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PLSN Names Nook Schoenfeld Editor

PLSN Names Nook Schoenfeld Editor

PLSN Names Nook Schoenfeld Editor

LAS VEGAS — Timeless Communications announces that well-known lighting designer Nook Schoenfeld will take the helm of Projection, Lights & Staging News effective Dec. 15. Schoenfeld, who is familiar to PLSN readers as the monthly contributor to the LD-at-Large column on the magazine’s last page for the last eight years, has toured with artists and bands ranging from Kid Rock to Imagine Dragons. He is pictured here at the 2014 Parnelli Awards, where his appointment was announced.

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Neil Diamond Concert at London Palladium Gets Visual Support from Creative Technology

LONDON – For a live concert featuring Neil Diamond that was staged at the London Palladium Oct. 14 and taped for a Nov. 13 premiere air date on British TV, Creative Technology provided visual support in the form of an 11.5 by 8.6 meter Spider 30 LED video screen. The 75-minute show, Neil Diamond: One Night Only, was hosted by Rob Brydon, who helped bring the U.K. audience on a retrospective journey back to Diamond’s roots in Brooklyn, NY. 

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Clay Paky Fixtures Help Launch Series of Absolut Sponsored EDM Events

Clay Paky Fixtures Help Launch Series of Absolut Sponsored EDM Events

BROOKLYN, NY – Absolut launched a new series of EDM events on the Brooklyn waterfront Sept. 12 – not by smashing a bottle on the prow of a ship, but by lighting up the sky with an 85-foot-high Absolut bottle-shaped silhouette. Fixtures from Clay Paky played a key role at the event, staged at the Pier 9 Container Terminal in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. It was the first of a series of Absolut-sponsored EDM events, which moved on to cities around the world, including Johannesburg, Berlin and Sao Paulo.

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Behind the Scenes UK Announces Card Aid Program

LONDON – Behind the Scenes UK, the newly launched charity that aims to provide financial support to entertainment technology professionals when they are ill or injured, is calling on companies and individuals to send their annual Christmas cards via Card Aid this year. Card Aid has been helping charities increase their funds from the sale of their Christmas cards for over 30 years and John Simpson, Chair of Behind the Scenes UK, believes proceeds from the sale of Christmas Cards via the Card Aid Website will really make a difference to Behind the Scenes, which only launched in the UK in October.

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XL Supplies Video Screens for Never Mind The Buzzcocks

XL Supplies Video Screens for “Never Mind The Buzzcocks”

LONDON – XL Video, working with Production Manager, Sarah Chaloner and Designer, Dominic Tolfts, supplied video projection and plasma screen solutions for studio recordings of Series 28 of the popular TalkBack television show, Never Mind The Buzzcocks. The set includes a number of video elements that are key to the music-based quiz show, which is hosted by Rhod Gilbert. This series is recorded at Stage 9 of Elstree Television Studios and broadcast on BBC2.

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Matthieu Larivée and Lüz Studio brought the band’s quirky album aesthetics to the stage

Foster the People

Mark Foster is another one of those talented musicians who worked for many years to become an overnight sensation. One day you’ve never heard of them; the next day, they’re everywhere. Like thousands of hopefuls, Foster moved to Los Angeles after high school to chase a career in music. After several years of onerous odd jobs and stillborn bands, he landed work with audio production house Mophonics as a commercial jingle writer, giving us immortal works for California Tourism, Cadillac and Muscle Milk.

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Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band at ACL Live at the Moody Theatre in Austin, TX. Photo by Debi Moen

25 Years of Lighting Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band

Think about it: The Beatles had no lighting designer on tour. The thought boggles the mind.

This year, America celebrated the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ 1964 landing in New York and the launch of Beatlemania. On their three 1964-66 tours, the world’s most popular band may have had a followspot operator, but otherwise were stuck with poor house lights or, in the case of stadiums, industrial fixtures meant to light the field, not the Fab Four. Forget “stage design.” One promoter lined up 200 folding chairs onstage — and directly behind the band — to squeeze in more of the screaming girls and society celebrities for over-capacity ticket sales.

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Drai's photo by Erik Kabik

Drai’s BeachClub & NightClub in Las Vegas

Restaurateur and one-time Hollywood film producer Victor Drai has radically shifted the course of Sin City VIP nightlife entertainment multiple times over the last two decades. In a highly competitive market, Drai has proven himself to be both prolific and visionary, having established Drai’s After Hours at Barbary Coast/Bill’s Gambling Hall 15 years ago, XS at Encore Las Vegas back in 2008 and the exceedingly popular Tryst in Wynn Las Vegas, which opened in 2007.

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2014 Parnelli Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Benny Collins

If you don’t want to know the truth about something, don’t ask Benny Collins. Because he will tell you. That trait — at odds with the stereotype of those who get close to the stars — has taken him far in the live event business, a career that started with him hauling a Hammond B-3 in a truck as a teen to circling the world running Michael Jackson’s most audacious tours.

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Avolites and Avoites Media: The team

Avolites and Avolites Media

Three years ago, Avolites sent shockwaves through the industry with the launch of sister company Avolites Media. In that time the new company has delivered a host of award winning and industry milestone projects. We at PLSN feel the time is right to take a closer look at Avolites Media and the impact the company is having on the converging sectors of lighting and video control.

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XL Video helped project Mindfield’s content onto the DIA museum. Photo by German Perl.

Art Installations: Dlectricity Brightens Detroit

With only about 681,000 residents — down from 1.86 million in 1950 — and about $18.5 billion in bills to pay (more than $27,000 per person), the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy in mid-2013. It was, by far, the largest municipal default in U.S. history. The city’s financial conundrum is a puzzle that might even stump sculptor Auguste Rodin’s iconic Thinker, a casting of which is perched high on a pedestal outside the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) museum — and one of more than 60,000 artworks in the city-owned museum, now drawing more than just aesthetic interest from the city’s beleaguered creditors.

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Entertainment Fabrication's products include truss brackets for speakers.

Entertainment Fabrication Inc.

For the past three years, Steven Anschutz has lived a life built on fabrications. Ask him directly and he’ll admit, “I’m a fabricator.” So he made it his business. “In 16 years of working production on shows,” he recalls, “I noticed we always had to set up using the same gear that we’d used forever. We wanted to do things like mounting speakers directly onto trusses instead of having the separate up-lit truss and speakers on sticks. But there wasn’t a handy bracket out there to do that. There were many situations like that, where we’d be stuck using stock components. The standard manufacturers were not willing to create one-off custom pieces. So I decided to start making them myself.”

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