USA - The owner of Life Is Art Studios, Daniel Thibault created the lighting design for No Parking On The Dance Floor, a drive-in concert by Top Ten dubstep artists Subtronic and Boogie T. Just under 2,000 fans (in 500 cars) attended the sold-out show, which took place at the Hounds Drive-In Theatre in Kings Mountain, NC, with each vehicle being separated by a wide distance.
Normally, when designing for a crowd that size, Thibault builds his rig for an intimate venue, focusing on tight angles, back lighting, side lighting, and close-in specials. But given the generous space between cars at this drive-in show, he had to adjust his approach.
“This was definitely different,” says Thibault. “It was still a 2,000-person show, but I had to design the show, and my LD Aaron Lenchek had to run it, as if it were for a much bigger event, because the fans were so spread out.

UK - Audio manufacturer Powersoft has supported Leeds-based audio integrator, Audioserv, in creating a vast audio system for Roxy Ball Room, Roxy Leisure’s bowling alley and bar experience in Birmingham.
The American style venue harbours a 10-lane bowling alley, which also includes a bar, creating a vibrant experience with the help of a modern audio system. Audioserv, who have also provided audio systems for over 15 of Roxy Ball Room’s locations, took on the task of providing and installing audio equipment for the venue, with support from Powersoft audio distributor CUK.
“We’ve been working with Roxy Ball Room since the beginning of the brand in 2013,” explains Pete Rollinson, technical director of Audioserv. “For the Birmingham venue, we designed a system to give consistent coverage across the whole space, with an added impact in certain areas of the venue

USA - Anaïs Mitchell’s hit musical Hadestown has worldwide attention since making its Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr Theatre last April. Directed by Rachel Chavkin, the show boasts an all-star audio production team, led by sound designers Jessica Paz and Nevin Steinberg. Included among the show’s audio gear are DPA Microphones’ 4066 mnidirectional Headsets, 4061 Omnidirectional Lavaliers and 4099 Instrument Mics.
When Chavkin expressed to the pair that her direction for Hadestown was to have the theatre feel like a concert hall, they immediately knew that microphone selection would be especially important. “For the actors, who are all double mic’ed, we chose a combination of DPA 4066 Omnidirectional Headset Mics with backup 4061 Miniature Omnidirectional Mics attached to the frame,” says Paz. “I greatly appreciate the discreet profile of the 4061s a

USA - It was easy to get caught up in the excitement of the Riverview School’s annual fundraising gala with its spirited live auction, stage shows and convivial company, all set against a 16-acre Cape Cod campus in Derry, NH. The Events United team experienced this first hand last year when they provided the lighting, audio, video and scenic elements for the popular affair at the boarding school, which serves 11 to 22-year old students with learning challenges.
Tim Messina and his team at Events United knew that they would have their work cut out when the school turned to them this year, in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown, and asked them to host a virtual gala at their Studio Lab facility.
“A big challenge for us was to take an event that was already spectacular in the live setting and create the same effect for guests virtually,” said Chase Clark, production m

Germany – The town of Bendorf, on the outskirts of Koblenz, has been staging its Summer In The City festival for many years. And even the COVID-19 pandemic was not going to stop proceedings this year.
Operating as a weekend-only event for its first decade - in the Kirchplatz, a square in the centre of town - this year it managed to get permission to run through until the end of August. This was on the proviso that the event was restricted to 300 seated and socially distanced seated guests, part of a maximum capacity of 350 (including artists, technical crews and staff).
The sound system that will take it right through the summer season is a Martin Audio WPC, acquired by Michael Enchelmaier’s rental company, Event & Veranstaltungstechnik Enchelmaier (EVE). This is the centrepiece of a complete technical infrastructure provided by the company.
A customer of

UK - On Monday 6 July in collaboration with Brighton and Hove Council and many of the city's event venues, The Brighton Event Professionals Independent Committee (EPIC) joined the Light It In Red initiative aimed at bring attention on the crisis within the events industry during the COVID-19 lockdown.
At 9pm on this day, many of the city's venues and outdoor event spaces turned red, including The Old Market Theatre in Hove, lit up by 96 Prolights Smart Bat.
Brighton-based Reveries Events took charge of the installation. Director John Wallis, reports, “The Old Market Theatre is a high quality live theatre and venue. To light up its imposing facade we chose the Smart Bat wireless uplighters as we needed a fixture with a small enough footprint that also had a great output of light. The Smart BatPlus was quick to set up and gave us the flexibility of making changes to th

France - Jacky Fregonese of French lighting and visual rental and production company Loctambule, based near Strasbourg, has put smiles on faces with a series of amusing product and business tutorials that have gained a large fan following on social media.
With all events and shows cancelled and the industry closing down with the French COVID-19 lockdown, Jacky, who heads the company with his wife Catherine Saint-Georges, wanted to do something creative to boost morale while so many usually busy companies and talented technicians, designers, production managers, event organisers all push through until events can re-start.
Jacky was originally inspired to start the funny tutorials with products Loctambule has in rental stock, which includes Robe MegaPointes, Esprites, BMFL Blades and PixelPATTs, all of which have featured and generated interest amongst technicians and ot

USA - Following many weeks of COVID-19 lockdown, the people of Athens, Texas had the opportunity to enjoy live music again last month when neighbourhood event space Common Area Market hosted a community music festival called CAM Fest. Production for the event was supplied by fledgling local company Gain Stage Productions, including a lighting rig comprised exclusively of ADJ LED-powered fixtures.
Based on the site of a 100-year-old cotton gin that serves as a local landmark in Athens but had been abandoned for decades, Common Area Market is the brainchild of Marine Corps vets and married couple Chris and Amanda Marholz. The vision for Common Area Market is a venue where the people of Athens can gather to eat, enjoy live music and celebrate big events.
Following a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, the first phase of the site’s redevelopment has been completed

UK - The newly lit Mirfield Station underpass in West Yorkshire is the first UK installation for the new Eminere RGBW LED fixtures from architectural lighting brand Anolis – a Robe business – with 16 luminaires installed as part of an improvement works scheme undertaken by train operator Grand Central and partner JMD Rain Ltd. in conjunction with Kirklees Council and Network Rail.
The new lighting transforms the previously dull, moody, and uninviting dark space on Station Road beneath the railway tracks – through which passengers must pass before accessing the station – into a vibrant, welcoming, contemporary, and comfortable space.
The Emineres were specified by lighting designer Kevin Dugdale from Winchester-based Designs for Lighting, who is a specialist in street and public space lighting.
Kevin has been working as a consultant to Kirklees Council, th

UK - The M4 motorway might cut a swathe through the centre of Boston Manor Park in Brentford, London, but where the Junction 2 Festival is concerned it is anything but a dividing presence. In fact since 2016, discerning fans of electronic music have gathered together between its pillars and beneath its road-deck to witness sets by some of the very best DJs in the world.
Junction 2’s mission was always to concentrate on delivering the best production values. The focus lies away from VIPs and plastic tents, preferring to concentrate resources on delivering quality sound and high production values against this fittingly industrial backdrop. Junction 2 has grown organically over its four editions to become one of the capital’s most popular electronic festivals and this year’s event, due to be staged in June, was sold out.
Events this year have of course been decimate

The Netherlands - Doka nightclub inhabits the basement of the colourful Volkshotel in southeast Amsterdam. With a maximum capacity of 200, Doka bills itself as the place where “listeners become dancers and vice versa”.
To meet that mission with something more nuanced than the conventional high-volume, high-distortion club PA, Doka hired pro audio distribution and integration company Firm4 to install the unconventional loudspeaker and subwoofer designs of acoustician Tom Danley. Four Danley SH50 full-range loudspeakers and two Danley TH118 subwoofers give Doka’s patrons an audio experience.
“The old system wasn’t meeting the high standards that Kerwin Groot, Doka’s chief sound engineer and Julian Chaptal, the club’s producer and programmer expected,” explained Robert Pigeaud, representative of Firm4. “Kerwin reached out to us because he had heard Danle

UK - Techs on the Decks saw 24 artists and technicians unite to present a 24-hour electronic music live stream broadcast on Facebook Live, YouTube and Twitch.
The event - which has currently fundraised £4,000 for technical entertainment charity Backup - was the brainchild of Gordon Torrington from Hampshire-based rental company Liteup. The idea was spawned from a conversation he had with Liteup’s MD Marc Callaghan and freelance LD Warren Hutchison about the work of the charity in supporting many industry peers including a friend and colleague of all at Liteup, lighting director and programmer Jonathan Rouse who passed away recently and is much missed.
Techs on the Decks was viewed by 37,000 people creating a buzz around the industry and giving those directly involved a chance to do what they are so passionate about, as the industry remains closed since mid-ma

UK - Cornwall’s Eden Project was born of optimism in 1996, when the visionary Sir Tim Smit announced, what many thought to be an impossible plan: to convert a defunct 160-year old clay pit into a site that would become a world-renowned attraction and education centre.
This July, the Eden Project served as a new symbol of hope, when GLX Productions used a collection of Chauvet Professional COLORado Q40 LED panels to create a brilliant glow throughout its massive Biomes as part of Light It In Red, the initiative aimed at drawing attention to the severe challenges faced by the entertainment and event industry in the UK and the entire world.
The vivid red hues that shimmered through the hexagonal cladding panels of the Biomes, (like the light that shined on other iconic structures throughout the UK), not only raised awareness of the situation faced by the 25,000 business

Puerto Rico - Drone show specialist Verge Aero delivered a stunning aerial performance on 4 July at Puerto Rico’s first drive-in music festival in San Juan, headlined by local artist Pedro Capó.
Promoted by Move Concerts (Puerto Rico) and No Limit Entertainment, the AT&T Drive-In Summer Fest was the island’s first step towards the return of live events since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.
Verge Aero was called in by Roly Garbalosa of Garba Music Corp to add its specialist technology to the event. A renowned production manager on the Latin American music scene, Garbalosa was looking for a spectacular way for the concert’s main sponsor, communications company AT&T, to announce its launch of 5G network services in Puerto Rico.
With corporate sponsorship playing an increasingly major role in live events, Verge Aero’s drone technology presents

UK - AV integrator CCOMM has installed a new multi-functional audio-visual system at the Cambridge communications hub of one of the world’s leading providers of technology to the oil and gas industry. Completed in late 2019, the new build project combines speaker systems from Italian manufacturer K-array with Germany’s Innosonix multi-channel amplifiers.
Both pro audio brands are distributed in the UK by Shefford-based 2B Heard, and it was to the company’s technical director Dave Wooster that CCOMM turned for assistance in specifying the audio system.
“We’d used K-array on previous projects and were entirely satisfied with the results,” said CCOMM project manager Andrew Giles. “As this project required a full design and build approach because the client was effectively converting the space from one usage to another, we asked Dave to submit proposals for a

Switzerland - Billed as Switzerland’s first open-air streaming festival, SummAIR featured a tight programme of live bands mixed on an advanced Allen & Heath dLive setup.
SummAIR was held on 18 June in the town of Hochdorf, where a small, socially distanced audience was joined by an online crowd to enjoy performances by prominent home-grown artists, including Veronica Fusaro, ZiBBZ and Marc Amacher.
With five bands performing on a single stage and just a few minutes for each changeover, the key challenge for Simon Münger from MSL Eventtechnik was to provide a quality, unbroken livestream mix throughout the evening. Reinforcing his own Allen & Heath inventory with a pair of dLive systems hired in through the dLive Rental Network, Simon devised an integrated mixing system spanning FOH, monitors, livestream and mastering matrix duties.
Simon mixed monitors

Canada - Lighting designer Pierre Roy has toured extensively over a 30-year career as well as handled lighting duties for a number of artists in his own hometown of Quebec. For this year’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, he lit a special Facebook Live concert by one of the top rock artists in Quebec, Martin Deschamps, using an Elation rig directed by an Obsidian Control Systems NX4 console, a lighting control platform Roy has worked with for much of his career.
Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day is one of the most important holidays in Quebec and across French Canada, a day to display the region’s fleur-de-lys flag and celebrate its Francophone identity with parades and outdoor concerts. With a storm in the forecast however, the Martin Deschamps show was moved indoors, on very short notice, to the Rolland-Brunelle Cultural Centre in Joliette, Quebec. Although the 24-hour notification mea

Belgium - RTBF, Belgium’s public broadcaster for the country’s French-speaking community has taken delivery of two identical full-IP OB trucks, with equipment from DirectOut playing a mayor role.
The two trucks were built at the German headquarters of system integrator Broadcast Solutions. The OBs are a joint development by the customer, Broadcast Solutions and NEP Belgium, who will lease the vehicles to RTBF. Both units make extensive use of DirectOut equipment for audio signal conversion, transmission and signal monitoring.
The two identical RTBF trucks come as full sized trailers and can work with up to 12 cameras (HD, but UHD-ready). They are designed as full-IP OBs, based on SMPTE ST 2110 but are capable of interfacing with baseband infrastructures. Therefore it was important that the audio infrastructure offers all common IP-based, digital and analogue forma

France - More commonly known by her stage name, Izïa, Izïa Higelin is the rock star daughter of 70s pop legend Jacques Higelin. The Senegal-born actress and musician recently completed a 24-date French tour on the back of her new album, Citadelle.
It took an inspired deployment of GLP’s X4 atom, with its tiny form factor, by the artist’s LD, Jordan Magnée, to provide an imaginative backdrop. The result was a tiltable matrix of 96 atoms (from a total complement of 124 pieces), each with a 30W full-colour LED source, to bring the scenography to life.
These were mounted on a structure fabricated by S Group, which also supplied the fixtures, having purchased them specifically for the tour. The versatility of the atom was demonstrated in the 9:1 zoom ratio - from a wide 34° wash down to a tight 3.5° beam - that enabled a constant variation of narrowing or ex

UK - Earlier this month, Creative Technology (CT) worked closely alongside long-standing client, George P. Johnson (GPJ), to professionally pre-record and edit a series of videos for their client, to later be streamed as part of two online events.
The initial brief evolved over the weeks leading up to the event and as the vision was developed and realised, the final brief was to provide polished, edited, and high-quality pre-recorded presentations and panel sessions. These were then uploaded and streamed to the event platforms being used for the two events they were involved in.
The project was run and managed from Scotland by CT’s senior project manager, Chris Greetham-Ellis, using remote producer and project manager tools which enabled him to clearly see, hear, and direct the event without the need to be physically on-site. In addition to this, CT also provided a p

UK - From the outside, the complex of buildings at 21-25 Bonville Road, Brislington, Bristol, doesn’t look markedly different than it did in 2019. Inside, however, a quiet revolution is underway. The building’s owner, Pytch, which until recently was known as SXS Events, has been busily reinventing itself since the COVID-19 lockdown brought its thriving live event business to a sudden and complete halt.
Almost immediately after the pandemic hit, the company began looking for ways to repurpose its extensive inventory of equipment, as well as the vast pool of skills, experience and knowledge possessed by its team members.
First came Intelligo, an all-in-one digital platform that makes it easier for schools to implement online learning programmes. More recently, Pytch launched The Virtual Venue, a powerfully-equipped production space that, in only its first month, has

The Netherlands - Singer/songwriter Danny Vera has been bringing his distinctive blend of Americana to enthusiastic Dutch audiences since the early 2000s. Following the success of hit single Roller Coaster, Vera and his band played a sold-out tour in late 2019 with a Yamaha Rivage PM7 digital mixing system.
The Rivage PM7 system was purchased in July 2019 by Chris Mertens, owner of Mertens-AVR, based in Eelde, near Groningen. Having started out as a young freelance engineer and worked his way up to management level, Chris set up and grew his business from renting warehouse space to owning its own large premises. Today he has built a company in which reliability and quality are central, based on three core values.
“For me, it has always been about investing in the best equipment, a proactive, committed way of working and delivering a perfect result,” says Chr

USA - Christopher Robin, a production manager at Star Design Event Services of Morgantown, put together the stage for an Independence Day concert by Top 40 recording artists The Davisson Brothers.
Unlike the usual summer concerts, he’s worked on, which take place before large crowds at a park or music venue, this one happened in front of only a few fans in the parking lot of a motorcycle dealership. Most of the fans who saw this show viewed it on a large drive-in screen at a nearby park. Others who saw it through the social media platforms of the 18 country music stations that carried it in West Virginia.
“This was probably the first time we did a multi-site hybrid show that was ‘live’ before a small group of people and livestreamed over different formats,” said Robin. “Like everyone in an industry that is changing all around us, we are adapting to a new no

USA - As the live entertainment industry looks for new ways to engage people in a post COVID-19 world, Bandit Lites, Moo TV and Clair Global joined forces to offer a safe and controlled venue to artists at the Steel Mill, Nashville, complete with a full production turnkey studio.
The full production studio includes a 60’ x 40’ stage area with a lighting rig comprised of over one hundred moving fixtures including the new Chauvet R2X LED washes, a grandMA2 Full console and hazer.
Bandit’s GoGo truss, under hung with GLP X4S, flank an LED video wall while each of the six eye-catching octagons are outfitted with eight Elation ACL360, eight Ayrton MagicDots and one Robe 600 wash. GLP X4 fixtures along the front truss offer key light while Claypaky Sharpys spread throughout the rig act as beam units.
The Steel Mill offers not only a stunning (and air conditione

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