Three years ago, Avolites sent shockwaves through the industry with the launch of sister company Avolites Media. In that time the new company has delivered a host of award winning and industry milestone projects. We at PLSN feel the time is right to take a closer look at Avolites Media and the impact the company is having on the converging sectors of lighting and video control.
For the past three years, Steven Anschutz has lived a life built on fabrications. Ask him directly and he’ll admit, “I’m a fabricator.” So he made it his business. “In 16 years of working production on shows,” he recalls, “I noticed we always had to set up using the same gear that we’d used forever. We wanted to do things like mounting speakers directly onto trusses instead of having the separate up-lit truss and speakers on sticks. But there wasn’t a handy bracket out there to do that. There were many situations like that, where we’d be stuck using stock components. The standard manufacturers were not willing to create one-off custom pieces. So I decided to start making them myself.”
One of the bright lights in the bustling Chinese economy is Shenzhen Eastar Electronic Co., Ltd., maker of Esdlumen LED screen and lighting products. The 800-employee company is located in the mega-metropolis of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong in southern China’s Guangdong province.
Historians believe fireworks first exploded onto the scene in seventh century China and reached widespread use during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). A new dynasty began in 1889 when Constantino Vitale founded his fireworks company in Pietramelara, Italy. In 1920, he moved his firm and family to New Castle, PA, whose official slogan would become “The Fireworks Capital of America.” In its first century, the business that would emerge as Pyrotecnico grew to become one of the country’s largest fireworks companies. It now creates many of the world’s most dazzling displays.
In Martin Professional’s early days, it was all smoke and mirrors. Literally. Entrepreneur Peter Johansen founded the company in 1987 in Aarhus, Denmark with the main factory located in the city of Frederikshavn, about 115 miles north of Aarhus. It all started with smoke machines, based on experiments using dry ice in a coffee machine. The Martin name was acquired through cooperation with a French smoke machine company. It soon added lighting products for discotheques but quickly diversified into lighting for the professional markets, particularly lights with moving mirrors such as the PAL 1200 and fixtures with moving heads.
Luccas Oliveira and Abbas Ritscher, co-founders of The Design Oasis in Davie, FL, both have a background in lighting design. As such, they became aware of a distinct market need – for 24/7 rental service and support. They embraced that “client-centric” vision from the start.
Allen Analian’s zeal for electronics is, well, electric. “Everything today involves electronics, and electrical engineering is the basis for the advance of technology,” he exclaims. “For me, I see a lot of interconnectedness in the world across all industries through electronics, from simple toys to supercomputers. With an electronics background, you can just about build anything!”
Catapulted? Ignited? Skyrocketed? Erupted? What is the best word to describe a company that, in a scant ten years, went from a two-car garage to a three-car garage to a 5,000-square-foot warehouse to a 12,000-square-foot facility and is now occupies 27,000 square feet with more than 25 employees? Begun in May 2004 by Sara B. Knutson and Ryan Knutson, Brown Note Productions of Thornton, Colorado, is a supermarket of services, support and sales for live event audio, video and lighting. Like most successes, the enterprise began with a simple idea.
Suspended! To the student, police officer or professional athlete, the word means a punishment. In the world of entertainment venues, it describes the magic that German company ChainMaster performs in getting heavy show elements into the air and keeping them there. You’ve seen their work if you’ve been to the Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg, the Louvre, the Stockholm Opera, the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles, the Kremlin State Palace, the Eurovision Song Contest, the Qatar National Convention Center, certain concerts by Paul McCartney and Metallica, and perhaps most visible of all, the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games.
Since forming video production company DWP Live in Oct. 2007, founder Danny Whetstone and his team have become widely known for projection-mapping — beaming static or moving designs onto a 3-D surface so that the images follow the topography of the surface, including window cornices, columns, doors — even gargoyles. One industry publication has gone so far as to call the company projection mapping’s “world heavyweight champion.”
“How do you keep the creativity going, and how do you find different ways to keep the sizzle — that’s something we ask ourselves constantly,” says Rob Barber, vice president of Atomic Design’s rental division. The answer for Atomic is making sure the common denominator is modularity in all things, providing a level of flexibility in renting scenic pieces that allows for a completely original end result.