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Colbie Caillat 2014 Tour

LD Louis Oliver and Chvrches

LD Louis Oliver and Chvrches

Tour Dates: January 2013-December 2014

Your lighting approach:

“I draw up everything in Vectorworks. My lighting approach looks at the larger picture; I treat each project as installation art. I was given the band’s artwork as a starting piece; this we turned into some fantastic looking set pieces which have been the foundation of this album’s campaign from early on. Using lighting, lasers and video we managed to produce an ever-changing, ever-improving show.”

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James David Smith of RC4 Wireless in the RC4 Wireless booth at LDI

RC4 Series 3 Gets Honorable Mention at LDI

LAS VEGAS – Several products appearing for the first time at the LDI Show in Las Vegas this November received special recognition at the show at the event’s Debuting Product of the Year awards, in product categories ranging from Lighting to Projection, Staging & Rigging, Special Effects and Sound. For the Widget category, top honors went to Grid Show Systems’ Tour Node 8. RC4’s Magic Series 3 DMX4Dim received honorable mention. Pictured here is RC4 Wireless’ James David Smith at the company’s booth during the show.

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Justin Lang welcomes Nook Schoenfeld as the new editor of PLSN magazine.

A Look Ahead

As we close out 2014 and I reach the end of my tenure as editor of I want offer some insight going forward in our industry. As you can gather from the past four years of my time at I am a technology junkie, always looking for new and exciting things that can make our work and personal lives that much better. Part of my daily routine is to read through press releases from around the industry. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve been making a habit of checking in on information from more than 300 news sites, technology blogs and websites. Sounds like a busy morning, right? It normally takes two to three cups of coffee to get through it all.

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Production photos by Joan Marcus

The Country House: Peter Kaczorowski Lights with Rustic Radiance

Lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski enjoys working with naturalistic sets, as evidenced in productions like No Man’s Land, That Championship Season and Born Yesterday. Even in a more surreal show like Waiting For Godot or a big musical like Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, he prefers some restraint. In Donald Margulies’ new play The Country House, about a group of actors retreating to a Berkshires home to ponder their place in the world and with each other, Kaczorowski gets to play with light in a radiant way.

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Ricky Martin performed in the Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City in early October

Ricky Martin 2014 Tour

The Ricky Martin creative team came prepared for whatever happens, for wherever they play. They delivered a consistent show night after night — no excuses, no “loco.”Martin, who has amassed six Grammy Awards among numerous other honors and 85 million albums in his career, has demanding fans around the world that expect and receive a show better than the last. So the creative team has to always top themselves, no matter where they go. Martin’s manager/creative producer Veikko Fuhrmann agrees with the conventional wisdom that touring south of the border can be more challenging, but he overcomes it, starting with the design. He’s learned from others who build tours for the U.S. for the relatively cookie-cutter arenas with success only to see it buckle under the weight of its gear when playing the varied landscape of Latin American countries. “I saw one that was not able to travel into Mexico, and as was suddenly too expensive and too heavy, and the tour lost out on a major market.”

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THE BLACK KEYS, c. Steve Jennings

Eric Cathcart, Michael Grant and The Black Keys’ “Turn Blue” Tour

Eric Cathcart says that, in terms of a career, he really hasn’t done anything but lighting. In high school, he was involved in the theatre tech departments, then was a technical theatre major in college when he picked up a gig with a local production company. From there, he worked in the San Francisco Bay Area with Morpheus Lights and a few other California lighting companies. He move on to Midnight Lighting in Austin, TX as an LD and tech and did his first tour for Asleep at the Wheel. From there, it was on to Nashville, working for Bandit Lites (Def Leppard, Brooks & Dunn, Reba McEntire and many others). In 1995, he was given the opportunity to be the designer for Olivia Newton-John. From there, the design/director gigs started trickling in. He’s also working as LD under Dan Hadley on tours. Prior to The Black Keys he’s designed Michael Bolton, Thievery Corporation, LCD Soundsystem and The Darkness. The last couple of years he’s been doing CAD drawings for Premier Global Production, including designs for some sizeable festivals.

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Lightning

Perfect Storm Helps Live Event Productions Prepare for Destructive Weather

Anyone who has ever worked an outdoor show seems to have a story to share about how the weather almost defeated them. My go-to tale happened at a casino just outside of Omaha, NE. It was one of those sticky, late-July days when humidity hung heavy in the air. Doors were set for 4 pm, but by 3:30, anxious audience members had already abandoned the comfortable temperature of the casino to gather at the entrance of the large general admissions field we called our office that day.

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