Most lighting designers and programmers have done a corporate show at some point, right? They are the bread and butter of our industry in many ways, so it’s hard not to find yourself sitting in a hotel ballroom at 3:00 a.m. from time to time, working on a show that will end as soon as that CEO makes his big announcement.
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Coemar, the Italian automated lighting manufacturer, has recently unveiled their latest product; the Infinity Wash XL. It’s a 1200-watt moving yoke color wash fixture with some interesting surprises. In some ways it is much like your typical color wash moving light with a color mixing system, zoom, effects, beam shaping, dimmer, shutter and pan/tilt. But in other ways it’s very different.
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Few performers command the type of production that you get with designers like Peter Morse (Prince, Bette Midler), Butch Allen (Garbage, Metallica and Dancing With The Stars, The Tour), Baz Halpin (Queen + Paul Rodgers, Westlife) and Jon Pollak (Steely Dan, Lenny Kravitz). But only the inimitable Christina Aguilera has the pull to bring them all together for one production, her “Back to Basics” tour. The tour continues its North American leg after starting in Europe.
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I am blessed in that I am busy all the time. It’s also a curse as it cuts down on time at home and the amount of preproduction I can do on-site. So I depend on visualizers to get a jump start on my lighting programming for most of my shows.
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Like the Great White Way, the West End of London is brimming with large-scale theatre productions. Recently, shows like Guys & Dolls, Spamalot and We Will Rock You have been popular there, even as more intimate pieces like Frost/Nixon have made a smaller but significant splash. But one show that is a West End mainstay, and which currently sits in the shadow of the impending Lord of the Rings production across the street, is The Woman in Black, a chilling Victorian ghost story that has been running at The Fortune Theatre for 18 years.
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It’s no shabby figure: a cool $446 million went into the design and construction of Miami’s new Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. And it shows. Boasting three theatrical spaces (the Sanford and Dolores Ziff Ballet Opera House, the Knight Concert Hall and the black box Studio Theater), the Center clocks in at an impressive 570,000 square feet.
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“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (9/16/1893 – 10/22/1986), Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian physiologist.
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He may have a common name, but David Taylor is a designer with an uncommon resume. The English native has been involved in theatre since he was a teenager working in the West End. After stints at the University of London and the University of Massachusetts, he went to work as a draftsman for Theatre Projects in Covent Garden, London.
Read More »Legislators from California to Canada are introducing legislation to either encourage or compel the migration from incandescent lighting to compact fluorescent bulbs. It could signal the most significant shift in the lighting industry since the introduction of the LED. According to an Associated Press report, a California legislator has proposed a ban on incandescent bulbs, contending that compact fluorescent (CF) sources are so efficient — they use one-fourth the electricity spent in an equivalent incandescent — that consumers should be forced to use them.
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Who:
Apollo Design Technology, Inc.
What:
Manufacturer and distributor of gobos, dichroics, gels and other lighting effect products and accessories for the entertainment industry.
After tweaking lighting cues for 3 straight days. I’m done. And I’m toast. At this point I think the Fall Out Boy tour will look pretty good. At least until I see the lights set up with the giant TV’s behind them.
Read More »Moving on with the tour update… So I left off when sound check ended in Moline. The gigs went really well I got to use a lot of my own rig and their dimmer board for pars. In most clubs it usually happens that way. They have the dimming system and I’ll bring in the automated lighting. It’s even better if they have both though! The first night was ok, but the second night was a lot more fun considering there were 200 people there for the first set.
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