For Miranda Lambert, “it’s all about taking this rock persona of hers and running with it,” says LD Chris Lisle of the Nashville star’s current Locked and Reloaded tour with Dierks Bentley, a sequel of sorts to the Lambert/Bentley Locked and Loaded co-headlining tour of 2006/2007. “I tell everyone she’s a rock star,” he says. “That little five foot four gal just explodes on stage, making her fun to light.”
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Brian Hugh Warner, the artist behind both the man and the band known as Marilyn Manson, has crafted a daunting persona, and the band’s “Hey Cruel World” tour schedule, interspersed with the “Twins of Evil” co-headlining trek with Rob Zombie last fall, was also clearly not for the faint of heart, either. Launched just prior to, and continuing after, the May 1, 2012 release of Manson’s Born Villain album, the tour legs included Australia (six shows in February and March), Asia (five shows in Japan and Taiwan in March) the U.S. (18 shows in April and May) and Europe (24 shows in 24 cities, May-July).
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Since its reportedly shaky start back in Oct. 1999, the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, staged by concert promoter Goldenvoice, is now on solid financial ground. Tickets for this year’s first weekend of events, held April 12-14, not only sold out, they were gone within 20 minutes. Three-day passes for the second weekend, April 19-21, sold out as well, in little more than a day.
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Sight & Sound, a Christian theatre company founded in Pennsylvania’s Amish country in the mid-1970s by Glenn and Shirley Eshelman, has been entertaining audiences and spreading the story of the Bible ever since.
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The first thing Robert “Bob” Belanger wants you to know about ChainMaster electric chain hosts and control systems is that they are built specifically for the entertainment industry. You won’t find them on car assembly lines. You won’t see them on construction sites. You will see them on concert tours, corporate events and theater installations.
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At first glance, the design for the Bon Jovi Because We Can World Tour looks extremely simple. When the show opens, there is no video screen, just a wide-open stage and not a lot of lights. On the surface, it seems that Performance Environment Designer Doug “Spike” Brant has taken a severely minimalistic design approach. Nothing could be further from the truth; rather the environment reveals itself, literally at the cue of the video. Building on their dynamic visuals for the last few Bon Jovi tours, Performance Environment Design Group (PEDG) and Brant have taken advantage of a convergence of new technologies and a few innovative companies to realize their most ambitious design to date.
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Good morning class, does everyone have a calculator? Today’s lesson is about calculating the center point of an image so we can align two LED curtains hung with space in between with different pixel pitches so that the image of one continues onto the second cleanly. The trick is to calculate where the center point is and work outward to find the starting pixel of the image. What follows is an example of how to work that math.
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The “LT” in Philips Vari-Lite’s new VL3015LT Spot stands for “long throw,” and one of the first things you will notice about this fixture is brightness, along with a zoom range tailor made for long throw applications. With an improved output running at 1650 watts using a 1500W Osram double-ended short arc lamp, the VL3015LT Spot combines some of Vari-Lite’s latest technologies with features that designers have been relying on for years with fixtures like the VL3000 and VL3500 spots.
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Before 2010, if a lighting crew member said “sharpy,” it was probably in reference to a black felt pen (i.e., a Sharpie). Those felt-tip markers are still around, but these days, so are a lot of Sharpys — Clay Paky’s compact, lightweight and quick moving light fixtures with distinctively bright and hard-edged beams. Last fall, at LDI 2012, Clay Paky launched its Sharpy Wash 330, a little more than two years after the company’s original Sharpy fixture made its big debut at PLASA 2010 in London.
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