SAN PELLEGRINO TERME, Italy – The Casinò Municipale di San Pellegrino Terme turned to Clay Paky fixtures – including some vintage gear – for a lighting solution. LD Giuseppe Cividini incorporated more than 100 Clay Paky GlowUp LED uplighters along with older but still functional Clay Paky V.I.P. 300s and with a Clay Paky glass optical unit from 1995.
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TOUR: Aug. 2015-Aug. 2016 world tour
TWO MOSIERS BACKSTAGE: “My oldest son, Calvin, is a lighting tech. It was great having him on the crew. The first time he called me Mac instead of Dad, coming across the stage, it threw me. But I got used to it. He goes out with the Stones in January.”
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NEW YORK – More than 50 GLP impression X4 LED moving heads made a recent TV appearance on Legends: OWN at the Apollo, a four-part prime-time special featuring icons such as Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, The Isley Brothers and Earth, Wind & Fire.
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The magic spectacle of The Illusionists — Live On Broadway recently offered that rare break from plays and musicals for something more offbeat and interactive. Featuring seven magicians with different skills — from the comedy hijinks of The Trickster to the death-defying stunts of The Daredevil to the fast-paced moves of The Deceptionist — the two-hour plus show is packed with all manner of dazzling illusions and is one of those rare shows that flies by. It begins its national tour in February.
The Weeknd recently wrapped up the sold-out The Madness Fall Tour, which was in support of the artist’s second studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness. Known by the stage name The Weeknd, Canadian singer, songwriter, and producer Abel Tesfaye wanted to build on the success of the album with the tour through extremely effective use of production elements to support his music. Production and lighting designer LeRoy Bennett, one of the principals in Seven Design Works, was asked to realize that goal.
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Production designer Alex Skowron recently wrapped up the latest leg on his tour with the classic rock star John Fogerty. The singer amassed a wealth of hits while leading Creedence Clearwater Revival in the late 1960s and 70’s before embarking on a solo career that has spanned the last 30 years.
SHANGHAI, China – The Shanghai Grand Theatre (SGT) featured performances by the Martha Graham Dance Company. LD Nick Hung lit Graham’s classics with Source Four LED luminaires controlled by a Gio lighting-control system. ETC’s Chinese dealer, Hangzhou YiDaShi Lighting Equipment Co., Ltd., also played a significant role in the event by providing technical support for the show.
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Everyone in the music industry feels the crunch of the digital revolution. Used to be a band would tour the world in the hopes of attracting interest in their new album or latest creation. These days, however, it seems up-and-coming artists who circle the globe place less emphasis on earning royalties from record sales than in racking up revenue from concert tickets.
Competition between vendors in any business is commonplace. But the entertainment business has long been known as a cutthroat place where saving dimes can amount to earning thousands of dollars in the long run. So many companies make similar products that a buyer can easily shop around for the best deal. Companies spend serious cash on R&D for a new product, only to find other companies copying their ideas a year later. The business of metalworking — especially truss manufacturing — is no different.
Laura Frank is the proprietor of Luminous FX, a company that specializes in dealing with getting the properly formatted media to the proper projectors or LED walls at an event. In these days of having a dozen or more surfaces on one stage covered with pixels, she has created a niche’ for herself. While she is not the only person in the entertainment business tasked with her job, it’s the unique way her company operates that sets her apart from the rest of the world.
Launched at the recent LDI show, the PRG GroundControl™ Followspot System is making people re-think how they use followspots in production. Awarded the LDI 2015 Best Debuting Product, the GroundControl is a huge step forward in not only safety in getting the truss followspot ops out of the truss and safely on the ground, but also in how designers use followspots. The LDI judges summed up their feelings on the GroundControl system, “The GroundControl advances the cause of staging and rigging in the concert industry by offering the possibility of removing spot operators from trusses forever, and continuing the efforts to make our industry safer.”
Newer-generation touchscreen devices have always held the promise of new and exciting ways for us as lighting designers and programmers to interact with our rigs. Carrying around a small tablet at a show beats standing behind a console in many situations — walk onto the stage and focus your movers on a particular spot instead of squinting from FOH, or explore during a show to get a different perspective. Previous control solutions were mostly console software shoehorned into the device’s OS, which was hardly ideal. Enter Vibrio from Toast Mobile, an application built from the ground up to control small to midsize rigs on Apple’s iPad family of devices.
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