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

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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Lighting programmer/designer Ken Jones

LD/Programmer Ken Jones

PLSN recently had the opportunity to sit down with Ken Jones, a prominent lighting programmer and designer based in Las Vegas. Ken is probably one of the busiest and most talented programmers in the corporate theatre world that I’ve ever met, and his affection for media server technology is a passion we share. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a few events with him, and I always find myself challenging the boundaries of both my own knowledge and the limitations of the equipment when we work together.

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4Wall provided lighting gear to saturate the set and performers in a world of color. Photo by Sarah Silver courtesy of Pantone.

Pantone: A Behind-the-Scenes Brand Gets Its Close-Up

When Karen Lantelme glimpsed the results of a photo shoot at Windmill Studios in Brooklyn, NY, for Pantone’s 2014 “Make It Brilliant” marketing campaign, she was stunned. Having been on location, Lantelme marveled at how the finished photos accurately reflected a set “painted” with light. “It blew me away,” says Lantelme, Pantone’s director of creative marketing. “The creative team on site had the ability to change the color of the environment in an instant. It was seamless. It was gorgeous.”

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Image Engineering's Beam Composer

Image Engineering’s Beam Composer

One of the hottest technologies in the current visual toolkit is one that has been around for a while in our business — lasers. Lasers make a huge impact on productions, with beams of light dancing over the audience that cannot be produced by any other sort of light source on the market. Lasers are available in a wide range of offerings, from simple DJ effects to elaborate systems that require their own programmer and/or operator. For years, lighting designers have been at the mercy of translating their vision of what they want lasers to do to the laser programmer. The LD handled the lighting rig while a separate controller operated the lasers.

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Reventón Super Estrella photo by Erika Diaz. The Latin rock extravaganza got a visual assist from Global Trend Productions and others

Reventón Super Estrella

The seventeenth annual Reventón Latin rock festival drew close to 18,000 to Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles on July 19, 2014. Organized by KSSE Super Estrella 107.1 FM, Reventón featured a lineup that included largely accessible, if fairly diverse, Spanish-language acts, such as Caifanes, La Ley, Fobia, Roco Pachukote de Maldita Vecindad, Enrique Bunbury, La Unión, Víctimas Del Doctor Cerebro and La Santa Cecilia.

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For this event in Las Vegas, panels of Edslumen Mini P3mm create striking visual impact.

Shenzhen Eastar Aims for the Long Term

One of the bright lights in the bustling Chinese economy is Shenzhen Eastar Electronic Co., Ltd., maker of Esdlumen LED screen and lighting products. The 800-employee company is located in the mega-metropolis of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong in southern China’s Guangdong province.

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The virtual working environment created by wysiwyg for lighting pre-viz...

The Evolution of Visualizers Continues

Recently I was asked about the difference between visualizers and which one would be best to choose for pre-viz (pre-programming a show). Those questions are not as easy to answer as they once may have been. For many years, lighting designers and programmers had only a few choices for pre-programming a show. And video engineers essentially had even fewer than that. All of that has changed, however, in the last few years. Visualizers, or pre-visualization software applications, are now available in practically all aspects of the entertainment and design fields. Which then leads to the questions, “What are they used for?” and “Which one do I need?” Let’s take a closer look at how the one-time “visualizer” has evolved into an array of powerful design tools for lighting and video designers.

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