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Billy Joel 2014 Tour

Billy Joel tickling the ivory, center stage. Photo by Myrna Suarez

Billy Joel 2014 Tour

After Four Decades, it’s ‘A Matter of Trust” between Artist and Director Steve Cohen

There was energy. There was dancing. There was an electrifying performance. And that’s just the FOH platform. Steve Cohen appropriately feels he’s part of the Billy Joel band – after all, this is his 40th year with the American pop icon. The Parnelli Award-winning video and lighting designer/show director is back in the arenas with Joel (the stop in St. Louis was the 20th Anniversary of the last time he was here, playing what is now called the Scottrade Center). Fueled by diet A&W root beer and an obvious deep love of the music, Cohen was a blur of movement as he kept the lighting and video in sync with the music.

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Matt Shimamoto and the Academy of Country Music Awards

Matt Shimamoto

Volt Lites LD/Programmer Energized by Fresh Looks

On behalf of PLSN, I recently had the opportunity to sit down with LD and programmer Matt Shimamoto while he was working on the ACM Fan Jam. This was no easy task to schedule. He has been working seemingly non-stop ever since I first met him during tapings for Q’Viva, the TV reality series that culminated in a live stage show in Las Vegas in 2012.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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