I light business meetings every now and then. Those boring conferences where people in the same line of work gather to get worked into a frenzy in order to sell sell sell whatever it is their company hawks. They always seem to have a motivational speaker. And I hate these bastards.
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I always make sure that I have a valid passport. I can’t emphasize this enough. It amazes me how many people I have seen lose… Read More »Be prepared before you travel
Read More »Well, well, well, I finally got to take my first trip to New Orleans recently and it was for Mardi gras! For me this trip was not only a unique experience but to try to understand more about the element of music I work with every night when I’m out on the road. New Orleans is known for their sacred music from down south and its there in the city is where it can be truly understood watching the parades and seeing all the plethora of musicians all over the streets. It is virtually impossible to walk down the streets of that town and not hear music.
Read More »Many LDs mix too many colors on the stage at the same time. When you add all these colors together, the camera sees brown. Thus… Read More »Consider the DVD shoot when lighting live events
Read More »I basically bounce between the Hog 3, the Grand MA and the Maxxyz console these days. Why? Because they get the job done. And they all suck equally.
Read More »In 2002, I worked on several shows programming the Catalyst media server with the Barco R6. With a 5k ANSI lumen output, the throw distance… Read More »Advances in projection have changed lighting design
Read More »Faders. I’m sitting here thinking about them. Who invented them in the first place?
And why do they only go up and down?
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What we’ve done is to build a model of a three-phase power system that graphically illustrates the phase relationships between the three legs of a… Read More »Use mathematics to understand electricity
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Lighting designer Chris Stuba tells the story of how he was once riding around in a car with legendary bandleader Billy Gibbons. It was early in his tenure as the designer for ZZ Top, and Gibbons wanted to talk to him about an upcoming tour. So he drove to Stuba’s house in Houston, where they both live, and picked him up. They were driving around, talking about the upcoming tour, when a ZZ Top song came on the radio. It was one of those moments when time stands still, and Stuba’s thoughts turned inward. “I grew up listening to ZZ Top, and here I was, driving around with the man, listening to his music on the radio,” Stuba recalls.
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I recently programmed the lighting for Gospel Superfest, a nationally syndicated television show aired on gospel cable channels. For the past couple of years, the executive producer has been increasing the use of video in the show by adding video walls and plasma screens to the stage. This year, however, he asked Set Designer and Show Technical Director Rene Lagler to incorporate video projection into the design, and the result was impressive. My quest to find out how it was accomplished and what equipment was being used led me on a little backstage investigation of my own.
Read More »In the deepest and darkest regions of your console, a demon exists that some will never dare to battle. In a place where many fear to tread, it has been cursed and reviled by many would-be heroes. In the beast’s lair, the measurement of the fourth dimension takes on an uncanny accuracy oth-erwise unknown to many humans. The periods known as Hours, Minutes and Seconds are joined by a unit of diabolical accuracy known as the Frame.
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Now that LEDs are dropping in price a little, we’re finally seeing some products come to market that take advantage of low-heat, long-life LEDs without breaking the bank. Chauvet’s new Élan fixture aims to bring LEDs to the masses by incorporating a three-color LED bank into an other-wise standard club lighting effect. Let’s see how they did it…
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