongoing construction and maintenance projects in the sector – announced by Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden include the Royal Albert Hall, National Theatre, English National Opera, Alexandra Palace and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“The

USA - Magmatic atmospheric effects has introduced Rocket, a line of powerful CO2 cryogenic simulation effects that produce ‘dense white clouds of fog for visually stunning atmospherics. Capable of generating a heavy blast of fog that engulfs an area in just a few seconds yet dissipates instantly, each effect is arrayed with high-output RGBA LEDs.
Rocket is making it easier for designers and production houses to implement high-impact cryogenic-type effects into projects of all types - tours, special events, clubs, theme parks and more, says the company. The advantages over traditional liquid CO2 or liquid nitrogen cryogenic effects are many. With the Rocket series there are no cumbersome, high-pressure liquid CO2 or liquid nitrogen cylinders to deal with, making for a safer, less expensive and faster setup that requires no local authority approvals.
Three Rocket ser

Australia - More than 75,000 tickets were sold as part of the NSW Government’s recent Great Southern Nights performance series held throughout November which is Australian Music Month.
Great Southern Nights delivered 1,100 COVID-safe performances to live music venues in over 140 towns and suburbs throughout the state. The aim was to reinvigorate NSW’s live music scene, which took a significant hit at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Presented in partnership with ARIA, Great Southern Nights saw more than 2,500 artists perform at over 300 venues, with many high-profile names heading to regional venues to perform.
All music events were programmed in line with current NSW Government health advice regarding physical distancing and venue capacity of public gatherings.
Acts who performed as part of Great Southern Nights included Tash Sultana, Alex The A

France - The annual ARTE Concert Festival went virtual this year with three days of music live streamed to audiences worldwide. Lighting designer Pierre Claude deployed seven Claypaky A.leda B-EYE K10 fixtures, two dozen Claypaky HY B-EYE K25 LED washes and 16 ADB SVOBODA classic batten fixtures for the live musical performances shot at La Gaite Lyrique in Paris in November.
Artists participating in the festival, which was prohibited from staging in-person concerts due to the coronavirus pandemic, included singer/songwriter Sebastien Tellier, hip-hop sensation Lous and the Yakuza and French electropop band Yelle.
Pierre Claude has designed and operated tours for many musical performers, among them The Strokes, Phoenix, Gesaffelstein, Boys Noize plus Future Islands’ live stream. For the ARTE Concert Festival he created a circular stage with three concentric circular t

Experienced lighting pro has used the compact console on several gigs since the summer, including Arnoldo Castillo 20th Anniversary livestream celebration
Like many in the lighting industry, Costa Rican lighting professional Emilio Aguilar has used the pandemic downtime to learn new competencies and better his skill set. Finding himself back home in Costa Rica last spring following Cirque du Soliel’s bankruptcy, Aguilar got in contact with long-time collaborators Luces y Sistemas, the exclusive distributor of Obsidian Control Systems products in Costa Rica. “I inquired about the NX2™ lighting console, which I thought would be the perfect console for the types of gigs I do,” he states. “They were happy to show me the console and in the end it was just what I wanted.” Luces y Sistemas provides full support for the entire Obsidian line of hardware and software lighting con

Italy - It has been a year since the release of the Prolights ECL Panel TWC, a 2x1 softlight with tunable white and coloured LED soft light for TV and studios. Since then, the company has been able to tap into a new market - one that looks for high-quality, reliable fixtures with a good ROI.
With recent product launches of late 2020, Prolights had expanded the ECL collection into what can be described as a one-stop lighting solution for TV, streaming and motion picture studios - the product portfolio includes Fresnels, Ellipsoidals, PARS, Cyclorama and soft-light panels, with fixtures available in multiple sizes and with different LED sources as Tunable White + Coloured LED sources or static white (tungsten and day-light). “We are one of few companies that are able to offer a complete lighting system for studios,” says Fabio Sorabella, Prolights MD. “We hav

USA - The arid arena of the Arizona desert and the Arcosanti community united for the staging of Existential Reckoning, a site-specific streamed concert of the new album by ‘supergroup’ Puscifer initiated by Maynard James Keenan.
Lighting designer Sarah Landau was asked to light the concert livestream, having been fascinated with the idea of Arcosanti for some time but not yet visited. She added Robe MegaPointes and PixelPATTs to her lighting design for this intricately constructed performance movie.
Keenan lives about an hour’s drive away from Arcosanti, the ‘arcological’ postulation of Italian American architect Paolo Soleri, designed to connect architecture and ecology as a philosophical base for democratic society.
The album backstory involves an alien landing on earth and trying to assimilate.
The Existential Reckoning video sho

Sweden - Malmö Opera presented well-received production of musical classic Funny Girl as part of the autumn / winter repertory programme which continued to run despite the pandemic. Audience figures were dramatically reduced to 50+ a livestream which could be enjoyed by all who had bought a ticket for each performance.
Planned two years earlier and fully sold out many months in advance, Malmö Opera decided to go ahead in delivering all their seasonal main house productions as the budgets were already allocated and spent.
Leading Swedish lighting designer Fredrik Jonsson was delighted to be back working on a live show and helping to create the aesthetic for this vibrant, funny, and poignant piece known for its intricate production numbers.
Malmö Opera has a quantity of Astera fixtures in its lighting inventory which are used for multiple situations and

UK - In a bid to lift the spirits of the local community and celebrate the efforts of the NHS, a team of entertainment industry lighting and laser engineers based around the north of England have set out to create laser lighting art.
Sheffield-based lighting designer Jonathan Dawson-Butterworth wanted to set up a morale-boosting event that could also help the Sheffield Hospitals Charity appeal.
“I thought it would be nice to organise something that people could look at and enjoy, and also do something to help charity. With the terrible situation brought upon us all by the pandemic, I thought it would be great to involve the hospitals charity and say ‘thank you’ to the NHS,” he explains.
Taking place on Monday, 14 December, with powerful laser beams firing from three different areas of the city, with the organisers hoping to deliver an entertaining display

Germany - Situated near Wermelskirchen in the Bergisches Land, Schloss Burg is one of the largest completely preserved castle complexes in Germany. Built in the 12th century as the ancestral seat of the Counts and Dukes of Berg, and extensively restored between 1890 and 1914, the castle is one of the landmarks of the Bergisches Land and has been used for years as a museum and for various cultural events.
After a planning period of almost a year, Burg Castle became the scene of the Castle Illumination for the first time this October - and despite, or perhaps because of, the current coronavirus situation, the event was a complete success.
"In the course of the year we had to reschedule several times and, at some point, threw the entire concept overboard," stated Uli Hoppert from Siren, the technical service provider for the event. “We said goodbye to the original idea

USA - Harman Professional Solutions has announced the Martin ERA 600 and 800 Profiles which join the ERA 300 Profile to round out the full-featured range of ERA Profile and ERA Performance fixtures (see LSi December for an in-depth review of the ERA 800 Performance).
The new profile fixtures are suitable for rental and entertainment applications needing an all-in-one moving head that is both compact and lightweight but also bright, efficient and feature-loaded. Whether being used for concerts and touring or corporate shows, cruise lines, houses of worship, and live TV, the new fixtures are designed for a long list of scenarios, requiring a truly versatile LED profile, says the company.
The new ERA 600 and 8

USA - Amber Solutions has introduced a solid-state two-wire dimmer solution that works without a neutral wire, is compatible with most types of LED lighting and offers ‘flicker-free performance with a wider range of LED bulbs and fixtures, and provides smooth, precise dimming from zero percent to max power’.
According to Amber founder and CEO Thar Casey, Amber’s two-wire dimmer architecture enables even older buildings and electrical infrastructures to provide wirelessly controlled dimming without any new wiring or construction.
“Amber’s newest solution underscores how its core technologies enable a fundamental restructuring of common electrical product architecture, significantly transforming their capabilities, reducing returns/support requirements and enhancing value,” said Casey. “Our solid-state redesign embeds intelligence that enables a substantia


Taiwan - When Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) hosted a revival of the German/Taiwanese co-production of Puccini’s Turandot earlier this year, Chien-hao Kuo, lighting designer and head of lighting, boldly chose to replace all the discharge moving lights of the original design with LED fixtures.
He carefully selected 26 Ayrton Khamsin-S profiles which were supplied to the venue from its rental stock by Hispot Workshop of Taipei, Taiwan, a company which has been dedicated to theatre design and equipment rental for over 26 years.
Kuo’s had used Ayrton Khamsin-S on several operas in the past and knew them to be both powerful and quiet. “Because opera singers perform without amplified sound, I was focused on methods of reducing the background noise in the theatre,” he explains. “Moving lights with discharge sources are n

USA - As this difficult year draws to a close, ADJ is hoping to spread a little festive joy over the holiday season with its Winter Wonderland Lighting contest. The company is offering lighting pros and enthusiasts at all levels the chance to win one of three prizes simply by using their ADJ fixtures as part of a festive display or holiday event and tagging the photos or video on social media.
Says ADJ, “Entries could be a holiday project created for a client or you could simply use your ADJ lighting, video or effects equipment to decorate your yard, front porch or home for the holidays. It probably goes without saying, but in whatever you do to celebrate the holidays and enter the contest, please be safe, take any necessary precautions and practice social distancing.
“The ADJ team will be selecting the first, second and third place winners based on how good the ph

Latest Issue. . .

Save
Cookies user preferences
We use cookies to ensure you to get the best experience on our website. If you decline the use of cookies, this website may not function as expected.
Accept all
Decline all
Analytics
Tools used to analyze the data to measure the effectiveness of a website and to understand how it works.
Google Analytics
Accept
Decline
Advertisement
If you accept, the ads on the page will be adapted to your preferences.
Google Ad
Accept
Decline