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Entertainment Fabrication Inc.

Entertainment Fabrication's products include truss brackets for speakers.

Entertainment Fabrication Inc.

For the past three years, Steven Anschutz has lived a life built on fabrications. Ask him directly and he’ll admit, “I’m a fabricator.” So he made it his business. “In 16 years of working production on shows,” he recalls, “I noticed we always had to set up using the same gear that we’d used forever. We wanted to do things like mounting speakers directly onto trusses instead of having the separate up-lit truss and speakers on sticks. But there wasn’t a handy bracket out there to do that. There were many situations like that, where we’d be stuck using stock components. The standard manufacturers were not willing to create one-off custom pieces. So I decided to start making them myself.”

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Lighting programmer/designer Ken Jones

LD/Programmer Ken Jones

PLSN recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ken Jones, a prominent lighting programmer and designer based in Las Vegas. Ken is probably one of the busiest and most talented programmers in the corporate theatre world that I’ve ever met, and his affection for media server technology is a passion we share. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a few events with him, and I always find myself challenging the boundaries of both my own knowledge and the limitations of the equipment when we work together.

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4Wall provided lighting gear to saturate the set and performers in a world of color. Photo by Sarah Silver courtesy of Pantone.

Pantone: A Behind-the-Scenes Brand Gets Its Close-Up

When Karen Lantelme glimpsed the results of a photo shoot at Windmill Studios in Brooklyn, NY, for Pantone’s 2014 “Make It Brilliant” marketing campaign, she was stunned. Having been on location, Lantelme marveled at how the finished photos accurately reflected a set “painted” with light. “It blew me away,” says Lantelme, Pantone’s director of creative marketing. “The creative team on site had the ability to change the color of the environment in an instant. It was seamless. It was gorgeous.”

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Image Engineering's Beam Composer

Image Engineering’s Beam Composer

One of the hottest technologies in the current visual toolkit is one that has been around for a while in our business — lasers. Lasers make a huge impact on productions, with beams of light dancing over the audience that cannot be produced by any other sort of light source on the market. Lasers are available in a wide range of offerings, from simple DJ effects to elaborate systems that require their own programmer and/or operator. For years, lighting designers have been at the mercy of translating their vision of what they want lasers to do to the laser programmer. The LD handled the lighting rig while a separate controller operated the lasers.

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Reventón Super Estrella photo by Erika Diaz. The Latin rock extravaganza got a visual assist from Global Trend Productions and others

Reventón Super Estrella

The seventeenth annual Reventón Latin rock festival drew close to 18,000 to Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles on July 19, 2014. Organized by KSSE Super Estrella 107.1 FM, Reventón featured a lineup that included largely accessible, if fairly diverse, Spanish-language acts, such as Caifanes, La Ley, Fobia, Roco Pachukote de Maldita Vecindad, Enrique Bunbury, La Unión, Víctimas Del Doctor Cerebro and La Santa Cecilia.

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For this event in Las Vegas, panels of Edslumen Mini P3mm create striking visual impact.

Shenzhen Eastar Aims for the Long Term

One of the bright lights in the bustling Chinese economy is Shenzhen Eastar Electronic Co., Ltd., maker of Esdlumen LED screen and lighting products. The 800-employee company is located in the mega-metropolis of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong in southern China’s Guangdong province.

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The virtual working environment created by wysiwyg for lighting pre-viz...

The Evolution of Visualizers Continues

Recently I was asked about the difference between visualizers and which one would be best to choose for pre-viz (pre-programming a show). Those questions are not as easy to answer as they once may have been. For many years, lighting designers and programmers had only a few choices for pre-programming a show. And video engineers essentially had even fewer than that. All of that has changed, however, in the last few years. Visualizers, or pre-visualization software applications, are now available in practically all aspects of the entertainment and design fields. Which then leads to the questions, “What are they used for?” and “Which one do I need?” Let’s take a closer look at how the one-time “visualizer” has evolved into an array of powerful design tools for lighting and video designers.

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The 4K Blu-Ray: Much More than Pixels

The 4K Blu-Ray: Much More than Pixels

I’ve written extensively about 4K (also known as UHD) over the last few years, and the weak link isn’t the quality or the price of the televisions — it’s the content. To get 4K content onto a 4K display, there are only a few options available. You can connect a 4K-capable PC to the UHD monitor, using HDMI or Display Port, or you can connect several of the industry’s advanced 4K video processors to a small group of professional 4K monitors, using four DVI single-link connections or two DVI dual-link connections.

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Atomos Ronin Portable Video Recorder and Monitor. The unit is available in standalone and rackmount versions.

Atomos Ronin Portable Video Recorder and Monitor

I’ve been uttering the phrase, “That’s my new favorite piece of gear” a lot these days. Any time I get something that makes my gig instantly easier — I’ll take it! Case in point: my most recent gear purchase, the Ronin from Atomos. They’ve made quite a name for themselves in the DSLR market producing small, inexpensive off-camera video recorders, but the Ronin is a bit of a different beast — and by far my new favorite piece of gear.

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ADJ 3 Sixty 2R

ADJ 3 Sixty 2R

ADJ has been stepping up their game in the professional grade segment of their business with the introduction of the 3 Sixty 2R split head moving light.  The company’s goal: to offer a wide range of products for every segment of the market from entry level to professional and installation markets. The 3 Sixty 2R, first featured at LDI 2013, is aimed at lighting pros aiming for both affordability and an array of amazing looks.

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The W1 packs 126 white LEDs in seven modules. Six of the seven modules can move independently

High End Systems Shapeshifter Series

In recent years, automated lighting fixtures utilizing LED technology have begun to evolve beyond wash fixtures into more dynamic visual effects. As many manufacturers continue to strive toward creating brighter and brighter LED profile fixtures, LED wash fixtures have tended to be pretty much the same. That is, until the Shapeshifter. I recently traveled to Austin, TX to spend some time with engineering innovator and Shapeshifter creator Richard Belliveau of High End Systems to learn more about this promising new fixture.

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Complete Production Resources Lights Up Firestone Live in Orlando with Chauvet Professional Gear

Complete Production Resources Lights Up Firestone Live in Orlando with Chauvet Professional Gear

ORLANDO – Firestone Live, a 20,000 square foot venue that rose to prominence in the 1990s, recently completed an extensive remodeling that lowered the club’s stage and included a new trussing rig to expand the space available for the overhead lighting system. Working with a design from Impulse Creative Group, Complete Production Resources equipped the venue with sixteen Legend 412 RGBW LED moving washes, eight Q-Wash 436Z LED RGBW moving washes, eight Legend 330SR Spot moving fixtures, eight COLORado 1-Tri Tour par-style fixtures and one Amhaze II water-based haze machine.  A grandMA on a PC with a fader wing controls the rig.

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