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Close Encounters with Automated Lighting

Cowboys and Aliens

Close Encounters with Automated Lighting

The premise of the new Universal Studios’ film Cowboys & Aliens is that aliens have arrived to take over the world, only they arrive in the Wild West circa 1873. Director Jon Favreau and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, ASC also bring to the Old West the very latest in automated lighting technology.

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The HireTAG arch system

Keeping the Numbers Straight with Navigator Systems

Keeping track of rental inventory and budgets is a daunting task. Keeping an accurate count of cable alone can make one’s head implode. Add fixtures, control, power distro and all the other products a rental house has to offer, and it can make you go nutty. Navigator Systems has used the power of the computer to handle inventory and create a tracking system for the entertainment industry. The company has been developing their HireTrack rental management package since 1995. Since then, they have also captured numerous awards for product excellence, and Navigator Systems HireTrack rental packages have been installed at over 500 sites in 16 countries and translated into five languages.

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Elements Krypton 515

Elements Krypton Series

Inner Circle Distribution has been representing various theatrical lighting products in the U.S. for a long time. In the last year, a few clients have come to them asking where they could find certain types of lighting products with better pricing. This raised some eyebrows with company president Craig Singer and sales director Bruce Bandy and, as a result, they teamed up with overseas manufacturers and developed a new line of lights to bring to America called Elements. This new line of affordable conventional lights ranges from tri-LED PARs and bars to Active Matrix fixtures, which people have requested. The market has taken notice.

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GLP Impression Spot One

Making Impressions with the GLP Impression Spot One

Moving lights have come a long way since the beginning of remotely panning and tilting a fixture. They began life with limitations in functionality and, more importantly, the lamp source. Towards the end of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st, more and more options became available in terms of lamp choices for various fixtures.  When the Light Emitting Diode (LED) came into mainstream for the lighting industry, it was just a wait-and-see game for when they would be incorporated into a moving light.

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DEVO tour photo by Steve Jennings

DEVO

Devo’s first studio album in 20 years, Something For Everybody, has a level of energy and memorable riffs and rhythms of past Devo hits, and to support the new release, the band hit the road, with gear provided by Epic Production Technologies. The tour pairs lighting designer and director Ernesto Corti with Davy Force (visuals/animation director) and Tim Brunet (live visual mixing).

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Parasol Systems

Moving the Moving Light with Parasol Systems

When we talk about moving a light, two things instantly pop into our heads. The first is getting up on a ladder and physically moving a light either to a new position or to focus it differently on stage. The second is a moving light that can remotely pan and tilt. The latter, of course, is easier, as it can be done from a desk. A new player to the field wants you to add a third dimension of moving a light — remotely moving the physical location of the light fixture itself as it relates to the stage or field.

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Sample storyboard sequence

Pre-Viz for Video, the Old Fashioned Way

You guys in the lighting industry have all the fun.  I mean, seriously — you have a thousand knobs on your consoles, all the sliders in the galaxy, buckets of colors for painting your sets, luminaires that move in three dimensions, and a variety of remarkable pre-viz software apps to choose from.  Out here on tour in video land, on the other hand, it’s Slim Pickens.  We have projection screens, LED walls, HD cameras, and, granted, we have some wonderful video switchers on which to cut the shows — but the design elements of the set have typically been cast in concrete by the time we show up.

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InfoComm11 DMZ: Squint Alert

InfoComm11: An Example of Why the Future is Red

This year’s InfoComm show, which took place in Orlando in June, was physically sectioned into categories, with color-coded carpeting to let you know when you wandered across the DMZ between, say, pro audio and digital signage. One section that didn’t need as much external delineation was the lighting section of the floor — you could pretty much see it from the Space Shuttle. And even if Sarah Palin couldn’t really see Russia from the Alaska coast, you got the sense that you could see Shanghai from Disney World. Those were the two big trends I noticed at InfoComm.

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Visualize Whirled Peas

A long time ago, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said “visualize whirled peas.”  I like the statement because not only is it a play on words, but it also reminds me that I need to look very carefully at what I see.  Much in the same manner, as an automated lighting programmer, I must look carefully at my work when programming with a visualizer.  I don’t want to program a look for “world peace” and end up with lighting that looks more like “whirled peas!”  Lighting visualizers are wonderful tools, but the programmer and designer need to take many things into consideration when using the technology.

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Pre-Visualizing the Future

Lighting designers today have many virtual options for pre-programming a show well before rehearsals begin.  These tools can be used to create entire shows, without having to hang the real rig in a warehouse. Pre-visualization software has advanced tremendously in the last few years as computer hardware has improved.  Today’s pre-viz software programs take advantage of computer gaming technology as well. 3D rendering and ultra-fast video cards make virtual stages appear incredibly lifelike, and the environment can be viewed from all angles.

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LD Lee Rose lit the Daytime Emmy Awards

Metallica Making a Movie? Hartley in “Hell on Earth,” LDs and Emmys and More…

Metallica in Movie Rehearsals

Longtime Metallica LD John Broderick is in San Francisco with the band, building the show for a film to be shot “sometime” next year, he said. The 3D show is apparently too big to take on the road. Rehearsals are going for a few months, said to be a composite of all the best show gags in Metallica’s history of touring. Apart from that, the band plays upcoming shows in San Francisco, New York’s Yankee Stadium, Brazil’s Rock in Rio and India. “Nothing new about the designs there, just a continuation of their international stadium dates they do every year lately,” Broderick said.

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Illustration by Andy Au

Working on Tomorrow’s Gig Today

I’m starting to feel like the Lincoln Lawyer. The guy that works out of the back of his town car. Except that, on show days, I set up shop in the back of a tour bus. Or a hotel room if I’m lucky. Summer is my busiest time of year. While I am out running one tour, I am busy working on others. There are several steps to the process before I actually run the first show of a tour. First, I must submit an idea I have along with artistic renderings to get the gig. Then I must finish drawing the CAD drawings to get them to the lighting/set/video vendors. Follow that with some pre-programming of lighting cues on a visualizer, and then make it to the actual rehearsals.

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