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Out of the Rabbit Hole

Out of the Rabbit Hole

Are we still in an economic recession? I have asked that question to a number of people within the industry. Answers have been running the spectrum from “Yes” to “What recession?” We can sit here and debate whether or not we are, but the fact is, people are starting to spend money again. Tours and productions are going full tilt and requesting more and more production technology.

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That Championship Season photo by Joan Marcus

“That Championship Season:” Revival and Renewal

Despite the extensive experience one can have working on Broadway shows, there is always something new to learn, and sometimes the seemingly simplest things become the most difficult to tackle. Scenic designer Michael Yeargan has well over three decades of experience in theatre and opera, and when he began working on the current revival of That Championship Season in late 2010, the initial challenge seemed to be the quick turnaround that was needed.

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Celine Dion photo by Gerard Schachmes

Celine is Back at the Colosseum

After five years, over 700 performances and 3 million spectators packing the 4,000-seat Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Celine Dion triumphantly closed her show, A New Day, on December 15, 2007. Three years later — after a year and a half on tour, and giving birth to twins, Celine returned.

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Marnie Styles and Adrian Segeren, Ultratec Special Effects

Ultratec Special Effects

Our industry is very visual. We use light to help alter the beholder’s perception of what is going on right in front of them. A single shaft of light and a dark stage, stunning aerials bouncing across the stage — these examples are common practices of capturing the audience’s eye and intensifying their experience.

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Scenex Lighting LED Base4 Truss Toner

LED Base4 Truss Toner

German Light Products, long a world leader in innovative LED products, has built the first lighting fixture designed to actually work as a truss toner — the LED Base4 Truss Toner that’s marketed under GLP’s Scenex Lighting brand. The unique 8-inch-square-by-four-inch-deep body fits snugly into all 12-inch box truss and is designed with 12 individual tri-colored LEDs surrounding the outside of the 8-inch face plate.

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Media Servers: Features for Stand-Alone Operation

Media servers are popping up on a wide range of permanent and semi-permanent installations including airports, theme parks and public buildings these days. The demands of these applications require these systems to integrate and control media distribution, projection, lighting, sound and more. Controlling a range of elements in a project such as a moving set tracked by video projection all but requires a central remote control.

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Michael Zinman

Michael Zinman, Media Maestro

Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with one of the hardest-working programmers in media servers, Michael Zinman, owner of The Zinman Co. (zinmanco.com). His work can be seen on a wide variety of television shows ranging from awards shows like ESPN’s Espy Awards to game shows like NBC’s Minute to Win It. In addition to designing content and programming for broadcasts, Zinman also is a prolific software designer, the creator of iPhone apps including In Your Back Pocket and Genielux. I wanted to find out more, so I tracked him down for a discussion on how the role of the Media Server Programmer & Designer has evolved.

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Color Fundamentals

Color is a powerful, if mercurial, tool. There are no absolutes with color. Blue or white do not exist. There are only relative degrees of color. Controlling the relative aspects of color should not require guesswork. A solid grasp of the basic properties of color perception is all we need.

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Resurrecting Caesar

I have just returned from my sixth trip to Las Vegas in less than a year. I never go there for fun, always for work (which is my kind of fun). I have been fortunate enough to work on quite a few projects in this town, and many of them have been permanent architectural installations. Some are still there, while others have changed into new stores or attractions and all previous lighting was removed. At any rate, one of my favorite things about working on a permanent installation is that, just like the name implies, the show lives on for a long time. On this last trip, I was there to freshen up an installation from 1997.

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Moore’s Law and the LED

I thought I was being clever when it occurred to me that the LED would at some point bring the lighting industry into the economic death grip of Moore’s Law, which, back in 1965, first postulated that the number of transistors that can be cost-effectively placed on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years.

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