In the last few months I received two offers to light a symphony. I thought to myself, “How hard can this be? Set a pretty look for each segment and key light a couple of solos. Simple, right?” Now add some flamenco dancers, jugglers, acrobats, assorted guest vocalists and 100 choir members. What I ended up with is a variety show, featuring the symphony.
Read More »Look Solutions’ newest fog machine, the Cryo-Fog, is a compact, low-lying fog production machine. It’s compact enough to fit in the “overhead bin;” just be careful when you open that bin, because this baby is 28 kilograms without the fog fluid. (For those of us who don’t do metric, that’s just under 62 pounds.) But don’t let its size fool you; the Cryo-Fog machine pumps out enough fog to compete with the more standard-sized (read, larger) fog machines of its type. I recently had the chance to get upclose and personal with the Cryo-Fog machine when Tom Gittens at Advanced Entertainment Services, in Las Vegas, Nev., showed me around the device.
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Event Producers Sets the Stage
The schedule looks something like this: Get in to town on Sunday, maybe Friday or Saturday if you are lucky. Walk through Hall D of the Anaheim Convention Center late Sunday night, go over some points, make sure that you have all of the gear and prep yourself for a long week. This 221,284 square foot convention hall needs to be turned into an 11,000 seat theatre by 8:30 a.m. Thursday for the opening ceremonies for AARP’s National Event, “Life at 50+: Lights, Camera, Anaheim,” a gala-event with performances by Bill Cosby, Jose Feliciano and Elton John; along with appearances by Maya Angelou, Geena Davis and Dan Rather, among others.
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Tenacious D has been described as “this wild lead singer with pipes of platinum” and “the heavy-set bald fellow churning out riffs of pure profundity.” Of course, it was Jack Black and Kyle Gass, the two founders of the band, who came up with that description. You would expect nothing less from the self-proclaimed “Greatest Band on Earth,” the same duo who said their show “couldn’t be explained but had to be experienced live and in person.”
Read More »I’m just waking up again. Now it’s 3PM on a Saturday afternoon. After a long night of party preparation, I finally got some sleep. What is party preparation? It’s a lot of fast programming the many areas of a Bacardi Live Event in Miami.
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I have an early loadin this morning. The only unfortunate thing is it's located in Miami and I'm still home in Chicago. Because I had to program another show last night, I could not get my usual day early flight. I have a nasty cold and I'm running on empty.
Read More »Hello to all, picking up where we left last week. I’ve spent sometime watching live shows, whether it is in front of my eye, TiVo, television or DVD player. I recall seeing Primus, Galactic, Muse, and Nine Inch nails very visually oriented shows.
Read More »Large gauge feeder cable and multi-core power cable are common sights at various concert, corporate, and touring events. If the person in charge of the… Read More »The Reason for “Figure Eight” Coiling
Read More »I have long been a supporter of people who ask questions. I would much rather have a lighting tech ask me a stupid question, then assume the wrong answer and have to do something twice because they were afraid to ask.
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I have a lot of respect and admirantion for Keny Whitright, the guy who invented the color scroller and started Wybron out of his garage… Read More »Wybron Ups the Ante
Read More »Ok so last week I ended the blog by telling you about how I incorporate track lighting into my light show. Well, at first I embarrassingly zip tied them to mic stands. It was really a desperate attempt to get a vertical ACL wash across the stage. It began to be a pain in the ass for the band and myself to drag them around so I took the two pieces I had, untied them and cut them down to about a length of three feet each. The day I went to set them up during a load in a really cool thing happened. I placed them horizontally on the ground one in front of Nathan’s bass rig, and the other in front of Matt’s guitar rig. When I patched everything and turned up the faders I was astonished. It lit the rigs up so intense. Everyone looked over at me and said it looked bad ass. I was complimented in a weird way that day by Geoff our drummer and Erik our sound engineer. They told me that I have the most f#*ked up ability to take something shitty and make it into something cool. I was proud that I made it cool, but also analyzing that it was shitty in the first place.
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