Pharos - Leaderboard - May 2024

Projects

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USA - Marc Janowitz of e26 design chose 30 Mistral-S - Ayrton’s LED spot fixtures as key features of his lighting design for Trey Anastasio’s The Beacon Jams. The eight-week ‘virtual residency’ was live-streamed weekly from New York’s historic Beacon Theatre throughout October and November 2020.
In an unusual twist, since no audience was present, the filming took place on stage in a reverse set-up, with the musicians facing the back wall and the auditorium acting as a backdrop. “The jam sessions were aimed specifically at the home audience, for which we wanted to create an intimate connection that felt like we brought a series of music sessions into the viewers’ own home,” explains Janowitz. “The reverse angle gave us something more like a studio environment into which Mistral fitted beautifully – it was very much in keeping with the look we were trying t

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Australia - While Australia’s national day might be a little different this year it is still, however, a day of reflection, respect, unity, gratitude and a celebration of many achievements.
The day is a national holiday and celebratory events take place country-wide. In Sydney, the harbour is a focal point for a day-long of events but thanks to Covid-19, many activities were cancelled. Fortunately, the popular Australia Day concert was still held on the Sydney Opera House forecourt along with a spectacular fireworks display, a flotilla of yachts and jet-skis. The event was produced and managed by The Department of Premier and Cabinet.
This year’s audience was capped at 1,200 with specially invited, social-distanced frontline workers.
Chameleon Touring Systems supplied the lighting for the concert, lit by Stuart Anderson, and the surrounding lighting lit by Pa

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Mexico - Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional’s (AN) was built in 1952 as a site for equestrian events. The building is made of riveted iron - the same technique featured on the Eiffel Tower - and has undergone extensive redesigns throughout the years. The Auditorio Nacional is known equally for its intriguing architectural design and for housing the largest pipe organ in Latin America.
The venue’s main hall consists of nearly 10,000 seats raised above and around its 23m stage, primarily used for national and international music concerts, song, dance and film festivals. Since 2013, the Auditorio Nacional has been ranked top selling venue in the world according to Pollstar Magazine.
Lunario, Auditorio Nacional’s alternative stage, seats 1,200 and is used for small and medium-sized events. Both spaces have hosted notable companies such as the Vienna Philharmonic, LA

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Italy - With its light and airy Neo-Renaissance forms, the Nicolò Bruno-designed Politeama Rossetti theatre affords excellent views from each of its 1,531 seats. Regardless of where visitors find themselves in the historic venue, however, they can only see the stage from one angle at a time.
No such limitation exists for livestream viewers, though, and that, believes Crt Birsa, changes the fundamental trajectory of a lighting design. “The live audience has just one point of view,” he explains. “But in a livestream each camera is a new point of view that has to look good. The viewer sees things from all angles, so your design has to present a very consistent image from one end to the other.”
Birsa provided an example of this principle in December when lighting a one-hour livestream at Politeama Rossetti for the Trieste-based guitar quartet 40 Fingers. Covering

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USA - Guests at Wisconsin’s Wilderness Resort are getting an aerial view of US National Parks, national landmarks and the Wisconsin Dells, onboard the new FlyRide Take Flight adventure ride. Developed by SimEx-Iwerks, the ride uses four Christie D4K40-RGB pure laser projectors with Christie Mystique, a camera-based multi-projector alignment and blending system.
Wilderness Resort is located on over 600 acres of forest, where guests can stay at three properties, enjoy golf, indoor and outdoor waterparks, dining, and a range of activities for the whole family. Take Flight opened in September 2020, expanding the list of exciting activities for guests to enjoy.
Take Flight begins as guests enter an airport-themed lobby, with ‘windows”’ looking out onto the National Parks. Guests are then queued at an ‘airport’ featuring airplane seats, before entering the ride.

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Australia - Dave Weir has worked as a freelance professional audio engineer and educator for the last 10 years. As a teacher, he draws upon wide experience of the industry to deliver audio courses at Oxygen College, a multi-disciplinary training organisation in Geelong West, Victoria, Australia, that specialises in the creative arts.
His role as an educator dovetails neatly with a full spectrum of audio duties, from studio mixing to live sound engineering, including touring the length and breadth of the country with notable bands such as Thirsty Merc, Rival Fire and Teramaze. In addition to his work with bands on the road and in the studio, Dave also runs arena audio for the Australian Open Tennis tournament, controlling court audio feeds for broadcast, running music between points, and managing post-match interview audio.
As is the case for many audiophiles, the boun

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USA - Prior to 2020, The University of Miami redesigned its live sports production workflows to ensure all audio feeds were on the network with Audinate’s Dante. From field mics to mixers - and from basketball to soccer - the university made the choice to trust Dante for all audio-over-IP capabilities.
“We don’t have a single XLR patch anywhere in our workflow,” said Anthony Lestochi, director of production services at the university. “Moving to Dante was clearly the better way to operate. It made building out our production really easy and effective. And, when COVID happened, Dante made it easy to quickly adapt.”
Dante has also proven its flexibility over the course of 2020. As productions needed to drastically alter their approach to adhere to COVID-19 safety guidelines, the ability to use Dante audio-over-IP as a connective fabric was a crucial enabler.<

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Thailand - Elevating teaching programmes and services in its Dharma Practice Room, the Young Buddhists Association of Thailand hired audio integrators Mahajak Development Co to deliver a Harman Professional audio solution to provides quality sound.
Founded in 1950, the Young Buddhists Association of Thailand (YBAT) is an organisation dedicated to enriching lives by bringing Buddhism to the younger generation and general public. Focused on developing minds and cultivating deep experiential wisdom through educational services, YBAT’s main office is located in the Phasicharoen District of Bangkok and includes the Thamnawet building, which features a 500-seat Dharma Practice Room.
"The client wanted an upgrade to their existing sound system in the Thamnawet building,” said Pongsakorn Kanchanachayphoom, project director at Mahajak. As we had already worked on renovating

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Saudi Arabia - FAZ Medical Centre in the city of Abha, south-west Saudi Arabia, is the latest in a chain of Saudi Arabian polyclinics, equipped to treat a wide range of conditions. The new seven-storey facility is equipped with all the latest medical technology, complemented by a Yamaha audio system.
Located between 2200 and 3000m above sea level, Abha is promoted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination, its semi-arid climate appealing to overseas visitors, as well as to Saudi citizens who live in the fiercer desert heat of the rest of the country.
Jeddah-based aDawliah Universal Electronics was asked to design and supply a system which would cover 16 areas of the building with high quality public address and paging audio, using both wireless and wired control for volume and independent routing of audio sources to different areas. The system also had t

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USA - When Northside Baptist Church in Huntsville, Texas, needed to source a sound system for its newly constructed worship space, the church’s technical team found itself confronted with familiar challenges. Like so many houses of worship, the church leadership needed to ensure the best possible sound coverage within their new sanctuary’s acoustic environment while balancing its love for music in worship with clarity of speech.
Crucially, all this needed to be achieved without taking too much from the donation plate. Now the church has found a solution in the TW Audio ELLA.
Marking the first ELLA installation in the United States, the system has been greeted by Bob Slie, youth pastor at Northside Baptist Church, as having transformed the church’s worship experience.
Slie first experienced ELLA as part of an early demonstration of the technology at the WFX

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Slovenia - The marriage between lighting and set design is never far from Crt Birsa’s mind. Only when light absorbs itself completely in its surroundings, can it exert its full power to transform. This is always true, he believes, but especially so when lighting television productions, where the limited and less forgiving eye of the camera replaces live human vision.
“In TV shows lighting has to walk hand in hand with set design,” he said. “There must be tight collaboration between the lighting and set designers for the total design to reach the level of perfection that the camera demands.”
Birsa and his frequent collaborator set designer Greta Godnic achieved this level, and then some, for a NYE special run by Slovenian National Television (RTV) in its famed Studio 1. Powering his five universe show with a ChamSys MagicQ MQ80, he wove light from 101 fixtures

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USA - Liberty University has invested in a complement of 20 Ayrton Khamsin-S LED profile luminaires for the new Liberty Arena on the Lynchburg, Virginia campus.
Liberty Arena seats 4,500 spectators and is the home of the university’s men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball teams whose games are broadcast on ESPN+. Liberty University previously purchased Ayrton Mistral fixtures for a multi-use event space, which hosts a wide array of entertainment programs and gatherings.
“We wanted bright LED fixtures that would really pop and enhance the fan experience in our new dedicated sports arena,” says Amy Caun, lighting director and Tier 2 production technician in Liberty’s Event Production department.
Designed for scenic applications, the Khamsin-S is equipped with a new LED module delivering powerful metallic white light with a record-breaking output of

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Sweden - Panasonic projectors helped celebrate man’s understanding of Space with over 100,000 visitors seeing the spectacular projection mapping onto Stockholm’s City Hall (Stadshuset) as part of the Nobel Week Lights festival.
The installation is one of the largest video mapping projects ever seen in the city. The event celebrated the 2020 Nobel Prize in Stockholm with lighting installations created around the city inspired by Nobel laureate discoveries.
The creative result was SPACE, designed by Andreas Skärberg and produced by PXLFLD studios. The content is a 16-minute projection mapped, animated art installation celebrating amazing advances in space physics.
PXLFLD called on its partners Lumination of Sweden and Creative Technology, which specialises in advanced technical solutions for the live events and broadcast industry, to help make the vision beco

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USA - Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, Squeek Lights owner Victor Zeiser converted the Ruby Stage at his company’s Middlesex. NJ facility into a performance space for livestreams and video productions.
Rigged with Chauvet Professional Rogue BeamWash fixtures, the new studio was well-received, attracting name bands like Motionless in White and The Wonder Years, in addition to hosting the chart-topping trio AJR for their Biden Presidential Inauguration, as well as their appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden.
While most people at his improvised studio were watching the performers on stage, Zeiser was focusing his attention on LDs like Mike Null (Motionless in White) and Ezra Donellan (AJR) and their crews as they worked cameras and light to make these productions click. His observations led him to shake things up at his successful Ruby Stage

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USA - The Beacon Jams were a successful eight-week ‘virtual residency’ presented by guitarist and singer-songwriter Trey Anastasio (AKA lead singer of Phish) and MSG Entertainment in New York City’s Beacon Theatre.
The shows were live-streamed free on Twitch at 8pm every Friday through October and November 2020.
The artist played with varied arrangements of his Trey Anastasio Band (TAB), adding and changing line-ups and special guests each week, offering a dynamic mix of live music and interactive entertainment. With up to 12 musicians onstage and the challenge of playing live with no audience in such a famous venue, production and lighting designer Marc Janowitz from E26 Design thought out of the box.
His mission was to adapt and redirect the visual drama and ambience that usually accompany a 3,000 strong live audience as well as light all the performers

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USA - 12Stone Church, a thriving multi-site congregation serving the Atlanta metro area, is radically rethinking worship for not only the COVID-19 crisis but also into the post-pandemic era. The church’s innovative ‘12Stone Home’ initiative is a creative fusion of remote streaming and in-person worship, with the dynamic power and flexibility of a new Meyer Sound Leopard reinforcement system playing a key role in the success of the concept.
The new system is flown inside the main worship auditorium at 12Stone’s Sugarloaf campus, where a rapid renovation last summer reconfigured the 900-capacity room to serve as a hybrid combination of live worship space and video production studio. With the old point-source system already slated for replacement, a new Leopard-based solution was the odds-on favourite as Leopard arrays already had been installed at four other 12Stone ca

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Germany - Built in 1908, the Laeiszhalle concert hall in Hamburg enchants visitors with architectural features, such as the towering organ integrated into the back wall of its stage. This made the historic venue an appropriate setting for Hype, an on-demand Netflix production by and about the award-winning comedian and author Felix Lobrecht.
No stranger to German fans, Lobrecht has rapidly risen to become one of the country’s most sought-after stand-up comedians as a result of his television shows and books. Following his first live tour, the highly successful kenn ick, he launched Hype in early 2020.
The appearance at Laeiszhalle was a stop on the Hype tour. As things turned out, it also wound up being the site of his stand-up special on Netflix, which was published on the streaming service in November 2020. Supporting this recorded performance

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Australia - Lighting designer Hugh Taranto lit a vibrant array of artists performing on the Sydney Stage for the 2020-21 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)’s New Year’s Eve broadcast. The high-profile event culminated in a pyro spectacular fired off the Sydney Harbour Bridge, stretching right across the harbour and watched by millions across Australia and worldwide.
This year, the event was named We Are One following 12 gruelling months that started with raging bushfires and ended with the ongoing pandemic. As the date neared, the tough decision was taken to go ahead without a live audience, due to general Coronavirus concerns, then a fast-spreading local cluster developing in the days immediately prior meant that even plans for a limited capacity ‘local hero’ audience – nominated by communities – had to be dropped.
Wanting to fill the gap imm

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South Africa - In Pretoria, the State Theatre’s 640-seat Drama Stage hosted the rounds and finale of the 2020 Idols SA, complete with a lighting design by Joshua Cutts of Visual Frontier and technical production delivered by Dream Sets for SIC Entertainment. This sixteenth series was directed by Gavin Wratten.
While the show would normally decamp to the 3000-capacity Carnival City Big Top Arena in Johannesburg for the finale, this year everything remained at the State Theatre, and while accommodating a strictly limited audience of 250, the visual elements of the production were also expanded to add some serious WOW factors!
Like any LD asked to add more lights, Josh jumped at the chance to seriously pimp up the rig with an additional 120 Robe moving lights for the finale which was broadcast live on the Mzansi Magic CH 161 on DSTV as usual.
Josh has li

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USA - When Caitlin Visel joined Uvalde Grand Opera House as manager in September 2019, she was immediately tasked with replacing the nearly 40-year old wired intercom system. As the second oldest theatre in Texas, Visel needed to find a comms system that would cover the entire building with its thick, concrete walls.
When she realised that repairing the outdated system was beyond her budget, she began the search for a replacement. Through some online research, Visel was immediately intrigued by Pliant Technologies’ MicroCom M digital wireless intercom system.
“I was instantly drawn to Pliant’s intercom offerings for its wireless capabilities,” says Visel. “Having a wireless intercom system has been a massive benefit as we can communicate with staff members throughout the entire building. Whether they’re with talent backstage, in the lobby collecting ticket

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Denmark - A Copenhagen shopping centre has installed 30 ADJ LED-powered moving head fixtures to provide a flexible lighting system that can be used both for special events and general ambient looks. Mounted to the high ceiling of the mall’s large atrium, which allows their beams to reach all across the main space, the fixtures have proved to be a big hit with the centre’s management who love the versatility that the system provides.
Located in Taaastrup, a suburb of the Danish capital city, CITY2 is a large shopping destination that also incorporates an ice-skating rink and nine-screen movie theatre. Originally opened in 1975, it was one of the first modern shopping centres in Europe, inspired by the popularity of the ‘everything under one roof’ malls of the United States. Despite its long history, CITY2 is continuously being updated and renovated, with the latest of

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UK - PRG has joined forces with the Saatchi Gallery in the heart of West London to create Saatchi Studios – a flexible, COVID-secure space, suitable for recording, streaming or basing virtual and hybrid events.
John Montague, director of corporate and events said, “We’ve had an incredible long-standing relationship with the Saatchi Gallery, and it’s been a pleasure to work alongside them once again to develop Saatchi Studios. We had our first client in the studio last week and it has been great to be back on site. The team and I cannot wait to continue this journey and are excited about the upcoming bookings for this month.”
PRG has created a studio package which includes bespoke backdrops (including a variety of LED walls), the latest robotic and manned cameras, professional lighting and secure, managed and uncontended internet access as standard. Basic sets

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USA - The Palace Theatre in Albany, NY, is Christine Whelan Sharp’s favourite venue to light in and not just for its graceful Art Deco architecture with its gleaming exterior and stylized accents. Nor is it for the theatre’s rich 91-year history that has seen the likes of Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones grace its stage.
What Sharp especially likes about this venue is the sense of intimacy performers and crew feel with the crowd. So, it took some getting used to when she stepped inside the Palace on 15 January to light a livestream show by rockers Annie In The Water before 2,900 empty seats.
“It was a different kind of feeling working that theatre when it was empty,” said Sharp of High Peaks Presents. “We had the band facing upstage during the livestream, so the downstage apron was really the back of our stage and the empty seats were the backdrop.”

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UK - Shure is the sound system of choice for a multi-million pound restoration project at St John at Hackney Church. The project was supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in collaboration with designer John Pawson (Abbey of our Lady of Nový Dvůr/Design Museum), visual artist Es Devlin and architects Thomas Ford & Partners.
A noted landmark, St John at Hackney Church was established in 1275 and has been part of the East London community ever since. A church in the traditional sense, since 2010 has welcomed major artists such as Robbie Williams, Florence Welch, Jamie XX, Benjamin Clementine, Bloc Party, Ed Sheeran and Emeli Sandé. As a Music Venue’s Trust and Independent Venue Week affiliated venue, Hackney Church looks forward to hosting some of the world’s finest creators and innovators whilst supporting local artistic endeavour in its Grade II* listed
  1. Presidential role for Contour XO in-ear headphones
  2. EAW RSX delivers flexibility for The Stillery
  3. Evoke and disguise partner with Siemens
  4. Elation at Brandenburg Gate on New Year’s Eve
  5. Anolis adds majesty to Brighton Grand
  6. Curve Theatre streams Sunset Boulevard with GLP
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