LOS ANGELES – At 82 years young, legendary singer, recording artist and front man of The Four Seasons Frankie Valli is still playing live and touring two weekends a month for most of the year … with Robe as the first choice of moving light on the rider. Valli has had multiple chart-topping singles and albums throughout an incredible six decade career and has also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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For the past six years, Black Girls Rock, Inc., an organization that promotes empowerment and mentoring for young women of color through the arts, has partnered with BET Networks to broadcast their annual awards event. The Black Girls Rock! production is an inspiring evening of performances, awards, speeches, and celebration. The 2016 show included appearances by Lauryn Hill, Gladys Knight, Brandy, Corrine Bailey Rae, Rihanna, Monica, Shonda Rhimes, Danai Gurira, and Hillary Clinton.
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“My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”
That quote was on an etched-wood plaque that hung on my mother’s kitchen wall for years, and for the longest time, I’ve used it as my personal philosophy concerning cleanliness…..at least in the kitchen and house. When it comes to gear, it’s a whole different game.
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I’m staring at a shiny silver/chrome looking piece of love here as I open the case containing a scaled down version of the elektraBar strip light. I easily lift this miniature 11-pound fixture out with one hand and gaze at this architectural model. They make a black one for theatrical use, but this one just looks so stealth. The fixture itself is just under two feet long and about seven inches wide. It has a built-in power supply that is permanently attached to the back.
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Despite their name and long association with lighting primarily meant for clubs and smaller venues, ADJ Lighting has released a number of professional touring fixtures recently. Their Vizi line includes lights with feature sets normally seen on larger-format lights, but with attractive price points set to be within reach of houses of worship and other facilities or productions that need to be conscientious with their budget.
Whether “Tis Nobler” Is Not the Question. Here’s a Roundtable Discussion of When It’s the Answer.
For some, timecode is the auto tune of lighting designers — a lazy choice. Others insist that timecode is doing the job of the operator, freeing him or her up from being chained to just punching the “go” button for each and every cue. But the truth is that when properly implemented, it can be used for a show’s greater good.
Most automated lighting programmers work as freelancers meaning that they have to not only program shows, but also are responsible for negotiating the terms of their payment and services. Usually this negotiation is done with the production manager, producer, or lighting company. It is very important for lighting programmers to understand basic negotiation skills and to know when to make changes to their standard agreements.
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LD Philip Ealy has designed the much anticipated reunion tour for Guns N’ Roses. Aptly titled “Not In This Lifetime” — referring to the fact that nobody believed it would actually happen — Ealy is working with lighting programmer Rob Koenig and content programmer Chris Lose on the stadium tour.
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For a creative and expressive field like live music production, it’s amazing how jaded some people can be at times. But I’m not going to talk about that; I am going to talk about the exact opposite of that. I want to talk about the energy that pushes you to keep moving to create something almost beyond this world. If there is a single word for it in English, I don’t know what it is. It’s beyond enthusiasm. It comes over you like a spell until you see the project through, then it goes somewhere else for a while. It comes back again later. This energy, as I know, it can manifest in at least three different ways.
Read More »TROY, NY — Richard Cadena, an ETCP-Certified Entertainment Electrician and Trainer, will lead the first professional-development seminar to be held at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. The workshop will be conducted in EMPAC’s Studio Beta from June 27-29, 2016.
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ADJ’s new Asteroid 1200 is designed to send super-tight beams and distinct pixel-mapped patterns hurtling through the air and down onto the dance-floor. Packing limitless dual-directional continuous rotation and quad-color LEDs into one portable source, the Asteroid 1200 promises a full array of pixel-mappable visual effects.
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John McKernon and City Theatrical have announced that Lightwright 6, the newest version of the industry leading, multi award winning software for managing entertainment lighting paperwork, is now shipping and is available through City Theatrical dealers worldwide. Lightwright is an iconic industry standard on Broadway and in other areas of live entertainment, and was created to help designers and electricians record and keep track of the vast amount of data needed to install and maintain a lighting installation. As the lighting world has increased in complexity due to the proliferation of moving lights and LEDs, the organizational demands on lighting designers, design assistants, and electricians has continued to grow. Lightwright 6, for the first time, fulfills a longtime industry dream of controlling the flow of lighting data from design to console without needing to enter data multiple times by hand, while documenting up to 45,000 universes of data.
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