Pharos - Leaderboard - May 2024

Projects

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Malta - Luxury cruise line Seabourn introduced its newest vessel, the Seabourn Ovation, with a naming ceremony in the harbour of Valletta in Malta in May. The ship is the fifth ultra-luxury vessel to join the Seabourn fleet over the past decade and the second of two ships designed by Adam D. Tihany.
The event was managed by Belinda King Creative Productions and saw the ship's Godmother, Elaine Paige perform to an exclusive audience on the cruise ship’s pool deck and a debut of the Seabourn anthem entitled We Sail to See the Lives of Others by Tim Rice was performed. The evening was capped with a fireworks’ display that lit up Valletta Harbour.
Belinda King Creative Productions brought Push the Button on board to handle the technical aspects of the project and they, in turn, asked Unusual to deal with the rigging elements.
Jim Dugan, production manager

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Denmark - Nordic Rentals has recently made its first major Robe investment with the purchase of 50 x MegaPointes and 26 x Spiider LED wash beams for rental stock, a decision driven purely by “demand” explained senior sales and project manager, Tue Knudsen.
The Veile and Copenhagen-based company already has around 800 moving lights on board, but wanted to keep pace with the latest innovations from Robe. Knudsen comments: “It’s a big investment, however, the massive demand for the fixtures enables a quick ROI, making the products very attractive.”
He also mentions Nordic Rentals had been looking at ways of reducing its annual sub-hired rental costs - and owning more of the products being spec’d is one approach.
The MegaPointes were out of the warehouse door the day after they were delivered by Robe’s Danish distributor Light Partner and are currently

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USA - Martini Bar, a new Florida nightlife venue, boasts three LED-lined spaces controlled by one Avolites Ai Miami Licence dongle.
Martini Bar is situated just a short trip from Miami International Airport in the CityPlace Doral retail and entertainment complex and offers a nightclub and an outside lounge.
Upscale entertainment lighting experts idesign Productions served as the speciality lighting and video designers for the project. Owner and lead designer Michael Meacham worked with the idesign team to create a diamond-shaped LED wall upstage, a LED-lined DJ booth and a large LED façade for the external lounge.
"The Martini Bar's owner, Joe Delaney, allowed us to have creative freedom for the spaces. We wanted a unique design that brought the rooms to life, rather than a usual video screen shape," says Meacham. "In addition to creating the unique video screen la

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UK - Now in its sixth year at Hyde Park, AEG Live’s Barclaycard Presents British Summer Time (BST) has settled into a proven formula, with sound reinforcement partners Capital Sound and Martin Audio’s MLA loudspeaker system having yet again optimised the sound site-wide.
Maintaining the status quo, Capital rigged the main stage and outfield identically to 12 months ago - with one major exception.Providing the spectacular curtain raiser to the 10-day festival, Roger Waters brought his Us + Them tour to the UK for the first time. Waters had already taken his sonic and visual experimentation to breath-taking levels at Desert Trip in 2016, with the biggest surround sound system ever built. To create maximum impact at Hyde Park, Capital were asked to provide an additional 12 hangs of MLA/MLA Compact on towers positioned through the concourse for one night only.

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Canada - With the popularity of boxing on the rise in Ontario, ensuring Canadian audiences get the kind of bang for their buck provided by high profile bouts is increasingly important. For Craig Bickerstaffe, owner of Toronto production services company, ShowWorks Inc., that means investing regularly in cutting edge LED technologies.
ShowWorks road-tested and then purchased Elation’s new DARTZ 360 narrow-beam fixture, as well as ADJ Vizi CMY300 hybrid moving heads, just prior to United Boxing Promotions’ The Big Hurt at the Hershey Centre in Ontario in May. SFM, Elation’s exclusive distributor in Canada, provided the DARTZ and Vizi CMY300 fixtures to ShowWorks for road testing.
“The first time I saw the DARTZ I was in Montreal and I was blown away by the amount of output for a 50-watt LED fixture,” Bickerstaffe states, adding that many of the lighting

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Italy - The former railway station of Porta Romana is one of the historic areas of Milan waiting to be renovated with a project of urban revaluation.
Since 2015, Social Music City has enhanced that unused space with its tensio-structure, attracting thousands of young people thanks to the DJ sets and spectacular themed events.
The lighting system for Social Music City consists of 78 moving heads by DTS: 46 Raptor, 12 Evo and 20 Wonder units.
Daniele Campanaro, resident programmer at Social Music City, comments: "This is the second year that Feliciano Musillo (Felix) of Expect Nothing has asked me to programme the stage lighting. The lighting project of SMC is by Felix, with whom I collaborate on different projects programming the light shows.
“A lighting design that satisfies the variety of SMC events - from electronic dance to corporate events - is certai

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UK - De Montfort University in Leicester has recently undergone a major investment in their lighting and staging capabilities for one of their largest on-site facilities, The Venue. With the help of Stage Electrics, the university now possesses more trussing and some of the most up-to-date lighting kit available.
Created to host a wide range of events, The Venue is often used for music events, conference work, performances, and celebrations. As the university hold all their graduation ceremonies here, they can now give each graduate the moment in the spotlight they deserve.
The university has invested £5 into transforming the building. After installing a number of improvements including retractable bleacher-style seating and a full sound rig, they have now added the lighting equipment to truly showcase the capabilities of this space.
Stage Electrics were appr

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Singapore - Signify reports that its Philips Vari-Lite stage lighting fixtures have helped to conjure the magic of the big-top for the sumptuous Circus 1903 - The Golden Age of Circus. The dazzling show, complete with life-sized elephant puppets, thrilled audiences at its most recent run at Singapore's Marina Bay Sands Grand Theatre.
Lighting designer Paul Smith utilised the dual functionality of the VL4000 BeamWash to fulfil two important lighting roles from a single unit. He says, "The VL4000 BeamWash performs well as a wash, and as a spot too - much better than I ever expected a hybrid fixture like this to perform."
With life-size mother and baby elephant puppets central to the show, floor space was at a premium. The mother elephant alone has four puppeteers inside. This gave Smith a challenge. "The BeamWashes have helped me to reduce the number of units I ne

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UK - Stormzy, headlined the Saturday main stage in spectacular fashion at this year’s Wireless Festival in London’s Finsbury Park. The London-born superstar performed in a full, bespoke production in six acts, created by Bronski and Amber Rimell of Tawbox.
It was clear that lighting designer, Tim Routledge, would need a giant-sized fog generator when lighting Stormzy’s set, and specified two MDG Me8 fog generators to take on the job.
“I’m very familiar with MDG’s TheONE dual fog/haze generator which I specify for most of the tours I light,” says Routledge, “but when Matt Wiseman brought the Me8 to my attention at the ABTT show last month and highlighted the sheer volume of controllable fog it can produce, we decided to try it out. Stormzy’s set design called for vast quantities of dense fog for a couple of numbers, which is always a challenge in an ou

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France - Nouvelles Pièces Courtes is a collection of short contemporary dance pieces, created in May 2017 by French choreographer Philippe Decouflé and his Compagnie DCA.
Each piece tells a different story, which in turn calls for a very separate visual identity to each work. “My interest in the short form comes to me via rock'n’roll: short, efficient tracks gaining in power what they lose in duration,” says Philippe Decouflé. “For me this system works well for dance, where the composition is often more poetic than narrative, where the format needs to be adapted to its subject, to go through different worlds in a same programme and take the pleasure to get lost.”
Lighting designer Begoña Garcia-Navas used Robert Juliat fixtures to complement each different dance piece through her use of lighting, choosing 20 Robert Juliat Dalis 860 Cyclight LED b

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USA - Grammy-nominated group Kaleo fuses Mississippi blues, old school country, up-tempo rock and a range of other styles into their creative cauldron to arrive at their particular brand of music.
Kaleo’s distinct style is also reflected in their ethereal stage presence. Minimizing the use of colours, they prefer to be lit in subtle variations of white light. Max Lenox, who has worked with the band in various capacities since 2016 and is the lighting designer for its current tour, has mastered the art of creating subtle white-light-dominated looks, while still providing the versatility needed to reflect his client’s eclectic music.
This balance was on full display in late June, when Kaleo headlined at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, illuminated by a bright, evocative lightshow created by Lenox with help from a floor package that featured Chauvet Professional STRIKE and

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South Korea - Curated by Olivier Saillard, Volez, Voguez, Voyagez - Louis Vuitton tells the history of Louis Vuitton, beginning in 1854, through the archives of the family’s founding members.
Conceived and designed by Robert Carsen, the thematic journey has been touring around the world, including a stop in Seoul, South Korea. With strict guidelines for the exhibition lighting design, lighting specialist Baesung Kim needed a series of powerful yet flexible lighting solutions, so he worked with distributor Hansam Systems and created a design with 260 Gallery LED luminaires from Altman Lighting.
“The exhibition was part of the world tour for the Louis Vuitton show with the initial exhibition design coming from France that included lighting product specifications,” began Baesung Kim. “I joined the team for the stage setting and assisted with the product pro

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Russia - After 19 TV shows, dozens of songs, some special performances and innovative lighting designs, created and executed by Leonid Poznyanskiy, Songs on TNT TV project had its final broadcast on 2 June.
He deployed 24 GLP impression X4 Bar 20 and 24 JDC1 strobes in the production, which ran from the first episode until the last. And the final performance by the singer Nazima was made almost exclusively with the X4 Bar 20.
The designer admits that he has been a fan of the GLP products ever since the Eurovision Song Contest that took place in Moscow in 2009, when some of the first LED moving heads were placed in the side-fills. This signified to him that the new era in professional lighting had arrived.
Around two years ago Leonid came across the X4 Bar 20 for the first time and by summer 2017 he had the opportunity to use them in a project. At that ti

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Italy - Playing during June and July, the annual Ravenna Festival is currently taking place in the city of Ravenna, making great advances in its audio production and delivery. At the heart of the sound system are d&b audiotechnik’s Soundscape immersive live audio technology, and mixing systems from fellow German systems innovator, Lawo.
For the past three years, Italian rental company BH Audio – which specialises in classical, contemporary and jazz production work – has used the combined d&b/Lawo platform for critical trials ahead of Soundscape’s official launch at the ISE event in February.
In charge of the Ravenna Festival system setup is BH Audio’s Massimo Carli, who chose Lawo’s IP audio capable mc²36 console for FOH mixing as he had previously proved its adaptability at a Verdi Festival staged at the Farnese Theatre in Parma.
“After t

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Canada - Built over a century ago, the Imperial Theatre in the city of Saint Johns, New Brunswick has played host to many a legendary show. In the mid 1980s, a huge restoration project took place, bringing the theatre back to its original glory.
With its colourful history and design, the Imperial Theatre still enjoys a busy schedule with music, film and theatre shows filling its diary. It has recently taken delivery of two DiGiCo SD12 consoles.
“We looked at a lot of consoles from a lot of different manufacturers. They each had things we liked and didn’t like,” explains the theatre’s head of sound, Sean Boyer. “Time again, the SD12 bubbled to the top of our conversations because of its small footprint, flexibility, world-class preamps, expandability and its light weight, trust me, that was a consideration. Our previous consoles would take four people to back

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UK - Signify reports that its new LED stage luminaire, the Philips Vari-Lite VL2600 Profile, made its world debut on the stages of the Forestry Commission's Forest Live shows in June. Supplied by Pearce Hire, the VL2600s were used to light performances by artists including Gary Barlow, The Script, Kasabian and Paloma Faith on this summer's first Forest Live weekend.
Peterborough-based Pearce Hire is the first company in the world to invest in these latest luminaires from the Philips Vari-Lite brand. They purchased 40 VL2600 Profiles from London-based show lighting specialist Flashlight Ltd. On delivery, 20 fixtures were supplied to each of two Forest Live shows, at Thetford Forest in Suffolk and Delamere Forest in Cheshire.
Pearce Hire's general manager Jim Brown says, "We'd looked at several alternative fixtures and the VL2600s were the brightest

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Myanmar - The Blue DI wireless Active Direct Box Interface from Australian manufacturer ARX Systems is literally proving to be a popular for bars and restaurants around the globe when it comes to professional solution for playing music.
As a wireless audio interface for computers, smartphones and tablets, the ARX Blue DI connects these and similar devices to the balanced line level pro audio world. By simply pairing the Blue DI to a wireless enabled device, it is easy to pull up a music file and press play and listen to music through a professional sound system.
At the Byblos Pub & Grill in Yangon, Myanmar the ARX Blue DI is proving a great hit with the management and the customers. A tablet controls the music in the bar which is connected to the Blue DI via wireless protocol. Selected customers who come into the bar can connect to the Blue DI and then play their

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UK - Illumination specialists LED Creative is working with scenic designer Dominic Tolfts on the latest run of dating show Blind Date for Channel 5.
Hosted by Paul O’Grady in front of a live audience at ITV London Studios, the show features a newly updated set design filled with rich colour and featuring opulent gold fittings against a lavish, deep purple velvet backdrop.
Cleverly crafted by Tolfts, the ‘framework’ façade that encircles the stage areas incorporates LED Creative’s Alpha 60 flex, providing discreet, uniform illumination to subtly highlight the latticework and add intensity to the vibrantly coloured drapes.
Commenting on the production, LED Creative project manager Tim Rees says, “Dominic has made perfect use of our Alpha 60 RGB system to ‘invisibly’ add illumination to emphasise the detail in his design. The overall effect hel

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New Zealand - Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour has been transformed by a decade-long artistic project, Vector Lights on the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
Powered by a mix of solar, battery, and peer-to-peer systems, over 90,000 mappable LED pixels and other fixtures provide a vast, animated canvas for traditional Maori designs, and special celebrations. Green Hippo Karst media servers supplied by Lexair were engaged by Mandylights, who designed, installed and programmed the project. The installation is part of a 10-year smart energy partnership between Vector and Auckland Council.
“This project is one of the physically largest, and of the longest duration, that we’ve done,” said Richard Neville, lighting designer and managing director of Mandylights. “Any media server solution we chose for this project needed to house and present content for a decade, support

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Belgium - TV presenter and singer Niels Destadsbader teamed up with composer, pianist and music producer Miguel Wiels in a special Niels & Wiels duo to present four exclusive concert performances, for which they wanted a show design that captured the essence of the collaboration.
The two, who are also great personal friends, and their respective managements asked Genk based creative practice Painting with Light to create some visual magic for the show, and Luc Peumans led the project for Painting with Light.
Choosing the distinctive and slightly retro look of the Portman P2 Hexaline to create an upstage wall of luminosity – Luc positioned 24 bars, each one offering six individually controllable 230W halogen bulbs complete with hexagonal reflectors and housing – upstage, just in front of the printed backdrop. Above the stage were 10 Portman P1 fixtures.

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USA - It may have been six years since Sugarland last hit the road, but Kristian Bush and Jennifer Nettles are showing audiences that time has not changed the Grammy-award winning duo’s energy or talent as they embark on their 2018 Still the Same Tour.
Bandit Lites provided the lighting package for the production. Lighting designer Chris Lisle and associate designer and programmer Erik Parker utilised lighting fixtures that would complement the ‘big top’ circus set. Prior to their hiatus, Sugarland was known for big sets and dynamic shows, and Lisle knew this production needed to be no different.
“From the moment house lights go down and the band takes the stage until the lights come back up, the goal is to transport the audience to a new place, a happier world full of love and unity,” explained Parker. “This design was very intentional with how each

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USA - Slamhammer recently deployed a host of Martin by Harman fixtures to elevate PRINCE: Live on the Big Screen, a live tribute concert that was held at Target Centre arena in Minneapolis.
The centrepiece of a four-day celebration of Prince’s life, the show took place on 20 April at the 20,000-seat Target Centre. The performance featured an all-star cast of musical collaborators from throughout the musician’s career, playing alongside multi-track recordings and live concert footage.
Paisley Park hired sound and lighting provider Slamhammer to create a versatile lighting rig for former Prince lighting designer Charles Ford. In order to deliver stunning visuals that would complement the video footage, Slamhammer selected an arsenal of Martin MAC Axiom Hybrid, MAC Viper Profile, MAC Aura, MAC Quantum Profile, and MAC Quantum Wash fixtures.
“On the anni

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USA - Popular country music superstar Dierks Bentley, who has 17 No.1 hits to his credit, adds a sparkling humorous touch to the encore of his current blockbuster Mountain High Tour, when he appears over the stage in an “aircraft” to perform his hit single Drunk On A Plane.
Lighting and scenic designer Chris Reade of KYVA Design (Las Vegas), who collaborated on the creation of the faux plane with production designer Bruce Rodgers of Tribe, Inc. and production manager Jay Ballinger, is accenting this scenic element by lighting it with 12 Chauvet Professional STRIKE 1 single source 230W LED blinders, supplied by Christie Lites.
“I love the incandescent look and the warmth that I get from the STRIKE fixtures; it’s beautiful,” said Reade, who serves as the tour’s lighting designer. “The original plan was to use them exclusively on the B stage t

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Bulgaria - Nestled high in the Rhodope Mountains that line Bulgaria’s border with Greece, Meadows in the Mountains (MITM) is an annual festival that provides an experience both musically and geographically outside the mainstream - and off the beaten track. Located just outside the small town of Polkovnik Serafimovo, the festival returned this June for a four-day, non-stop party, powered by a Funktion-One sound system.
The very thing that makes MITM such a special festival – its spectacularly remote location – naturally meant this was far from a regular set-up. The system, supplied and installed by UK-based Audio Feed, undertook quite a journey to site. The truck carrying all the necessary kit from the UK was only able to travel half way up the mountainside – with the remainder of the trip made on a combination of smaller flatbed truck and horse-drawn cart.
  1. Airstar balloons at Eurovision opening
  2. Elation for new Welsh language studio
  3. Chauvet enhances Tempe’s 4th of July festival
  4. Nexo reinforces Manchester’s Trafford Centre
  5. DAS keeps the mood upbeat at Veza Sur
  6. Odin Line Array tour continues
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