For many production and design professionals, the VectorWorks suite of computer aided drafting software has become an industry standard platform. A highly mature group of products, the VectorWorks family includes products that cater to architects, engineers, landscape artists and lighting designers.
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Every time you turn on an incandescent lamp you’re seeing about 3.5 percent of the energy you’re paying for to power it up…But before we… Read More »Color Rendering vs. Efficiency
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I once walked into Bill Little’s office at Little Stage Lighting in Dallas in the late 1980s and he showed me a software program he was working on. This was in the very early days of desktop computers, before Windows, and he was working on a DOS-based lighting design system.
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The entourage for Tori Amos’ latest tour just might be the easiest group to wrangle in the history of touring. That’s because the cast, which includes Pip, Isabel, Clyde, and Santa — a.k.a., the American Doll Posse — were all figments of Amos’ imagination.
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American DJ Mega Pixel LED
American DJ’s new Mega Pixel LED is a color bar with 384 LEDs that produce moving patterns and chases. It measures one meter long and has 128 red, 128 green and 128 blue 5mm LEDs arranged in 24 color banks of 16 LEDs each.
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Every month I see new products on the market. It seems the latest LED and media server technology is constantly outdating last year’s cool stuff. Automated lighting manufacturers are dueling to keep up with each other in terms of lumens while trying to come up with new features. This stuff is impressive, but it makes me wonder…“Why don’t people concentrate on making new cooler versions of existing gear?”
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At the age of 23, Brian Sidney Bembridge moved to Chicago, the home of more than 200 small theatre companies, to try to make a name for himself as a lighting and scenic designer. After working on various small projects, he finally got his break in the local theatre community after he was invited to work on a film featuring a little green frog and his friends. He took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about how his naivety helped him make the most important decision in his life and what he’s learned since relocating to the Windy City.
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To the uninitiated, an elevator ride in Austin’s newly-opened Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Center for the Performing Arts might give the wrong impression. The green and orange metal skin that lines the interior of the elevator is replete with dents about the size of a ball-peen hammer. It wasn’t the carelessness of the construction workers who left their marks on the elevator walls, but Mother Nature herself.
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Scenic designer George Tsypin uses transparent and translucent materials to take the stage production for Disney’s The Little Mermaid under the sea.
Here, Sierra Boggess as Ariel ventures from a cool-lit underwater realm to bright sunshine.
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People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
Suppose you owned a construction company and, along with it, some big, shiny dump trucks for hauling materials. Now suppose you’re constructing a building, starting from the foundation up. So you hire some drivers to haul sand from the sandufacturer (you know, the place where they manufacture sand) to the construction site so it can be mixed with some cement to pour the foundation.
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While I was programming a show recently, I was using one of my favorite console features and I knew right then that I needed to write about it. Most automated lighting consoles have this feature which is a holdover from standard conventional or theatrical desks. This feature is commonly known as “Cue Only” and is used when you are recording or updating cues. This powerful feature behaves almost as if the console knows what you really want and takes care of it for you! However, before explaining exactly what the feature does, you must have an understanding of basic console tracking.
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On the road to a conventional lighting update, you could say Mark Sepulveda took an “intelligent” detour. Sepulveda, who is global technical director for the six campuses of the Houston-based, 40,000-member Second Baptist Church, had a big task ahead of him in re-lighting the main sanctuary at the Woodway Campus. The system had originally been installed in the 1970s and updated in the mid-1980s, but with the increasing demand for video production and new high-definition cameras coming into the picture, the lighting needed to be updated.
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