Pharos - Leaderboard - May 2024

Projects

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Israel - Ronen Najar is a lighting designer used to working under some pressure, and for the 2018 Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha'atzmaut) opening ceremony on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, he needed those steely nerves as part of the creative team helping to commemorate a historically significant moment in Israel’s history, the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Declaration of Independence.
Ronen chose to use 55 x Robe MegaPointes and 68 x BMFLs - a combination of Spots and WashBeams - to illuminate the vast performance area built around the tomb of Theador Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, at the top of the Mount of Remembrance, the site of Israel’s national cemetery and a resting place for the country’s war dead.
The event is organised by the Culture Ministry and broadcast live on all Israeli TV channels.
It’s also attended by an invited audience of 7,5

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UK - Since their formation in 2017, Lights Control Rigging (LCR) has supplied kit for many high-profile tours and artists ranging from Ed Sheeran and Dizzee Rascal to rising stars such as Wolf Alice and Sundara Karma.
“At the moment we seem to be sending out equipment for a different tour every week,” says LCR director, Mike Oates. “The key is being able to work with the artists, their lighting designers and make sure we have the right, high quality equipment available at the right time. We work closely with A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET), who supply much of the equipment we hold in rental stock.”
Recent purchases from AC-ET have included Chroma-Q Color Force II Battens, Luminex networking equipment and ProLights static lights. LCR also sources many of their consumables and specialised cables from AC-ET - cabling being supplied under the Tourflex Cab

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USA - Arizona’s famed Valley of the Sun is located in a desert, but from 11-15 April, this hot, dry landscape was shaking with thunder, not the meteorological kind, but the rolling four-stroke variety, as over 70,000 motorcyclists from every corner of North America, descended on the area for the 22nd annual Arizona Bike Week.
At the end of each day, after all the charity rides and swap meets were over, most bikers said goodnight (temporarily) to their Hogs, Blackbirds and Hurricanes and headed off to the event’s fairground concert venue to see multi-platinum headliners like ZZ Top, Shinedown, Collective Soul and Chevelle.
Supporting these performances with some potent hard-driving looks was a flexible festival rig supplied by Creative BackStage that featured Chauvet Professional Maverick, Rogue and STRIKE 4 fixtures. Designed to create maximum impact with plenty o

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UK - Established 20 years ago and set in the heart of rural Essex, the Magic Mushroom restaurant offers contemporary fine dining in relaxed modern surroundings. A recent extension and upgrade has added high quality audio, thanks to Yamaha loudspeakers and amplifiers.
With a growing number of customers, for 2018 Magic Mushroom’s owner decided that an extension to the restaurant was needed, along with a new sound system. The restaurant prides itself on sourcing its products locally and has continued this ethos with the new audio system, approaching technical production company Spotlight Sound - based in nearby Chelmsford - to specify and install it.
The new extension is designed to allow certain parts of the restaurant to be closed off for private functions and exclusive dining for larger parties. This meant that the new audio system needed to work in different ways, a

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France - French band Shaka Ponk is touring through 2018 with a rig that includes flexible lighting pods full of Elation Rayzor 360Z LED fixtures, as well as Elation’s new narrow-beam DARTZ 360 LED moving head.
Lighting design is by Alexandre Bucher of the 4eleven company, who has worked with Shaka Ponk for seven years as a lighting and video programmer and has toured with the band several times. The current MonkAdelic tour is his first as lighting designer. The LD, who also serves as lighting director on the tour, works with a set rich in scenery and detail with accompanying video show. Bucher uses lighting to add another layer of dynamism to the set while accentuating the on-screen visuals and has integrated the two Elation LED source luminaires in his design in large numbers.
Compact Rayzor 360Z fixtures, high-speed LED beam/wash luminaires with zoom, are l

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Sweden - Philips Lighting played a central role in the lighting for Melodifestivalen 2018, the popular television series in which Sweden's entry to the Eurovision Song Contest is selected annually.
The VL6000 Beam, from the Philips Entertainment Lighting portfolio, was chosen by award-winning lighting designer Fredrik Jönsson, one of Europe's leading experts in lighting entertainment events for television. Jönsson has been responsible for lighting Melodifestivalen since 2002, and has also lit the Eurovision finals on two occasions, in 2013 and 2016.
For Melodifestivalen 2018, Jönsson selected the Philips VL6000 Beam luminaire to fill a specific role in his lighting design. He says, "The set designer created a kind of radio mast set-piece, suspended just above the sweet-spot on stage, so we needed some kind of big, beamy lighting instrument that

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USA - Tools from Waves Audio were employed by sound engineers for a variety of performers in diverse set-ups and consoles throughout Coachella 2018 – from Avid Venue S6L (Kygo) and Avid Venue Profile (The Weeknd), to DiGiCo SD10’s (Vince Staples), to SSL Live (Portugal. The Man) and Waves’ own eMotion LV1 Live Mixer (MØ). Prominent FOH engineers provided a peek under the hood of their productions, relaying which tools help them create a tight, spectacular-sounding show under demanding festival conditions.
Vince Staples’ FOH engineer Robbie Barr has been touring with DiGiCo SD-series consoles nonstop for five years, mixing such acts as M83, Foster the People and Banks. His setup for Staples at Coachella consisted of a DiGiCo SD10 console, two Waves SoundGrid Extreme Servers (one for redundancy) and the Waves MultiRack plugin host.
“Running Waves plugins on

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USA - Excitement for ABC-TV’s Academy Awards show built well before the telecast began with the arrival of celebrities captured by the Oscars Opening Ceremony: Live from the Red Carpet. The pre-show, held on famed Hollywood Boulevard outside the Dolby Theatre, featured for the first time Claypaky K-EYE K20 HCR LED wash lights selected by lighting designer Madigan Stehly.
Stehly has worked on the Red Carpet show for the last five years. This year marked his first in the lighting designer’s seat. He describes his brief for the live broadcast as “daylight reinforcement” since the show leads into golden hour, which “quickly changes the intensity, quality and colour of light” as the sun sets.
“The whole Red Carpet is the show, not just the defined interview stages,” says Stehly. “Celebrities arrive and interact with each other – that’s part of

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UK - New Robe MegaPointes and LEDBeam 150s, purchased by SJ from Birmingham UK based rental and technical specialist DMX Productions, were used to spectacular effect in lighting the 2018 Voice in a Million (VIAM) extravaganza which was staged at London’s SSE Wembley Arena. VIAM amasses some of the largest children’s choirs in the world.
The Voice in a Million organisation was founded by Robert and Jo Garofalo in 2006, to raise awareness of the millions of children worldwide who are orphaned, abandoned or separated from their birth parents. In 2009 the VIAM shows began to showcase children’s choirs from around the UK. Now these annual shows are full scale arena concerts with some of the largest children’s choirs in the world, this year comprising 10,000 children’s voices.
DMX productions, for the second year, supplied lighting and all other technical

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UK - Students from the University of South Wales Lighting and Technology department, who were given the opportunity to operate the lights for a music video shoot by The Haus Band at The Wales Millennium Centre last month.
The students got to use a variety of consoles, including a ChamSys PC Wing to run a David Howard- and Dominic Boston-designed rig that featured over 50 moving lights, including Chauvet Professional Maverick and Rogue fixtures. Aside from getting the chance to operate this impressive gear, the students garnered valuable insights into the lighting design process.
“It was really nice to lead a project with students from conception, though programming and production, to completion,” said Howard. “It’s something I had not yet done on a university project of this scale. It was also nice to see pre-visualised programming come to life on a real rig,

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Malaysia - Goldenduck International recently outfitted the newly-opened MBO The Starling Mall with end-to-end cinema surround audio systems by Harman Professional Solutions.
Founded in 2005, MBO Cinemas operates 27 complexes across Malaysia, making it the third-largest chain of movie theatres in the nation. The new state-of-the-art facility at The Starling Mall in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Petaling Jaya offers a wide range of movie-going experiences, with revolutionary theatre formats such as MBO Big Screen, MBO Premier, MBO MX4D and MBO Kecil.
In order to ensure pristine surround sound reproduction, MBO Cinemas hired cinema sound integrator Goldenduck International to outfit MBO The Starling’s ten theatre rooms with premium cinema audio systems. Goldenduck selected a complete cinema audio solution comprised of JBL ScreenArray Series cinema speakers and Crown amplif

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USA - Steven Wilson is out on tour with a lighting package provided by Bandit Lites, bringing his ever-evolving sound to audiences around North America. The English musician and singer-songwriter released his fifth studio album To the Bone in the fall of last year, and while lighting director Tellson James is apt to note that Steven’s sound dictates the lighting, he also works to make sure the mood of the lighting matches the songs.
Bandit Lites is supplying Martin MAC Viper Profiles, GLP JDC1 Strobes, Clay Paky B-EYE K20, a Road Hog for control along with Chauvet VIP X6iP Video Panels.
With each venue featuring its own lighting fixtures, James shared how the Bandit-supplied package is crucial in crafting a consistent look that is still adaptable no matter whatever unknown factors the venue is going to throw their way.
“The B-EYE s offer something t

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USA - With total album sales topping 12m and more than 35m singles sold, Imagine Dragons continue to soar – and the Las Vegas band’s epic live gigs no doubt play a significant part in its swift ascension into ‘arena filler’ status. Last year witnessed the four-piece thunder its way through North America, wowing fans on the first leg of its Evolve World Tour which started in Phoenix, Arizona and is scheduled to conclude in Kiev later this year.
This opening stage of the global outing, in support of the band’s third studio album Evolve, comprised 31 North American dates and SRae Productions – owned and operated by Sooner Routhier and Robert Long – used a trio of Hippotizer Boreal Media Servers to control a stunning array of 30 LED pods. Mounting the pods on a brace of automated Axis the SRae team used four projectors to shoot on to physical roll dro

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Poland - The new Karova Club in Warsaw has opened, with an advanced technology infrastructure. As a central component of the AV fit-out, Phono Media, Martin Audio’s recently-appointed Polish distributor, supplied system integrator, LFX, with a CDD (Coaxial Differential Dispersion) and BlacklineX solution to fulfil the owners’ request for the Martin Audio brand cachet.
Explains Phono Media director Jacek Stanislawski: “This is a brand new club and the owner approached them for a quotation, believing that Martin Audio would be a perfect solution for the club sound. The owner, Marcin, has a lot of knowledge and passion for sound and he demands the same high quality as he would expect at home. His goal was to provide hi-fi quality to achieve the same result with classic club music.
“Once LFX had made a presentation, showing references of installations at the Minis

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UK - Really Creative Media, digital and live production company, created live performance visuals for Friendly Fires’ one-off comeback gig at O2 Brixton Academy, 5 April.
Machine Management, brought in Really Creative Media’s video expertise to ensure Friendly Fires’ first UK gig in five years delivered maximum visual impact.
“Having worked with Clean Bandit since 2016, who are also with Machine Management, we knew the artist team at Machine,” commented Nick Dew from Really Creative Media.
Over the course of one month, creative director Jack James brought the bands’s‘psychedelic’ content vision to life, generating original footage filmed in-house during a series of one-day shoots followed by post-production editing.
Jack explains: “The band expressed a keen interest in us using practical effects such as ink droplets into water rather than

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UK - Sound Space Vision (SSV) acousticians and theatre planners worked as consultants with architects, MUMA, to provide an innovative and sustainable community space for Storey’s Field Centre at Eddington, on the University of Cambridge’s North West Cambridge development.
Storey’s Field Centre is the dynamic hub of the community of Eddington, a new neighbourhood under construction as part of the North West Cambridge development. The Centre is a civic building in the heart of the new development and encompasses meeting rooms and a large multi-purpose hall for exercise classes, lectures, music of all genres, local festivities and events alongside a nursery.
SSV joined the project to support the range of uses both in the acoustical design and the noise isolation and the activity-led design and specification of the technical fit-out of the building.
MUMA design

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France - Dushow, one of France’s leading technical production companies, has invested in 20 of Robe’s RoboSpot remote follow spotting systems.
Dushow’s commercial director Christian Lorenzi commented, “We see this as a big innovation in the follow spotting world. It’s very flexible and gives everyone involved in staging all types of shows many more options.”
The RoboSpot system comprises a BaseStation and a MotionCamera that communicate via DMX with no latency and enable several of Robe’s most popular moving lights – including, currently, the BMFL Spot, BMFL Blade, BMFL WashBeam, DL7S Profile, DL4S Profile, MegaPointe and Pointe - to be controlled from anywhere in a venue or space.
The RoboSpot MotionCamera is available either as a separate unit or integrally on the BMFL Follow Spot fixture, a modified version of Robe’s signature high powered l

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UK - The hit musical, Hamilton opened at the end of December to sell out audiences at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London. Prior to its opening, the venue underwent a complete facelift to prepare for the show, with everything from the decor, the seats and the uniforms of the staff tying in with Hamilton. As part of the refurbishment, Unusual Rigging was brought on board to rejuvenate the theatre's 'tired' flying system as well as to provide rigging services for the show itself.
Jeremy Featherstone of Unusual explained: "The flying system at the Victoria Palace Theatre had become life expired due to many years of use. For Hamilton, Unusual was asked to refurbish fifteen counterweight sets that were needed for the show. Essentially, all the moving parts and ropes were replaced during the pre-rig period and the opportunity was taken to lengthen some of th

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UK - Part of this year’s Barbican OpenFest saw a major new Culture Mile light and sound installation take place in the Beech Street tunnel, opposite Barbican Underground. Culture Mile presented Tunnel Visions: Array which transformed the tunnel into an audio-visual performance space combining cutting-edge projection and sound technology with the Barbican’s distinctive brutalist architecture.
Created by Tony Award-winning artists 59 Productions led by director Richard Slaney, co-produced with the Barbican, and with music by composer/conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, Tony and Olivier Award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry was commissioned to create a multi-channel spatial sound design for the immersive multimedia art project, using TiMax SoundHub-S64 spatial audio matrix and playback engine.
TiMax directed the audio playback of 30 channels of audio stems and effe

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UK - It is 35 years since Dreamgirls first hit Broadway. It was a sensational success then and the latest production at London’s Savoy Theatre is equally so.
Sound designer, Richard Brooker, wanted an analogue sound to the audio, in keeping with the show’s 1960s/70s setting, but also wanted to benefit from today’s digital technology. He specified a DiGiCo SD7T to handle Front of House mix duties, which has the warmth of sound he was looking for with all the advantages of the digital domain and the theatre-specific functions of DiGiCo’s ‘T’ software.
“No other manufacturer has put the time and effort into understanding the strange idiosyncrasies of the theatre world,” says Richard. “The SD7T has functions that are imperative when you’re working on musicals and that’s because the guys at DiGiCo talk to us, the people that use them, and make t

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USA - Allen & Heath dLive Digital Mixing Systems were in use on multiple Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival stages in support of a diverse line-up of musical acts and production needs.
Launched in 1999, Coachella has grown into a premier music and arts festival, grossing over $114m and drawing over 250,000 attendees annually. Coachella 2018 saw a large number of dLive artists on the line-up, including BØRNS, Hayley Kiyoko, Nile Rodgers & Chic, Nothing But Thieves, PVRIS and The Neighbourhood.
Praised for its intuitive workflow and tiny footprint, the dLive C1500 Control Surface was a popular choice across Coachella festival stages. The C1500 is the first rack-mountable surface for the dLive system. Packed in a diminutive frame are 12 faders over 6 layers, built-in audio I/O, an audio networking port and a 12" capacitive touchscreen. All dLive Control Su

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Europe - British Electronic Dance Music (EDM) pioneers, Orbital, reunited last year to the delight of music fans world-wide after five years apart following separate projects. Brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll are currently touring their reunion show across Europe.
Lit and stage designed by the band's long-term lighting designer Jonny Gaskell, the show features an array of lighting effects from the Claypaky A.leda B-EYE K20 and Claypaky Stormy CC.
Known and loved for their moments of on-the-spot improvisation during live shows, Orbital can be a challenging act to light for even a seasoned designer. However, Gaskell has worked with the brothers for over 25 years and is confident in optimising the lighting for their performance style, as well as realising their creative input.
"We know each other well and are able to bounce ideas off one another to really develop the

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USA - Veteran lighting designer Kelly Easterling of Quantum Creative Studios recently deployed Martin by Harman MAC Encore Performance fixtures to create an intricate lighting design for The Secret Silk a Broadway-style musical which debuted on the Princess Cruises ship Royal Princess in February.
The Secret Silk was brought to life by a talented team of industry veterans, including Director John Tartaglia, executive producer Stephen Schwartz (creator of Wicked, Pippin and Godspell) and supervising producer Jayson Raitt from Quantum Creative Studios. The stunning set design was created by three-time Tony Award nominee Anna Louizos, with lighting design by Easterling, video and projection design by Aaron Rhyne, costumes by Tony Award-winner Clint Ramos, and animal puppets created by the Jim dHenson Creature Shop.
Based on a Japanese fo

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USA - Launched in February 2018, Brilliant! is the latest addition to the popular Neon Museum Las Vegas, featuring an augmented-reality A/V system designed, installed, and programmed by Earth Water Sky of Las Vegas.
Combining art, history, and technology, the innovative Brilliant! neon experience, featuring 40 historic neon signs from the museum’s collection, is highlighted by Earth Water Sky’s 360-degree laser video projection system, a 24-channel 3D audio system with multitrack 3D audio soundtrack, and outdoor lighting system with automated show control. DMX signal distribution for the entire production is handled by ProPlex Opto-Splitters and Data Cables.
“ProPlex was selected as a critical component to handle all of the DMX signal distribution needs for this complex installation,” says John Humphries of Earth Water Sky. “We are avid proponents of P
  1. Silverdale Baptist grows with Allen & Heath dLive
  2. Elation ACL for Denmark’s Scarlet Pleasure
  3. The White Panda tour goes Rogue
  4. AC-ET supplies Alton Towers’ Wicker Man
  5. Avolites powers Black Panther European première
  6. Elation refreshes The Good Parts tour
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