Skip to content

Coachella 2014

Photo by Gilbert Baghramian

Coachella 2014

The annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival kicked off its 15th season in Indio, CA over two weekends in mid April.  More than 180 acts along with surprise guests and artists performed on six stages each weekend. Headliners included OutKast, Zedd, Muse, Arcade Fire, Skrillex and Pharrell Williams, among others.  graced the various stages throughout the entire festival run. Here’s a comprehensive listing of the crew and gear supporting the lighting, pyro and laser effects at the various stages, along with the staging itself, at Coachella 2014, working with Kevan Wilkins, festival production manager.

Read More »
Demi Lovato Neon Lights tour photo by Steve Jennings

Demi Lovato “Neon Lights” Tour

Demi Lovato’s “Neon Lights” tour, named after the single on last year’s album release, Demi, is the artist’s third headlining concert tour, and the most elaborate yet. High-tech touches include an app from Wham City Lights that links handheld smartphones with the overall lighting design, pulsing to the beat of the tour’s title song. A tightly woven interplay of high-res video, faux low-res “neon” elements, lighting and special effects adds up to an enormous number of cues per song, and timecode helps keep everything in synch. Yet despite all the visual flourishes, reviewers have praised the production for not overshadowing the main attraction: a remarkable, multi-faceted talent who’s still just 21 years old.

Read More »
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias Tours Like a Rock Star. Photos by Anthony Nunez

Comedian Gabriel Iglesias Tours Like a Rock Star

Comedian Gabriel Iglesias is living large. In a 17-year career, his popular stage act, based largely on largeness and Chicano culture, has taken him all over the U.S. and to 20 foreign countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, Norway, Dubai, Greenland, Australia and Singapore. Having graduated from 200-seat clubs, he routinely sells out venues ranging from 2,500 to 12,000 seats, often adding extra shows to appease the demand.

Read More »
System A

Lighting Network Management Tools

This article originally appeared in the PLSN’s sister publication, Stage Directions (April 2014), continuing a series of technical articles in that magazine including “Ethernet Demystified” (June 2013), “Perplexing Protocols” (Aug. 2013), “Know Your Nodes” (Oct. 2013) and “How Clean Are Your Pipes” (Dec. 2013).

In the past columns (see note above) I’ve written about various hardware options related to your lighting control network. These include nodes, switches, topologies and latencies. If you’ve missed these, be sure to check back in the back editions of Stage Directions (archived on stage-directions.com) for more information on the hardware required to create a modern and reliable network for your console. There is another important factor to consider when designing your system: the software configuration of the network itself. That is the topic I’m addressing below.

Read More »
The company, led by founders Frank and Susanne Hartung, does its heavy lifting with about 30 employees.

ChainMaster Hoists a Stein to 20 Years in the Business

Suspended! To the student, police officer or professional athlete, the word means a punishment. In the world of entertainment venues, it describes the magic that German company ChainMaster performs in getting heavy show elements into the air and keeping them there. You’ve seen their work if you’ve been to the Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg, the Louvre, the Stockholm Opera, the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, the Kremlin State Palace, the Eurovision Song Contest, the Qatar National Convention Center, certain concerts by Paul McCartney and Metallica, and perhaps most visible of all, the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games.

Read More »
Fantasee Lighting’s Cyklops fixtures in the 1970s were individually controlled with a dedicated joystick.

Control Protocols: Where We’ve Been, and Where We’re Headed

When I was in about tenth grade, I lit my first rock show. It was in my high school foyer during the homecoming dance. We didn’t have any kind of portable lighting control in my school. I ended up taking down four Fresnels in the theatre and hanging them on the volley ball net stands that I “borrowed” from the gym. For control, I went to the hardware store and purchased four household rheostat dimmers and made my own 4 channel lighting control board. It was clunky, but it worked, and my first rock show was (in my mind) a smashing success. Not bad for a 15 year old kid in 1989. Oh, how far we have come since then.

Read More »
Blackmagic Design HyperDeck Studio Pro

Blackmagic Design HyperDeck Studio Pro

You probably read the title of this piece and then the byline, and asked yourself, “Why would a lighting guy be reviewing a video product?” I might start off by noting that it’s really okay for people to venture into unfamiliar terrain and learn something new. I could strengthen that further by saying lighting guys really should learn more about video, since our consoles are being used, more and more, for video cues. So if you’re also a lighting professional looking to learn more about new video technologies, join me as my venture into the world of video production continues.

Read More »

314 SGM P-5 Wash Lights Illuminate Salvatore Ferragamo Fashion Show

MILAN, Italy – The Salvatore Ferragamo Fashion Show during Milan Fashion Week took place recently under no fewer than 314 SGM P-5 wash lights, each of which has 44 RGBW 10W LEDs, creating the perfect flicker-free colour output. “The show needed to have a vast homogeneous illumination”, comments LD G. Paolo Bruzzese. “The P-5 gave us that big bang of light with diffused reflection that we wanted.”

Read More »
Elation Professional Platinum Profile 35

Elation Professional Platinum Profile 35

When you design a rig, you typically use fixtures for a given look that you are trying to achieve. Say you trying to wash a stage in a color, or you are looking for something that can project gobos. You choose a fixture based on its abilities. There is a give and take sometimes with a choice of fixtures. You might want the color mixing abilities, but the shuttering of a profile is something you can live with out.

Read More »

New CRC Auditorium in South Africa Installs Robe Lighting

PRETORIA, South Africa – The new auditorium at the Christian Revival Church in Pretoria, South Africa is benefitting from an all-Robe moving light rig made up of 24 x Robe ROBIN LEDWash 1200s, 12 x ROBIN Pointes and 18 x LEDForce 18 PARs. The need for the lighting to be adaptable and multi-purpose was paramount to the overall design as CRC features three very different styles of Sunday service to suit the different demographic of their congregation.

Read More »