Pharos - Leaderboard - May 2024

Projects

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UK - Following on from the resounding success of its production of The Flying Dutchman in summer 2017, Theater Regensburg has once again pushed the boundaries of open-air opera with its latest offering - a version of Puccini’s semi-staged concert performance in three acts, Tosca.
Like its predecessor, the event was held at the West Port of the bayernhafen business park, a freight traffic hub in the East Bavarian town of Regensburg. The stage was situated on the historic Municipal Warehouse side, while the audience of nearly 3,000 was seated opposite on the North Quay. The side of the warehouse itself served as a gigantic projection surface upon which visuals were beamed, courtesy of Digital Projection Titan laser projectors.
“The video aspect was the main part of the show,” comments video operator, Wolfgang Frauendienst. “The actors and their audi

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UK - The 1975’s video for new single People sees the band performing the alt rock track inside an LED cube, supplied and installed by 80six Ltd, displaying swirling lyrics and quickfire, colour-changing content. Filmed at London’s Black Island Studios, the production was an ambitious surround-video setup, powered by a Hippotizer V4 Taiga servers from Green Hippo. Directed by Warren Fu, the video featured premade content inspired by the band’s lyrics, created by Jon Emmony.
Simon Harris, project manager at Bryte Design, was approached by The 1975’s tour director James Valpy to project manage the video content delivery. “Set up was simple, utilising Hippotizer’s Output Manager and VideoMapper to map the five sides of the cube, outputting six HD signals via Evision LED processors,” says Harris. “As the content was running to timecode, playback was simple

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USA - Indie singer-songwriter Mitski has endeared her to a growing fan base. She followed up a successful 2018 tour with a 2019 spring outing that also saw the artist playing summer dates before wrapping up in September with two New York shows at Summer Stage in Central Park.
Lighting design for the Be the Cowboy tour was by John Foresman, who employed an Elation rig of Platinum HFX moving heads and SixPar 200 colour-changing PAR lights to complement the emotive singer’s lyrically rich songs. Lighting supply was by Pisgah AVL of North Carolina.
Mitski’s songs are played along melodic lines that can vary in tempo, with carefully choreographed movement key part of the show. Foresman describes his design as dynamic with a lot of energy during the high points and still calmness during the quieter points of the set. The design, he says, was focused around the ch

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UK - The MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is a new arts venue designed by award-winning architectural firm, 6a architects. The development, which opened in March, encompasses the original MK Gallery and adds a new structure to more than double the space available, providing five exhibition galleries, a learning and community studio, and The Sky Room, a flexible auditorium on the upper floor.
With 150 retractable seats (300 standing), the Sky Room is the home of independent cinema in Milton Keynes (in partnership with Curzon) and also hosts live music, theatre, lectures, conferences and more. The venue is equipped with an EM Acoustics sound system based on the EMS Series and the dedicated installation i-Series range supplied by event production specialists, Hawthorn.
An EM Acoustics system was specified as part of the global design of the Sky Room. “It sounded great but I

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Europe - Iconic German hard rock band Rammstein have been on the road again as part of the European Stadium tour, a visual and sonic extravaganza of lighting, video and pyro effects.
Roland Greil from Woodroffe Bassett Design (WBD) created the lighting design together with Patrick Woodroffe and specified 56 Robe BMFL WashBeams, 12 BMFL Follow Spot LTs (long throws) and six LEDBeam 150 moving lights - among many others - for this tour.
WBD was contracted to produce and coordinate the tour’s production design including lighting, set and video design plus technical integration.
The lighting was a collaboration between Roland and Patrick Woodroffe who is also the show designer. Florian Wieder and Cuno von Hahn looked after the set design, and Jeremy Lloyd from Wonder Works directed the technical aspects of the design and integration. The band are also very

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USA - City Theatrical’s Multiverse wireless DMX/RDM technology is currently being used to provide DMX data for the windmill and carousel lighting features at Historic Hudson Valley’s The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
After 10 years of working on The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze, the lighting design team from Jay Woods Design chose Multiverse wireless DMX for its ability to broadcast multiple universes of DMX data across an open field to receivers that are in constant motion. With an anticipated total audience of 170,000+, the Multiverse wireless DMX system was also an ideal solution for its ability to have a small radio footprint despite transmitting in a crowded radio spectrum.
“With the Multiverse Transmitter, we were able to focus on setting up and talking to a single device, as opposed to setting

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Spain - Every year, Arenal Sound - an open-air music festival held in Arenal de Burriana - presents an unbeatable package of music and party by the beach. In 2019, more than 300,000 flocked to the event, with tickets selling out 14 hours after going on sale, even without the full line-up being announced.
DAS Audio has accompanied the festival over the past 10 years, providing new solutions and optimizing resources and service. In this last edition, DAS Audio has been on all the stages deploying the necessary equipment to cover the acoustic needs of this large-scale event and rising to the challenge posed by the location of the stages near a residential area.
With this in mind, Audioprobe, the company responsible for the sound system and its installation at the festival, deployed on the Desperados main stage 32 AERO-40A, 18 flown UX-218A subwoofers and six sta

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USA - Summer’s not over yet, at least not for country singer-songwriter Thomas Rhett who continues his headlining Very Hot Summer tour of North America. A large complement of Claypaky Mythos 2 and Scenius Unico lighting fixtures is accompanying the tour, which is in support of Rhett’s fourth studio album, Center Point Road. The tour kicked off in Montreal last April and will conclude in Nashville in October.
New York City’s Fireplay is serving as the lighting and production designers for the Very Hot Summer tour with Upstaging, the lighting vendor. “We’ve worked with TR for about five years as his shows keep expanding and growing,” notes Nick Whitehouse, co-founder of Fireplay. “This tour is based on a concept we all developed together. Looks progress throughout the show and are different for each song so there are lots of cues an

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UK - iMAG, Poole-based creative technical production and LED screen supplier, has just invested in a whopping 300 panels of ROE Visual Diamond 2mm indoor LED screen and has chosen Brompton Technology’s SX40 processors and XD 10G data distribution units as its perfect accompaniment.
Working with a diverse range of clients, from well-known brands such as Dyson, Samsung and Calvin Klein, to a multitude of festivals and conferences, iMAG knows that having the best products available in its portfolio is vital.
“ROE Visual is an industry leader. We’ve been using their LED screens since the very beginning and they’ve always worked really well for us,” says iMAG co-founder and director, Charli Harding. “With requests for hi res indoor screens increasing significantly, we decided that now was the time to add ROE’s Diamond 2mm to our inventory.”
W

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UK - The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently installed two Shure Microflex Advance MXA910 ceiling array microphones at its headquarters in Cambridge.
Tthe UK-based charity required a multi-functional, reliable microphone system for one large collaboration space with the option of dividing into smaller spaces and not compromising sound quality. By selecting two MXA910’s the foundation can configure the microphones for complete coverage and ensure optimum capture of the talker when connecting with its UK and International sites or for two smaller programs happening simultaneously such as their ‘Code Club’ and ‘Raspberry Jam’ social events.
With both spaces attended primarily by children, the system needed to offer excellent audio quality while being efficient and effective in its performance.
AV specialists Snelling Business Systems were on hand to

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UK - On the surface, My Favorite Year and Children of Eden are very different shows. The Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens musical takes a farcical behind the scenes look at 1950s television, as a hapless writer tries to keep an irascible matinee idol from a bygone era out of trouble before his appearance on a live show. By contrast, Steven Schwartz’ Eden recounts the story behind creation in the Book of Genesis.
Different? Indeed! But both shows offer audiences the shared experience of departing from everyday reality and cry out for brightness and colour on stage - which is what Nic Farman provided for recent productions of the plays at Mountview’s new theatre. Aiding him in this undertaking was a collection of Chauvet Professional Ovation fixtures supplied by White Light.
“I’ve worked on a number of productions for Mountview before,

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The Netherlands - As part of a 15-hour performance spread over three days, Dutch National Opera performed major parts of Karlheinz Stockhausen's aus LICHT cycle.
One of the world’s top five opera companies, the Dutch National Opera opted for a combination of Christie Terra for AV distribution and processing, and Christie Pandoras Box for content management and control of the four LED video walls, cameras and projectors used throughout the performance space.
The performances were produced in cooperation with the Holland Festival, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and the Stockhausen Foundation, and held at Amsterdam’s Gashouder, a former industrial hall that now serves as an event space. The audience experienced some of the highlights from the artist's seven operas, named after weekdays, during the three-day performance. This is the first time that a summa

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UK - Owned by AB Hotels, Sopwell House is a luxury country house hotel set in 12 acres of Hertfordshire countryside. Steeped in history, the house was once home to the Mountbatten family and remained as a private residence until 1969 when it became a hotel. In 1986, it was acquired by Bejerano family who are still at the helm of the business.
With more than 100 rooms, two restaurants, bars, conferencing, wedding and spa facilities as well as a swimming pool and gym, the hotel is equipped to meet every kind of business and recreational requirement.
Just as the gym plays an important role for guests who do not wish to interrupt their training regimes whilst away from home, its audio system is critical to delivering a complete experience. Fitness spaces with high quality background music reinforcement are now very much the expected standard.
Not satisfied that its e

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UK - White Light has recently supplied the lighting equipment for the UK tour of The Lovely Bones.
Based on Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones is a coming-of-age story about Susie Salmon who is observing her family from the afterlife as they try and deal with her death in different ways. Adapted by Bryony Lavery, the production is directed by Melly Still and features a lighting design by Matt Haskins.
Haskins comments: “Bryony Lavery's adaptation is a mesmerising piece of theatre that, despite its often dark subject matter, proves uplifting and cathartic. The text actually expanded and changed heavily through the rehearsal process and what emerged was a very physical, and visually experimental way of storytelling.”
As such, Haskins soon realised that he needed to have a flexible rig to respond to the new ideas as they unfolded throughout the pr

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USA - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the ultimate special-event address, but that venue tends to be booked up at least four years in advance. So the team at Everlast Productions did the next best thing: they projection-mapped a detailed simulacrum of the presidential residence on a three-dimensional stage they constructed in the International Ballroom of the Washington, D.C. Hilton Hotel for the annual leadership event of Power Home Remodelling Group.
And it was, thanks to Everlast Productions’ use of an Avolites Ai Q3 media server as the mapping engine paired with a Tiger Touch II lighting control console and the manufacturer’s Synergy software.
“This was a huge projection event - it had to be very detailed, and it had to be built literally overnight,” says Washington Arias, Everlast Productions’ CEO, referencing the large-scale mapping project in which multip

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Italy - RCF celebrated its 70th birthday in spectacular fashion with A Night in Laguna at the famous old Venice Arsenal, the hub of Italian shipbuilding in the 16th century.
To help them celebrate this milestone, they flew in nearly 500 distributors, dealers and customers from all points of the globe, who arrived at the ocation via a 45-minute boat journey on 19 September.
First, guests were treated to cocktails and a buffet, courtesy of two-Michelin starred chef Massimiliano (Max) Alajmo (of Le Calandre fame), along with a special 70th birthday cake.
Suitably replete, guests were then invited next door, where RCF Group CEO Arturo Vicari was introduced to spontaneous applause. He emphasised the fact that what RCF had really been selling this past 70 years, as much as transducers, was “emotion” - a fact confirmed by a short company video.
This was

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Japan - Celebrating its 20th anniversary year, and extended to five days for the 2019 edition, the Rock In Japan festival also marked the Japanese debut of Martin Audio’s Wavefront Precision Longbow (WPL).
Running on seven stages over two weekends at Hitachi Seaside Park, music lovers from all across Japan congregated at the location. Unlike other large-scale festivals, this specialises in home grown talent and featured some of Japan’s biggest acts.
Martin Audio systems are now regular fixtures at this event, with the award-winning MLA adopted for the largest, 70,000 capacity Grass Stage. “It was back in 2011 when we first introduced MLA on the Lake Stage,” reports Shuzo Fujii, president of MSI Japan. “This is now the ninth year that the system has been adopted, and its high degree of control has become essential for the festival. Grass Stage has more than 20

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Italy - Billionaire is a club in Porto Cuervo, an Italian seaside resort on the Costa Smeralda in Northern Sardinia. Named as one of the most expensive resorts in the world, the area is a magnet for luxury yachts and a playground for wealthy visitors.
The club caters for a chic, jet-setting clientele of international showbiz, fashion and sports stars who are entertained by leading DJs and artists. Atmosphere and style are everything to this world-renowned venue and high-end audio is a must.
Billionaire’s management recently wished to upgrade its DJ booth monitoring system to keep pace with the expectations of its A-list performers and after taking account of the market, settled on Pioneer Pro Audio’s stylish and powerful XY Series speakers to take care of business. Two XY-2 mid-high speakers were installed, complemented by two XY-215S dual 15" subs.
Pioneer P

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Germany - With Roxy Music he celebrated international successes in the 1970s, in 2019 the now 74 year-old Bryan Ferry presented his greatest hits once again as part of a major world tour. For his concert at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, PM Blue provided an Alcons-based sound system. For the 360-degree sound reinforcement, mainly LR18 and LR7 pro-ribbon line-array systems were used.
The main PA consisted of a stacked five-cluster of LR18/90 compact line-array on a BC543 triple-18" cardioid subwoofer. Right next to it, another BC543 was used. The near field in-fill was taken care of by four LR7/120 micro line-arrays. The rearward projecting sound system consisted of six LR7/120 each on a tripod, supplemented with two out-fills each consisting of three LR7/90, between the main PA and the first rear-fill. This ground setup has proven itself and serves PM Blue as the standard setu

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Germany - Almost 30 years after Thomas Fenzl and Thomas Moritz joined forces to create the successful West Berlin rental house, PAM Events, their company is still setting the bar high for large scale productions both in Berlin and Germany at large.
After looking to replace and update their stock of conventional Fresnel fixtures, PAM Events joined forces with a number of other Berlin-based rental houses in acquiring 48 Chauvet Professional Ovation F-265WW, 24 F-55WW and 24 E-260WW fixtures as part of a Berlin-wide cross rental platform.
In a move echoing the collaborative efforts of Fenzl and Moritz behind the Berlin Wall, the Ovation fixtures were able to win over the wide collection of Berlin-based rental companies, such as Lichtwerk, Audio + Frames, Spice Events, Huth Events, Edelmat, Wemme-Evennt, and Atlantis-VT with their versatile yet highly efficient Fresnel s

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Spain - A dBTechnologies full-scale line array system together with the VIO S218 subwoofer powered the Lion Stage during the 2019 edition of biggest reggae live event in Europe that welcomed 202,000 attendees from 76 countries.
The Rototom Sunsplash Festival was created in 1991 in Codroipo, Italy, and grew steadily until it moved to Benicassim, Spain, in 2010. This year, seven million people could enjoy all the musical events thanks to the live streaming.
Giorgio ‘Kobra’ Carneli is the technical director of Rototom Sunsplash 2019: "For twenty-five years I have been responsible for the technical production of Rototom Sunsplash, specifically in the field of live event production. The first time I was able to listen to the VIO L212 system was during a demonstration at dBTechnologies headquarters in Italy, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sound quality; the real p

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USA - Located on the eastern edge of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Woodbury is a verdant community ringed by parks and golf courses. It’s also home to Woodbury Lutheran Church, which has grown from its first 315-seat sanctuary dedicated in 1968 to three area campuses over the past half century.
Much has changed facility-wise since then, including, most recently, Woodbury Lutheran’s adoption of a pair of KLANG:fabrik immersive in-ear monitor mixing systems for the church’s Valley Creek campus, which also serves as the home base for the congregation’s live broadcast operation.
Moving to a high-end immersive IEM system for monitoring was no small change as the campus’ existing wedge-based monitoring system had been in place and in use for more than a quarter of a century. Add to that the fact that the install took place only a week and a half before one of Woodbury

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South Africa - Lighting designer Joshua Cutts from Visual Frontier used Astera Titan Tubes to light various segments of the final of The Voice South Africa 2019, which was staged at the Mosaïek Teatro in Fairlands, Johannesburg, and broadcast on M-Net Channel 101.
Josh has lit the series since it started in South Africa in 2016. For the finales, he is on the lookout for new, innovative and inventive lighting effects and potential visual eye-candy. This year, they came in the form of Titan Tubes shortly after DWR Distribution had been announced as the exclusive South African distributor. Josh decided to control the Titan Tubes through his grandMA lighting console.
His initial idea was to use eight of the wireless battery powered fixtures to illuminate the dancers for different songs. Then, he and some other core production team members, including choreographer

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Israel - Singer-songwriter Hanan Ben-Ari is currently one of the most popular artists in a country replete with singing talent, and his new tour has just started, complete with a lively and dynamic visual design by Nesi Alfasi, who has included 12 x Robe MegaPointes at the core of the lighting rig.
These are being supplied to the tour by rental company Mega Kol based in Rosh Hayain and headed by Zvika Refaelovich, which has been involved with the artist as an equipment vendor since last year and has worked with LD Nesi for many years on assorted projects.
Hanan Ben-Ari's tour features a 3m diameter circular LED surface upstage made up of over 3,000 smart pixels in strips which are mapped into a series of different shapes and graphic effects throughout the set, providing a digital element that is different from a standard video playback screen.
Eight of the MegaPo
  1. Showman’s Show attracts international exhibitors
  2. Kvant lasers for Let It Roll
  3. Chauvet lights Newsies in Pittsburgh
  4. Top Thai stadium switches to JBL and Crown
  5. grandMA3 for university’s Little Theatre
  6. Claypaky lights Dreambeach Villaricos 2019
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