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Brian Sidney Bembridge

Brian Sidney Bembridge

At the age of 23, Brian Sidney Bembridge moved to Chicago, the home of more than 200 small theatre companies, to try to make a name for himself as a lighting and scenic designer. After working on various small projects, he finally got his break in the local theatre community after he was invited to work on a film featuring a little green frog and his friends. He took time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about how his naivety helped him make the most important decision in his life and what he’s learned since relocating to the Windy City. 

 

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The Long Center for the Performing Arts

To the uninitiated, an elevator ride in Austin’s newly-opened Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Center for the Performing Arts might give the wrong impression. The green and orange metal skin that lines the interior of the elevator is replete with dents about the size of a ball-peen hammer. It wasn’t the carelessness of the construction workers who left their marks on the elevator walls, but Mother Nature herself.

 

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Uncharted Waters

Scenic designer George Tsypin uses transparent and translucent materials to take the stage production for Disney’s The Little Mermaid under the sea.

 

Here, Sierra Boggess as Ariel ventures from a cool-lit underwater realm to bright sunshine.

 

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Getting to Green

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes.  All is a miracle.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Suppose you owned a construction company and, along with it, some big, shiny dump trucks for hauling materials. Now suppose you’re constructing a building, starting from the foundation up. So you hire some drivers to haul sand from the sandufacturer (you know, the place where they manufacture sand) to the construction site so it can be mixed with some cement to pour the foundation.

 

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The Wonders of CUE ONLY

While I was programming a show recently, I was using one of my favorite console features and I knew right then that I needed to write about it.  Most automated lighting consoles have this feature which is a holdover from standard conventional or theatrical desks.  This feature is commonly known as “Cue Only” and is used when you are recording or updating cues.  This powerful feature behaves almost as if the console knows what you really want and takes care of it for you!  However, before explaining exactly what the feature does, you must have an understanding of basic console tracking.

 

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Second Baptist Church Lights Up Anew

On the road to a conventional lighting update, you could say Mark Sepulveda took an “intelligent” detour. Sepulveda, who is global technical director for the six campuses of the Houston-based, 40,000-member Second Baptist Church, had a big task ahead of him in re-lighting the main sanctuary at the Woodway Campus. The system had originally been installed in the 1970s and updated in the mid-1980s, but with the increasing demand for video production and new high-definition cameras coming into the picture, the lighting needed to be updated.

 

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Shifting Gears for Biofuels

You’d think that with highway diesel fuel rolling past $4 per gallon, alternative fuels harvested from corn, soy and other crops would be a natural: good for the budget, good for the environment, good for a tour trucking company’s image. But crop shortages have pushed prices for harvested oils to record highs. And growing awareness of the connection between biofuels, high food prices and deforestation, coupled with indignation over government subsidies and mandates, have created flashpoints of controversy.

 

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Lighting for a Small Planet

In 2006, famed physicist Stephen Hawking said that we need to colonize space in order to preserve the future of the planet. I think we need to colonize space in order to preserve the dignity of the human race. Can we go any lower than The Bachelor, Dancing with the Stars and Rock of Love with Bret Michaels?

 

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InfoComm’s Annual Market Survey Report

With the NSCA show rolling into its show this year, InfoComm becomes that much more relevant to a wider swath of professionals in lighting, staging, projection and rentals. Thus, InfoComm’s recently released annual survey of its increasingly inclusive constituency offers some insights into where these sectors might be headed.

 

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