Butch Allen’s production design for Tears for Fears’ 2022 tour takes a cue from the circular pattern on the band’s latest album, The Tipping Point, with a projection screen from Sew What? serving as the main visual focal point. PLSN also chats with Lighting Designer Joe Cabrera ][, Lighting Director Caleb Eckerman, Screens Producer and Video Designer Kerstin L. Hovland, and Video Designer / disguise Programmer Emery Martin.
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After two summers of waiting, festivals are once again flourishing, bringing musicians, fans and production partners together. But while their sudden return is a welcome development for the live event production industry, the festival landscape in 2022 is not without its challenges. PLSN shares current perspectives from designers Chris Lisle and Patrick Dierson and vendors including 3G Productions, 4Wall Entertainment, Bandit Lites, Brown Note Productions and Music Matters Productions.
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Planning for Fan Controlled Football’s recently completed Season Two, played at the historic Pullman Yards in Atlanta, GA from April to June 2022, required completely building out the field, the VIP suites and grandstands as well as all the support facilities. Production Designer / Production Manager Tom E. Marzullo worked with All-Access and the Magnum Companies as well as Elation Lighting to ensure the elaborate made-for-broadcast sports production went off without a hitch.
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X-Laser’s Mercury is not a projector. Instead, it’s an integrated hardware solution that is installed into X-Laser projectors, allowing LDs to work with lasers as if they were simply another light fixture in the rig, seamlessly controlling X-Laser effects from their lighting consoles.
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The 20th Annual Parnelli Awards, held Friday, June 3 during the 2022 NAMM show, were unique in more ways than one. It was the first to be held in June, and with so few live shows staged in 2021, the focus shifted to the three career achievement honorees, the Parnelli NextGen award and the four Indispensable Technology product awards. But despite all the challenges, the well-attended event proved to be a truly memorable evening.
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Lighting Designer/Director Ben Factor is living the dream, today crafting the looks for one of his favorite bands, whose concerts he started attending at age 16: Umphrey’s McGee. Factor is the second of our NextGen spotlights nominated for the 2023 Parnelli NextGen award.
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When Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne in early 1952, she probably never imagined that, 70 years later, her video likeness would be smiling and waving to her royal subjects from the same a gilded horse-drawn carriage. Technology helped bring her Platinum Jubilee full circle from her Coronation Day.
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Craig Rutherford’s thoughtful essay tackles the provocative question posed by LD-at-Large Chris Lose in PLSN’s June 2022 issue, Does Color Exist?. Rutherford makes a strong case for answering yes.
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The Shubert Foundation recently announced a record $37.6 million in grants for not-for-profit theater and dance companies along with $2 million for two HBCU colleges. Another bright spot on the horizon: Ruth Arts, created on behalf of the late arts philanthropist Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, has plans for a wide array of grants totaling more than $17 million annually.
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This month, all of the products submitted for PLSN’s Buyer’s Guide on Audience Lighting (aka Blinders) have LED light sources, reflecting a trend towards less power-hungry alternatives.
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Craig Rutherford checks out Blizzard Lighting’s G-Max™ 200 spot, a compact luminaire that takes advanced features and puts them into a surprisingly affordable package.
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Lighting and Video Mapping the Upside Down on the Empire State Building
On an “ominously” cloudy May 26 evening in NYC the world turned upside down as a rift opened on the south side of the Empire State Building. This traffic stopping event was part of NETFLIX’s visually spectacular activation for the debut of Stranger Things 4, Vol. 1 that consisted of a light show and projection mapped ‘opening of rifts’ on 15 landmarks in 14 countries around the world. The rift projection and lighting presentation on the iconic Empire State Building (ESB) was actually a 15-minute show that looped for two hours. The effort to realize this event on the ESB epitomizes the saying ‘The devil is in the details.’ To learn more about those production details PLSN spoke with two of the companies that provided the lighting design and projection mapping solutions—Tactical Manoeuvre, LLC and PRG. They gave us some insight on the technology that captivated fans streaming around the world and New Yorkers who clogged streets and rooftops to glimpse the Upside Down.Read More »‘Stranger Things’: A Rift Appears in NYC