USA - The historic Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro, California, is an opulent art deco venue that is moving into a new era of performance excellence with the help of Kinetic Lighting and Elation Professional’s theatrical-grade Artiste DaVinci LED moving head.
Originally opened in 1931 and listed on the National Historic Register, the 1500-seat theatre features a vaudeville-size proscenium stage with T-guided fly system that makes it an ideal venue for concerts, dance performances, multimedia presentations, film screenings or any cultural event.
Great strides have been made in recent years to restore the theatre, with a lighting upgrade the latest in a series of on-going improvements. Kinetic Lighting worked with the Warner Grand and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to convert the theatre from conventional lighting to an entirely LED-based system, as

Mexico - Drone light shows specialist Verge Aero has delivered Mexico’s first drone light show. Working with local partner Sky Precision, Verge Aero provided a system of 150 drone lights to create moving, colour-changing pictures in the sky to open the performance by Dutch DJ Martin Garrix, marking Mexico’s Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) at the FIG19 hot-air balloon festival.
Founded in 2002, the FIG (Festival Internacional del Globo) hot-air balloon festival, which takes place each year in the city of León in central Mexico, has become one of the leading balloon events in the world. This year, organisers were keen to provide a cutting-edge visual treat for visitors and called on Sky Precision to deliver it. Taking up the challenge, specialists from Verge Aero and Sky Precision created custom choreography to accompany a set of four songs, including an opening number

UK - White Light recently supplied the Royal Albert Hall with a range of Martin MAC Encore fixtures, continuing the phased upgrade of the in-house lighting rig.
As it hosts concerts on an almost nightly basis, the venue houses its own in-house kit which is used by incoming shows. The rig has to be flexible in order to adapt to such a varied programme, as well as needing to be energy efficient and sympathetic to the needs and requirements of a wide range of different lighting designers and productions. The existing ETC Source Four Revolutions, whilst having served their time very well, were due for replacement in line with the Hall’s ongoing replacement programme. As a result, the venue approached WL in order to invest in some LED alternatives for these new fixtures.
WL’s business development manager Jonathan Haynes explains: “I met up with lighting design manage

Poland - When production, lighting and multimedia designer, Pawel ‘Spider’ Pajak, and PERCEPTO [LAB] - the team responsible for creative visual production - were approached by production company, East Eventz, to design and deliver creative solutions for a one-off concert, they chose Ayrton MagicPanel-FX and Khamsin-S fixtures to provide contemporary, densely-coloured and dramatic effects for this very special evening.
The two-artist concert featured singer Dawid Podsiadlo and rapper Taco Hemingway, and was the first sold-out gig for Polish artists in the history of Warsaw’s PGE Narodowy Stadium, attracting an attendance of 60,000 people.
Spider chose Ayrton’s state-of-the-art technology - 64 MagicPanel-FX and 44 Khamsin-S fixtures, supplied by Transcolor - after many successful years using the brand: “I have also adopted Ayrton’s range of more classic, but

UK - Lighting designer Jacob Gowler took the opportunity to use Robe’s new T1 Profiles and LEDBeam 150s for the first time on a Cambridge Theatre Company (CTC) production of the crime-and-passion fuelled musical Chicago (High School Edition), staged over six performances in the 337-seat Great Hall at The Leys School in Cambridge.
CTC was founded in 2015 by Louis Ling to offer a range of opportunities for performers - young and old - to participate in high-quality theatre, and it now performs to over 9000 people annually. Since 2017, CTC has developed its focus on the youth community, and by working with professional directors, LDs, choreographers and musical directors, enables its young performers to experience unique opportunities to develop their skills.
For this production, the professionals were Jacob, director Chris Cuming, set and costume designer Franki

UK - The Tony Award-winning Best Musical Dear Evan Hansen opened in London 19 November at the Noel Coward Theatre with video projection comprising the shows entire stage scenery.
Supplied by Stage Sound Services, three disguise vx 4 and four gx 1 servers powered projections for the show, highlighting the impact of social media on daily life and create an immersive social media environment on stage for the actors.
“The cornerstone of the play is Evan and his interaction with the real world through a social media lens,” says projection designer Peter Nigrini. “To successfully tell our story, social media needed to be a visceral part of the theatrical environment. After the set designer created a physical environment, my job was to bring this virtual world to life on stage and give it the emotional power that so many teenagers clearly feel in their day to day

USA - The Gaylord National Resort & Convention Centre in National Harbor, Maryland near the nation’s capital likes to celebrate Christmas in a big way. Set in the property’s 19-story glass garden atrium with its views of the river, Christmas on the Potomac is the hotel’s myriad holiday installation crowned by Cirque Dreams Unwrapped, a six-week-long, 25-minute Christmas fable combining artistry and showmanship from around the world with Christmas music, a dancing fountain, laser-light show and indoor snowfall.
Bringing this production sonically alive was the task of an L-Acoustics Kara system, designed and installed by Showtime Sound LLC of Frederick, Maryland. The system was split between the atrium’s lower and upper terraces: the former comprised a left-right design of one SB18 subwoofer ground-stacked with five Kara enclosures per side to cover t

UK - Rising British singer and rapper Little Simz played her flagship show at London’s Kentish Town Forum in December, making video a priority for the first time to enhance her show for the tour’s largest audience.
Production AV was brought on board by Little Simz’s production manager, Eric Wade of EZ Services, who was on the lookout for a new video supplier. Wade was keen to ramp up the visual effect of the show and capture quality footage, not only for live stage to IMAG screens, but also for use in promo material.
“We had a pretty tight schedule to implement the video aspects for the biggest show of the tour and going with Production AV made perfect sense,” says Wade. “We wanted to give everyone in the audience the same experience, regardless of whether they were on the balcony or tucked away some place where sight lines weren’t so great.
“Pro

Slovakia - Bratislava’s new year celebrations, held in the heart of the Slovakian capital at the Rázusovo nábrežie (the banks of the River Danube) were brought to life by a spectacular lightshow masterminded by Kvant Show Production.
The laser specialists, who are also PR Lighting’s distributor for Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia, have been the event lighting contractors since the concept was introduced three years ago, and in addition to their own lasers, 24 pieces of PR Lighting’s Aqua 580 Beam helped provide a spectacular show as the city counted down to 2020.
Organised by Biela Noc (White Night), the artistic department of the Slovakia and Bratislava municipality, a crew of around 25 people were responsible for creating the infrastructure, including Layher structures, lighting, sound and lasers, and all programming.
This year’s event was based

Italy - The University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples is turning to a different use of immersive audio technology with one of its new physics research labs. The lab at the university’s Aversa campus is exploring the relationship between temperature, audio and visuals, and to do this in a scientific way the researchers required a space where each element could be precisely controlled. To achieve this control from an audio standpoint, the researchers turned to Martin Audio’s Sound Adventures.
The new lab has been purpose-built as a small, dedicated space within a historic building. Radiant heating panels on the walls and the floor and air conditioning system allow for the room’s temperature to be raised or lowered, while the intelligent lighting system allows for the management of this element.
The Sound Adventures solution controlling the sonic environment

Europe - Sergio Herman is a successful Michelin-starred Dutch chef. His restaurant, The Jane, in Antwerp, is internationally renowned for its food and carefully created ambience. At Strandhotel in Dutch Flanders, Herman is responsible for the hotel’s three restaurants, including the recently opened Blueness. In order to fully realise Herman’s vision for Blueness and breakfast restaurant Pine House, new audio systems were considered essential and his team were clear about what they wanted.
A Pioneer Pro Audio system had been installed at The Jane back in 2014 and had left an indelible mark on The Herman Group. At the Strandhotel, the team needed a system that could deliver a chilled experience for guests at the beginning of their day, maintain a relaxed output on weeknights and then inject some energy for weekend DJ sets.
A flexible system was essential given the d

USA - The new Capital Hills main campus of Summit Church looks right at home in North Carolina’s famed Research Triangle, which is routinely ranked as one of the most tech-savvy areas in the US.
Once inside the 90,064sq.ft house of worship, the visitor is greeted by a welcoming and engaging environment created with help from an advanced AVL system engineered and installed by the CSD Group that features an immersive 360° sound system, massive video walls, and a state-of-the art LED lighting system anchored by close to 100 Chauvet Professional fixtures and two Net X II nodes.
Opened in 2019, the new building serves as Summit Church’s broadcast centre. Services from its 1,800-seat worship area are live streamed to the church’s nine other campus in the Research Triangle. Accurate, precisely controlled key lighting and colour temperatures are critical to main

UK - Specialist equipment supplier and production house, Light Fantastic Production Services apply their stock of Robe MegaPointe fixtures to a variety of live events.
Having made a significant investment in Robe MegaPointe fixtures to extend their growing lighting inventory, LFPS director, Rob Myer, says: “We have a long-standing relationship with Robe so naturally we are delighted with the performance of our MegaPointes. Over the past few months we have been making great use of them on a host of projects, from creating aerial searchlight effects and gobo projection across building facades to adding incredible theatrical looks to prestigious large-scale live events, including a particularly spectacular product launch installation on a roof at Chelsea Harbour.”
Working both on their own in-house projects and in collaboration with a broad range of industry partners,

South Africa - For the past 17 years, British lighting designer Graham McLusky has made his way to South Africa to light the annual pantomime. This season, Jack and the Beanstalk was presented at the Joburg Theatre during November and December.
McLusky utilised the theatre’s new lighting gear, which included 12 Claypaky Sharpy Plus fixtures recently purchased from DWR Distribution.
McLusky’s history with the production dates back to when director Janice Honeyman and producer Bernard Jay wanted to hire an established UK panto lighting designer to launch their new production. They consulted with UK pantomime producers Qdos, which creates and maintains spectacular stage sets and more than 100,000 costumes for an enormous portfolio of shows.
Over the years, Honeyman and Jay have adapted the well-established and successful pantos to convey a distinctly Sou

USA - 2020 is set to be very big for the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus, with events centred around what would have been the former Beatle’s 80th birthday.
The Lennon Bus - a mobile audio and HD video recording and production facility - regularly provides free digital media production workshops to schools across the US and Canada, enabling students to learn how to write, record, and produce original songs, music videos, documentaries, and live multi-camera video productions.
The bus’ two onboard studios have recently been upgraded to Genelec’s The Ones coaxial three-way point source models.
“We go to a lot of under-served schools and a lot of communities that are under-resourced, so bringing something that really represents the best of the industry is eye-opening and can be life-changing for kids and communities,” explains Brian Rothschild, co

UK - Over 170 Adamson loudspeakers were deployed for three days of spectacular events for Edinburgh's Hogmanay.
Marking the 27th edition of the famed New Year party, the three-day festival combined Scottish traditions with contemporary artists and acts from across the world in Edinburgh, the home of Hogmanay.
Working directly with Dave Watson and Scottie McKean from producers Underbelly, The Warehouse designed an Adamson system for Hogmanay in the Gardens headlined by Mark Ronson, the Waverley Stage headlined by Marc Almond and McEwan Hall’s three-day celebrations with Symphonic Ibiza, Eddi Reader and Ronnie Scott’s Big Band.
In addition, Adamson partner Live Systems Ltd provided the system for Ceilidh under the Castle.
Across the whole event, 170 Adamson loudspeakers were used, including the E15, S10, S7 line array loudspeakers, E119, S119 an

USA - East Shore Sound is based about a half hour north of the Baltimore Metro Area but the company handles event production, system design and installation, and broadcast communications nationwide.
This past October, East Shore Sound owner Bill Saltzer and his team were responsible for the intercom systems at Telemundo Networks’ 2019 Latin American Music Awards, held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. To connect the intercom system throughout the venue, the East Shore Sound team relied on Luminex GigaCore network switches.
“We started using Luminex GigaCore switches about two years ago, primarily with Riedel’s Bolero wireless intercom product,” Saltzer recalls. “We mostly use GigaCore switches for Bolero systems because the integration with Bolero is seamless, and we like how GigaCore handles PTP [Precision Time Protocol] clocking. Also, GigaCore’s PoE

Sweden - Singer and songwriter Carola Maria Häggkvist – best known as Carola – has been one of Sweden's most popular performers since the early 1980s, releasing a range of albums over that time encompassing pop and disco to hymns and folk music.
She has just played 12 sold-out festive shows at the Slottsladan (Castle Barn) in Steninge Slottsby, around 35km north of Stockholm with special Christmas lighting designed by Danne Persson of Roxy Lighting and including a selection of Robe moving lights – 18 x MegaPointes, 8 x T1 Profiles, six BMFL Spots and one RoboSpot system.
The venue is newly refurbished. The old barn was ‘discovered’ by Carola when she relocated to Steninge Slottsby a couple of years ago and it became her dream to perform there.
The charismatic space is 60 metres long, 20 metres wide and dates to 1900. It’s now adjacent to a collection

Croatia - A property of the Maistra Hospitality Group, the five-star Grand Park Hotel Rovinj is set at the edge of a pine forest on the Adriatic coast of northwestern Croatia. The six-story hotel offers 193 guest rooms and 16 suites, plus three restaurants, three bar/lounges, a spa, indoor and outdoor pools and tennis courts, a grand ballroom, and three combinable multifunction conference spaces.
Recently, systems integrator HUST d.o.o. finished the design and installation of a 40-zone networked sound system at the hotel that employs Linea Research amplifiers, managed by a Biamp Tesira Server-IO AVB digital network server.
“Linea Research amplifiers are one of the most reliable amplifiers that we’ve used in our projects,” reports Tomislav Stubican of HUST d.o.o. “We have never had a problem with them, so they were the right choice for a demanding system that ne

Germany - Schauspielhaus Bochum has recently completed a major installation featuring multiple Allen & Heath dLive systems, alongside new digital network technology across all of its venues and finished a successful first season with the new systems.
Schauspielhaus Bochum is one of the biggest and most acclaimed theatres in Germany. Founded in 1907, it was completely destroyed in World War II and rebuilt in the 1950s with a capacity of 811 seats. A second theatre – the 400-capacity Kammerspiele – opened its doors in 1966. Former directors of the theatre include Peter Zadek, Claus Peymann and Leander Haußmann.
Christoph Bonk has worked in the sound department for 28 years and has seen many technical changes during that time. His final goal as technical director was to guide the theatre into the future of digital technology and networking.
“In Bochum we

UK - White Light has recently supplied the lighting on Teenage Dick, the critically-acclaimed production which is currently running at the Donmar Warehouse.
Making its UK debut, Teenage Dick is a darkly comic take on Richard III and is directed by the Donmar’s artistic director Michael Longhurst. Set in an American high school, it tells the story of Richard who, after years of torment due to his hemiplegia, plots the ultimate rise in power: become president of his senior class.
The show features a lighting design by Sinead McKenna, who comments: “My brief on Teenage Dick was to create the feeling of a bright and brash ‘high school movie’ meets dark European stark expressionism. It was actually a real joy to mash up these two styles and experiment with what could be achieved. The play is also set in a gym and Chloe Lamford’s set really mak

USA - Philadelphia Zoo did their part to spread holiday cheer this season with LumiNature, a massive new experiential holiday sound and light attraction that transformed the nation’s first zoo into a magical winter wonderland encompassing 12 captivating experience zones.
At the centre of the event was a majestic multi-media spectacular called Northern Lights designed by award-winning lighting designer Ken Billington, using a 4Wall Entertainment-supplied lighting package that included Elation Professional’s IP65-rated Proteus luminaires.
The show, produced and directed by Jason Kantrowitz of Luminous Ventures, played 11 times a night, and starred a 35ft tall polar bear sculpture named Polaris crafted from recycled car doors and hoods. Polaris, which also served as a giant projection surface for the eco-themed show, stood prominently overlooking a lake conta

USA - More than 200,000 people gathered at Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park to usher in 2020 at Jack Daniel's Music City Midnight: New Year's Eve in Nashville. Bandit Lites once again provided the celebration with a comprehensive lighting system to help with six hours of live music, fireworks and the midnight Music Note Drop.
“It’s never easy to plan a party for 200,000 people but the design and production team of David Spencer, Chris Lisle, Mark Anderson and Erik Parker literally make it seem like a stroll through the park,” comments Bandit Lites vice-president, Mike Golden. “This marks the twelfth year of working with this team, and each year they make adjustments to further streamline production.”
Production designer Erik Parker of Chris Lisle Lighting Design refreshed his previous years’ designs for the main stage, outfitting the rig to pop both i

USA - The HiJinx Festival of Electronic Dance Music marked its second year with a return to Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Centre where production designer, Cort Lawrence, ramped up the excitement with Ayrton Huracán-X fixtures providing dynamic graphics and colourful effects.
HiJinx drew crowds of approximately 25,000 on 27 and 28 December 2019 with headliners such as Bassnectar, Excision, Slander, GRiZ, Porter Robinson, Skrillex and Zeds Dead. Following the success of its inaugural year in 2018 the festival occupied a bigger portion of the centre and staged a bigger show to the delight of attendees.
Cort Lawrence reprised his role designing the club-scene look of the show and coordinating with the individual artists’ teams who crafted the visuals for their performances. He had seen Ayrton’s new Huracán-X in its debut at LDI the previous month and imm

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