USA - Darkroom Creative, a fusion of ideas and production design from lighting and visual experts Seth Jackson and Nathan Alves, combined history, nostalgia, and reinvention in a blind pitch for the lighting and production design of the Doobie Brothers 50th Anniversary tour, which they won.
The tour was originally scheduled for 2020, was halted amid the initial pandemic shutdowns, and is now back on the road across North America.
The lighting design includes 92 Robe Spikie moving lights which play a key role in shaping the show’s aesthetic, which takes inspiration f

Singapore - BroaMan MUX22 fibre multiplexer and Repeat 48 3G/HD/SD-SDI Video/MADI fibre extender were provided by Total Solution Marketing (TSM), along with full-service support, for the recent Singapore National Day celebrations. The event this year was rescheduled by the Government from its traditional 9 August date to 21 August due to the increase in COVID-19 cases.
These interfaces were deployed by The Show Company Pte, the appointed vendor of the multimedia committee for this year’s National Day Parade. The fibre-based solutions were used between transmitters and receivers,

UK - The National Lottery’s Team GB Homecoming, staged at the SSE Arena, Wembley in August, saw Britain’s Olympic athletes honoured by some of the biggest names in music and entertainment during two hours of storytelling, live performances, and big screen content from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
With production led by Global Touring Office, the star-studded line up saw Rag’n’Bone Man (otherwise known as Rory Graham) open and close the event with a powerful audio control package supplied by Brit Row.
“I think any show post-pandemic has a certain electric feel abou

USA - The Sing! Global 2021 Getty Music Worship Conference this year took place at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena from 13-15 September. The event, hosted by Christian music power duo Keith and Kristyn Getty, perhaps best known as the writers/singers of In Christ Alone, brought together worship leaders, music directors, composers and others in the worship-production sector for four days of workshops, panels, and music.
For the fourth year in a row, Brentwood-based integrator CTS AVL was the audio and lighting systems provider for the event. However, this year, the company a

Germany - With a capacity of 2,500 seats, the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden is considered Germany's largest opera and concert house. However, the huge concert hall is acoustically challenging. A recently installed Alcons QR24 pro-ribbon column speaker system is reliably mastering these challenges.
The project to replace the ageing sound reinforcement system of the Festspielhaus had been underway since 2017. The German-based theatre consultancy Walter Kottke Ingenieure GmbH were commissioned to do the job. The specialist in charge, Joachim Lindemann, reports: "The system was not on

USA - To create exciting, immersive visuals that highlighted Red Rocks Amphitheatre’s unique layout during the String Cheese Incident’s multi-night run, PHNTM Labs deployed a lighting rig featuring Martin Professional lighting fixtures, provided by Brown Note Productions.
Colorado-based jam band The String Cheese Incident returned to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre for the 45th time this past July to kick off their 2021 tour, marking the first full-capacity events at the venue in over a year.
Red Rocks’ geological architecture and storied history make performing there a ma

UK - England’s Enlightened Lighting sparked up its stock of VL10 Beamwash and VL2600 Series luminaires from Vari-Lite for the Bath Festival Finale Weekend in August. One of the first major music festivals to take place in the UK after the pandemic lockdown, it saw favourites McFly, Scouting for Girls and Gabrielle perform alongside a host of big-name bands.
For Dave Thorpe of Enlightened this was the first time their newly purchased VL2600 Profile and Wash fixtures and VL10s had graced the stage of a busy festival. Therefore, he was keen to see how they performed and gauge the r

Germany - On 9 September, Gentleman was the star guest at the Strandkorb Open Air series of concerts at Berlin’s Hoppegarten venue. The reggae artist from Cologne and his band delighted around 2,000 fans who watched from the comfort of 1,000 two-seat beach chairs at the historic racecourse.
Wired and wireless microphones and IEM solutions from the Sennheiser portfolio are ubiquitous at concerts by Gentleman and his band. And by forming the first links in the audio signal chain, they play a key role in ensuring the live sound quality.
For his performances, lead vocalist Ge

USA - Tom Kenny wowed the crowd and cameras at the iHeart Radio Music Festival at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas in mid-September with a big, but artfully balanced, lightshow that featured 124 Chauvet Professional Maverick MK3 Wash fixtures supplied by 4Wall Entertainment.
Produced by Diversified Production Services, C2W, Firehouse Productions, All Access Staging & Productions, Inc., and Atomic, The iHeart Radio Music Festival is “a real hybrid,” notes Kenny. “It’s really a big TV special,” he said of the show, which was broadcast on the CW Network. “All the exper

Denmark - Coinciding with Denmark’s ‘Freedom Day’ - the lifting of all the current coronavirus restrictions - in September, an innovative and popular production of Jesus Christ Superstar featuring the Danish Chamber Orchestra (Danmarks Underholdningsorkester) conducted by Andreas Vetö was staged at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena, complete with a spectacular lighting and stage design by Sune Verdier.
This version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘rock opera’ embraced the production genres of theatre and rock ‘n’ roll in staging and lighting.
The lighting include

USA - Christie and the University of Waterloo’s Vision and Image Processing Lab are celebrating a new milestone – the development and productisation of the patented algorithm that drives the resolution enhancement of the new Christie M 4K25 RGB pure laser projector. This is the latest success between the institution and Christie, which together recently wrapped up a third, two-year research project.
The collaboration between the Vision and Image Processing Lab at the University of Waterloo and Christie began in 2013.
“Years ago, we wrote out a set of problems we’d li

USA - Car dealership Porsche Austin’s top floor window display features 10 Porsche cars highlighted using SEVEN Batten 72 linear lights from Elation Professional.
Eric Bernstein of Intelligent Lighting Services (ILS) of Austin has worked with the dealership’s ownership group for about 20 years. On this latest project, he worked with Kirk Franceschini, managing partner at Hi Tech Motorcars (Porsche Austin Group), who was tasked with implementing a lighting system that would attract attention to the new dealership. The idea was to line 10 Porsche cars along a sixth-floor displa

India - The Centre for Materials for Electronics Technology (CMET) in Hyderabad enlisted KVIK Infotel to equip the facility with an end-to-end Harman Professional Solutions audio system.
An autonomous group under the Government of India’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, CMET is a research institute dedicated to developing materials for electronics using local resources and supporting India’s technological industries.
Administrators at CMET wanted to utilise the facility’s auditorium for events including training sessions, conferences and seminars

Serbia - Since it arrived on the scene in 1994 with over 100 channels, TV Pink has been a media success story. The privately-owned broadcaster is well-known for its innovative programming aired on numerous channels in entertainment, music, talk shows and news.
The popular broadcaster recently upgraded its PFI studio complex in Šimanovci near Belgrade with an intelligent LED lighting system.
Designed and installed by Novi Sad-based AVL Projekt, the new system includes a collection of 64 Chauvet Professional Maverick and Rouge fixtures as well as four RDMX Splitter 8 units an

USA - When Germany-based Thomas Christmann saw Claypaky Xtylos at a Prolight + Sound expo in Frankfurt he knew he had to work with the fixture one day.
The lighting designer and director for metal band Korn since 2015, Christmann, who is known as ‘Church’, thought the 2020 tour planned for the band would be the perfect opportunity to use the first moving head light with a laser light source. “I’m not a big fan of beam lights and try not to use them for effects lighting,” he says. “But I love the Xtylos beam, their colour and speed and was eager to use them.”
Th

USA - When San Francisco’s Tempo debuted in 2020, it had the connected fitness industry buzzing. The interactive personal training solution brings a team of expert trainers into the home virtually, with adaptive technology that delivers real-time guidance and creates custom workout plans around a user’s fitness goals.
Instructors are filmed in a dedicated recording space in San Francisco, and audio is a key consideration in simulating the energy of an in-person workout class. To provide users ‘the ultimate sound experience’, the brand selected DPA Microphones.
Accord

USA - When the COVID-19 pandemic first swept across the nation last year, Flagstaff’s Orpheum Theatre had no choice but to close its doors to the public. For audio production manager Scotty J., this meant not being able to showcase the venue’s new KF810P PA system from Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW).
While the Orpheum was closed, the theatre still produced some virtual events including about 25 webcasts during 2020 from its indoor stage with the new EAW system. The venue also created an outdoor space in the parking lot, which was first used for a two-day Halloween/Grateful Dead

USA - North Montgomery High School auditorium in Crawfordsville, IN, is benefiting from a new technical upgrade, including advanced C21 dimming technology and Vision.net touchscreen control interfaces from Strand.
Looking for new power-saving LED house lights and stage lighting control infrastructure to replace their increasingly unreliable systems, North Montgomery High School turned to Associated Controls & Design (ACD) for help. “The existing wall controls had started to fail, while the dimmer racks were also failing and had started randomly flickering various circuits wh

Austria - To give the reimagined Starmania 21 a fresh look, lighting designer Roland Greil designed a dynamic and versatile lighting rig using Martin Professional LED lighting fixtures and creative video solutions.
Starmania is an Austrian televised musical competition that was originally broadcast from 2002 to 2009 on channel ORF 1. This year, ORF decided to bring the show back as Starmania 21, with a fresh cast of contestants and a new panel of judges. Taking the opportunity to give the revived show a fresh look, the producers hired lighting designer Roland

USA - St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland, Oregon has served as the centre of the Archdiocese of Portland since the site’s dedication in 1926. For nearly a century, the intricately designed and stately cathedral has been the host of important ceremonies for the 400,000 Catholics living in the greater Portland metropolitan area.
The cathedral has many ornate elements designed in the Romanesque style with a few Byzantine elements mixed in. These include remarkable stained-glass windows. an apse dome, and an expansive ceiling rising three stories high. M

Norway - Nobody can deny that the last 18 months have been difficult and challenging, especially for our people-orientated industry. Limitations on work, movement and contacts have been hard on everyone. But as restrictions started to ease and the industry begins to open up, LiteNordic, Ayrton’s exclusive distributor for Norway, Sweden and Denmark, came up with an ingenious way to reconnect with their customers and lighting designers in a safe, fun way after a near two-year hiatus.
They hired a camper van, threw in a bunch of IP65 rated lighting fixtures, including Ayrton’s Pe

Italy - Staged in the elegant courtyard of the Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza, the flagship performance of this year’s Notte d’Opera a Palazzo was a stirring representation of Puccini’s Tosca. The natural acoustics of the 16th century architecture were lifted powerfully yet naturally through TiMax spatial audio processing.
Complementing TiMax’s sympathetic spatial amplification and to ensure complete audience immersion, impressive virtual scenography was video-mapped onto the imposing façade of the building.
Federico Bianchi, designed the multichannel d&b so

The Netherlands - Lighting designer Bas van der Poel from design practice Light Image used Robe’s new LEDBeam 350 moving light fixtures for the recording of a new series of German games show 99 - Eine:r schlägt sie alle! (99 - One Beats Them All!), which was recorded in the Netherlands at the circular Westergas venue - part of a former gasworks now sustainably reimagined as a popular event and cultural space - in central Amsterdam.
The 32 LEDBeam 350s - the first to arrive in the Netherlands - were delivered to lighting rental company Eventec which specialises in

UK - Dating back to 2009, the Rewind Festival is an annual ‘80s music extravaganza that today generally takes place in three different locations.
Although this year Rewind Scotland had to be cancelled, the events at Capesthorne Hall, Macclesfield (Rewind North) and Temple Island Meadows, outside Henley (Rewind South) went ahead within a month of each other. The event is now back under the management of David Heartfield, whose leisure group Impresario Festivals had previously sold the brand to radio group Global back in 2017.
The events’ long-term sound suppliers, Capital

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