UK - As Blind Date returns to prime-time television, illumination specialists LED Creative is supporting the crews at the legendary, iconic dating show and the Big Brother’s themed housemate challenge.
Filmed in front of a live studio audience at ITV London Studios the new Blind Date stays faithful to the winning formula of the original. Hosted by Paul O’Grady and featuring the sliding panel and three question format, the show pits three hopefuls against each other, fighting to win the attention of a mystery date.
Created by scenic designer, Chris Webster and lit with LD Oli Richards, the suitably fabulous set balances a blend of cool neonesque LED against a warm tungsten glow provided by an array of cleverly housed LED practical fixtures that form the backdrop. LED Creative’s Alpha 60 RGB system has been put to good use, adding crisp accents

Namibia - Walvis Bay, an extraordinary city on Namibia’s coast, with the contrast of sand dunes on one side and the ocean on the other, was the location for the 2017 Namibia Annual Music Awards which was both a livestream and live broadcast on the NBC platform.
Micky Lehr from EventPlus has headed the technical production for the NAMAs since 2015 and had a clear vision of what he wanted the show to look like in 2017. A substantial amount of Robe gear, with 12 Robe Squares being a predominant feature, ran off a grandMA2 control system.
With over 42 years’ experience, Micky Lehr is a leading technical producer, production manager and designer to the live event and entertainment industry. “This year’s production design relied heavily on lighting as the set mostly consisted of scaffold structures,” Micky explained.
“I believed that Joshua Cutts from Visua

Germany - Following a recent technical upgrade, which saw convention and concert venue Eurogress Aachen install two Yamaha CL5 digital mixing consoles, the new desks proved so successful that five more Yamaha digital mixers have now been installed.
Eurogress Aachen is a major venue for business and entertainment in the German city, with three main halls and an array of breakout and meeting rooms. For the previous upgrade a Dante network was installed throughout the complex, with a Yamaha CL5 console and Rio3224-D i/o unit in the 1700-capacity Europa and 430-capacity Brüssel halls.
Installed by Köln-based TEQSAS GmbH, the company has since been asked to add two Yamaha QL1 digital consoles, each with a Rio1608-D i/o unit, and three TF1s.
“The straightforward way of working with the CL5 consoles was the ‘door opener’ for us being asked to install further Yam

Latvia - Dinamo Riga, the Latvian professional hockey team, teamed with Stage Crew, Latvian technical production service, to mark Dinamo’s final home game of the KHL 2016/17 season. And central to the stunning pre-game visuals was a Hippotizer Karst Media Server, running Hippotizer V4.
The impressive Arena Riga has been home to the Kontinental Hockey League club Dinamo Riga since 2008, offering a 10,300 capacity when the ice is laid out. One of Latvia’s leading indoor venues – artists to have played concerts there include Ed Sheeran, Elton John, KISS, Metallica, and Tiesto – Arena Riga provided a superb backdrop and centrepiece for the show.
Pro 1 Stage, Green Hippo’s Latvian distributor, used and configured a Hippotizer Karst to drive five 1920 x 1080 feeds at 60Hz. Two of the Karst outputs, split with Datapath X4’s fed four Barco HDXW20 Flex projectors fo

Aruba - Too often, events that receive a lot of accolades don’t seem to live up to their press clippings. This was most definitely not the case at the 2017 Soul Beach Music Festival in Aruba’s capital, Oranjestad.
The five-day event exceeded even the highest expectations this year, serving up a plethora of charismatic performances from superstars like Usher, The Roots and Mary J. Blige in a paradisiacal setting. Adding extra sizzle to the proceedings was the seemingly endless variety of intensely coloured big looks that Erik van Oorsouw of Elite Productions created with help from over 100 Chauvet Professional fixtures.
“I have been the designer for the Soul Beach Festival for some years,” said van Oorsouw. “It is a wonderful festival with so much talent on stage. The challenge from a lighting design standpoint is to create different looks over the course of t

Belgium - Painting with Light renewed its long-term working collaboration with the Summer Opera at Alden Biesen, a 16th century castle in the village of Rijkhoven, Limburg, eastern Belgium, just a 20-minute drive from the creative design practice’s own HQ in Genk.
Paco Mispelters from Painting with Light was tasked with lighting this year’s production of Gaetano Donizetti’s well known comic opera Don Pasquale, celebrating 20 years since the start of the successful annual opera event.
In keeping with the light-hearted and animated rhythm of the piece, Paco wanted to keep the lighting upbeat and vibrant in style and feel.
The production is staged in the gardens of the castle - now a cultural and conference centre - and this well-tended, leafy green environmental setting provided the inspiration for Philippe Miesch’s set design, which extends the gar

Mexico - Corona Sunsets returned to Tulum, Mexico on 17 June for a daylong programme of electronic dance music in idyllic surroundings. The festival saw the country’s first outing for Vero – Funktion-One’s vertically arrayable loudspeaker system.
Sound for the event was supplied and managed by Loto Audio – Funktion-One’s distributor for Mexico. Funktion-One founder, John Newsham, flew out to help with set-up for Corona Sunsets and to provide Vero training for the Loto Audio team.
Loto Audio has placed an order for its own Vero system, which will be delivered in July. For Corona Sunsets, the Vero system was shipped from the US.
The event organiser was keen to keep the visual impact of the system to a minimum, which led to a stipulation that it should be stacked rather than flown, which offered the sound crew a challenge.
Newsham worked with Ramon

Germany - Back in the summer of 2013, system integrators, fulfil engineering, replaced the main PA along the four stands at Signal Iduna Park, home to Bundesliga club, Borussia Dortmund. At the time, they left the existing EAW sound system providing coverage in the four corners for future upgrade. This has now been implemented, and at the same time, the previous two-channel amplifiers have been retired in favour of Powersoft’s 8-channel process-controlled solution.
A large quantity of Powersoft’s streamlined, energy-efficient Ottocanali installation amplifiers have been specified in combination with the advanced X8 Series, which were supplied by the Italian manufacturer’s German distributor, Laauser & Vohl.
“Whenever I visited fulfil, Powersoft amplifiers had always been an important topic of conversation,” stated L&V sales director, Friedemann Wüstn

UK - LAMDA (London Academy of music & Dramatic Art) recently opened its brand new £28.2m facility, which replaces the western part of its campus and more than doubles its overall size. Founded in 1861 as the London Academy of Music, LAMDA is the oldest drama school in the UK and was the first such institution to offer acting tuition. Today, LAMDA offers seven validated degree courses in acting, directing, production and technical arts.
Charcoalblue LLP worked alongside Niall McLaughlin Architects to provide the Performance Specification for the consolidation of LAMDA’s disparate and remote teaching spaces onto the new single-site campus in Hammersmith. Development consisted of the 200-seat Sainsbury Theatre, the 120-seat Carne Studio Theatre, The Manny & Brigitta Davidson Foyer, The Sackler Library, a screen and audio suite, ten training/rehearsal studios and ful

UK - Star Events provided a performance wall for a 12-piece synthesiser ensemble and a standard 1.2m high forestage as New Order rolled back the years and rolled out the production to open Manchester International Festival (MIF).
Playing at Old Granada Studios, home to Joy Division’s first televised performance, on Tony Wilson’s So It Goes programme, and a nascent New Order three years later, Star Events helped develop the supporting structure for artist Liam Gillick’s responsive stage designs.
Star Events’ pods, stacked six on six, sat behind custom mechanical louvres, which served as a screen for visuals, flickering open to reveal 12 dancing synth players.
Largely dispensing with the hits, New Order chose to reinvent or embellish a ‘setlist of surprises’, from Joy Division’s Disorder to Plastic off 2015 LP Music Complete.

Slovenia - Teamwork is a great thing, and this was clearly evident for Slovenia’s 2017 PopRock Festival, a high profile national TV live event broadcast from Ljubljana, where lighting designer Crt Birsa and set designer Greta Godnic worked their creative magic in a special collaboration - with the help of 200 plus Robe lighting fixtures!
The PopRock Festival, now in its second year, was staged at the Gospodarsko Razstavisce exhibition centre for the first time, bringing an interesting mix of pop and rock artists and bands who had battled it out to reach the final twelve.
The aesthetic requirement was for a high-energy environment with enough latitude for all to look different and cool - both on camera and onstage - where they were appreciated by 700 excited music fans packed into the venue to catch the action as it unfolded.
The 12 contestants performed and we

The Netherlands - Built in the 1920s, the domed and eye-catching Majella church in East Amsterdam is a large, imposing building. Its design was inspired by the Byzantine churches in Palestine visited by its architect, Jan Stuyt. From the very beginning of the church's life, its sheer size presented the parish with expensive maintenance issues.
Having first found a use hosting the Institute for Women's History, in 2012 it became home to the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Dutch Chamber Orchestra (NedPho/NKO). NedPho/NKO had for some time been seeking a new rehearsal space and with Stadherstel's expertise, the heart of church was altered to create an ideal facility. The space is also used for small-scale concerts, lectures and receptions and the NedPho Dome, as it is commonly known, is highly regarded as an important cultural hub.
To further enhance and improve th

Germany - As Ascension Day is a traditional day off for Germans, what better way to spend it then at Tanta Mia tanzt, a one-day electro dance music festival with international and regional DJs.
Held in the town of Vechta in northwest Germany, Tanta Mia tanzt debuted in 2016 and was back in 2017 with a line-up of EDM and house beat artists playing across multiple stages. The all-day EDM party with its unusual name (Aunt Mia is dancing) attracted more than 16,000 visitors this year.
Elation Professional’s new German distribution partner, LMP Lichttechnik Vertriebs GmbH, who began distributing Elation Professional products in Germany in April of this year, worked with production services company Multi Media Marketing & Event GmbH. Dirk Möhlenbrock from Multi Media, responsible for the entire show design, took over the creative and technical project management this

UK - Warpaint is a Los Angeles based “dream pop” band currently on tour in support of their third album, Heads Up. The tour, which has played high-profile venues from Australia’s Sydney Opera House to England’s Glastonbury Festival, carries two Allen & Heath dLive S5000 Surfaces with DM64 MixRacks for FOH and monitors, supplied by Wigwam Acoustics in Europe and Rat Sound in the USA.
FOH engineer Hanford Pittman first encountered the dLive at the Music Tastes Good festival in Long Beach. “Right away, I fell in love with it,” he says. “I set things up with the dLive Director and I was pretty much self-sufficient right away. Then, as soon as I heard that first kick, I knew it sounded amazing.”
Maxine Gilmore, Warpaint’s monitor engineer tried the dLive at the same festival and Pittman says, “Once she realized that she could set it up exactly

UK - Working with creative studio Another Space, VER London helped build the vibrant, large scale artistic installation that shrouded the entrance to the Dazed 100 celebration event.
Titled Shadow Play, the production centred on a 15m wide projection, featuring imagery and beams split into layered colour channels. The presence of visitors passing through the beams refracted the layers resulting in their silhouettes becoming an integral part of the highly immersive experience.
Speaking about the production, VER lighting project manager Mark Rooney said: “The Dazed 100 event was an incredible artistic adventure for us. The equipment we supplied out of VER London helped the production team create and deliver a fantastic audience experience”.
VER provided six Barco HDX 20K projectors to the show, offset from standard blend and operating in conjunction with

Europe - “How do we set up the control system to accommodate everything we need for a huge show including capacity for different festival rigs?” Matt Arthur, lighting director for System of a Down’s current European tour, and festival appearances asked Jack Moorhouse, Jands product manager from A.C. Entertainment Technologies.
Rob Sinclair’s ambitious creative design for the headline European tour by the American alternative, Grammy-winning rock band contained over 800 individually controlled elements, including a touring floor package, festival house rig and a large hybrid video wall.
The wall incorporated embedded RGB pixel “lights” alongside a traditional video screen. The lighting pixels themselves required 2,128 DMX channels. Matt originally planned to run the video and pixels from two separate media servers, with overall control from Jands Vista.

UK - St John's is a Romanesque chapel, located in the heart of the Tower of London. It was built between 1077 and 1097 of French stone imported by William the Conqueror and constitutes not only the best-preserved interior in the White Tower but also one of the finest examples of Anglo-Norman church architecture in England.
Historic Royal Palaces had wished for some time to improve lighting provision in the chapel to achieve an improved experience for visitors and congregational acts of worship. Architects Carden & Godfrey, retained architects for Historic Royal Palaces at the Tower of London, recommended James Morse for the project. Morse specialises in the interior and exterior lighting of historic buildings and had recently worked with Carden and Godfrey at Rochester Cathedral.
There was to be strictly no disturbance of the ancient fabric and with this in mind,

UK - Storyhouse in Chester is a new theatre, cinema and library, housed in a renovated art deco Odeon Cinema building. Located in the city centre, it is the biggest project of its kind outside of London. (A detailed report on the evolution of The Storyhouse features in the latest issue of LSi - plasa.me/lsidigital).
The £37m renovation has seen the building revitalised and it now houses an 800-seat auditorium, a 200-seat studio theatre, a restaurant, two bars and a 100-seat boutique cinema. Leading production solution specialist White Light was contracted to supply all of the loose entertainment equipment, which included lighting, audio and video.
Jonathan Haynes, WL’s business development manager and William Bray, business development support at WL, brought Doughty Engineering on board to supply a range of IWB boxes.
Jonathan commented: "For the Storyh

UK - Now in its third year on the wide-open spaces of Brighton City Airport, the Wild Life Festival, jointly founded by Disclosure and Rudimental, once again brought the best out of Martin Audio’s MLA PA and the Capital Sound crew charged with optimising it.
As with the inaugural event in 2015, gusting 30mph winds on build-up day threatened to play havoc with the sound control but this had largely abated by the time the two-day event got underway (this time moving to a Friday-Saturday slot to avoid interfering with Sunday services at the nearby church).
Said Capital crew chief Robin Conway, “I personally believe the MLA system handles the crosswinds much better than other PA’s.” He also praised the latest DISPLAY software, describing it as “brilliant”. In fact, it has extended the low frequency control beneath the previous 300Hz - and this is essential for

Ukraine - !FEST is a chain of creative restaurants, bars and clubs in the Ukraine. Its latest project is !FESTREPUBLIC.CLUB, a new nightclub in the city of Lviv. The club’s owners and management wanted a system of the same quality and impact as the iconic Bowery Presents’ Terminal 5 and Webster Hall in New York City and looked to L-Acoustics to ensure they could offer such an all-round, world class experience.
Converted from a former glass processing plant, the 1500 capacity nightclub has been designed as a loft-style venue, with an industrial feel and a stage for live acts at one end. The club’s owners want to ensure that the desires of visiting artists are always met, but their main concern is to satisfy their guests.
“I want everyone who has ears not just to hear, but also to feel,” says Andriy Khudo, co-founder of !FEST along with Yurko Nazaruk and Dmytro

Belgium - In his 11 years as Epica’s lighting designer, Erwin Van Lokeren has never repeated a look from song to song. Neither he nor the band would have it any other way. Never afraid to blaze their own musical path, the symphonic metal pioneers have transcended genres by pulling in wildly disparate influences from Vivaldi to Star Wars, and weaving them all into a uniquely transformative sound.
Van Lokeren, who collaborates closely with two of Epica’s members Coen Janssen and Isaac Delahaye, has accentuated the band’s musical message with a ceaseless flow of compelling looks, each more unique than the next.
Helping him accomplish this feat on the group’s current Holographic Principle tour of Europe and North America is his ChamSys MagicQ MQ60 console with a compact wing.
“My constant touring life is really easy with the MQ60,” he said. “Because of

World - Ed Sheeran is currently engaged on an extensive world tour, featuring an eye-catching production design by Mark Cunniffe with a networked grandMA2 system specified to control lighting and playback video.
Cunniffe has worked with Sheeran and his technical team, led by production manager Chris Marsh since 2010. That was right at the start of the artist’s impressive career trajectory which started unobtrusively and steadily grew – keeping all the best cool and slightly underground elements - to the supersonic proportions it is today.
For this tour, Cunniffe’s brief was to make the stage space really dynamic, so he created an elaborate video set and a highly versatile lighting rig which includes 142 moving lights and 17 LED strobes together with two MDG theOne stadium hazers and 10 Kilometres of DMX-controlled RGB LED tape which is lighting the set very effec

Sweden - For a state-owned venue, making a major investment in new equipment can involve a long consultation process. But at a theatre in the southern Swedish city of Borås, this proved well worth the wait, with an Alcons LR7 pro-ribbon system transforming the sound of its productions.
Founded in 1964, Borås Stadsteater is a state-owned production house which moved to its current home in 1975. A typical 1970s-style provincial venue, the 500-capacity main auditorium features raked seating and a balcony. By 2016 the ageing PA system had become too small and outdated to meet the demands of modern audiences, so the management team worked with the local authority to find a solution. They contacted leading systems integrator Electrosound, who visited the venue and suggested the Alcons LR7 system.
"We invited staff from the theatre to listen to the LR7 and then we did a dem

South Africa - The most recent RMB Starlight Classics concert, staged at the Vergelegen Wine Estate in Somerset West, Western Cape, South Africa was lit by Chris Bolton of Keystone Productions with a little help from some Robe moving lights.
It was Chris's second year in the creative hot seat - working directly for organizers Jam Events. Last year he and Joshua Cutts of Visual Frontier produced a lighting co-design – and the two are now partners in their brand new visual design venture, Collective Works – however when Starlight came up this year, Josh had other commitments, so Chris added the lighting magic working with his assistant Jade Manicom.
For the first time, the 2017 event was also recorded by MNET for broadcast a couple of weeks later, bringing a different dimension and set of parameters for lighting.
The talented South African line-up includ

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