Features

Remember how, as a kid, you’d take a Hot Wheels track, hook it up to something like a door, and create some psycho-jump ramp? Then you’d pick your favorite car, and let it fly down and watch it careen into the air accompanied by whatever race car sounds you could vocalize? Scott Humphrey does because he did it more recently than you or I. Not sure whether he made race-car sounds though — he certainly didn’t need to because he did it for real.

Unique Association Marks Impressive Growth during Challenging Times

All the members of the Rental & Staging Network would agree that, as a whole, their organization is greater than the sum of its parts. As it barrels toward its fourth year propelled by a serious growth spurt, the organization continues to strive to be a network of top rental and staging companies joined by a common set of principles, high ethical standards and superior performance.

LONDON — What does it take to light the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton? Production meetings five months prior to the Big Day and backups for the backups. When an event is live and all eyes of the world are watching, there’s only one chance to “get it right.”

Designing for nightclubs is vastly different then designing for a stage. Don’t take our word for it, however — PLSN sat down and talked with three of the leading club lighting designers out there. Each designer has multiple nightclub designs under their belts and many more in the planning stages. PLSN talked with John Lyons from the Lyons Group, Michael Meacham from iDesign and Stephen Lieberman from SJ Lighting.

The 13th Ultra Music Festival drew 150,000 revelers to downtown Miami’s waterfront Bicentennial Park in late March, expanding for the first time to a three-day format. The event, which has developed a huge following among ravers, techno and electric music fans, featured more than 300 DJs and numerous bands performing on six stages.

If you ever needed proof that good things come in small packages…

For a six-week, 12-show run at Potawatomi Bingo Casino’s Northern Lights Theater earlier this year, Cheap Trick put on a show that was anything but standard. The front half of the show re-created their Dream Police album aurally as well as visually (think white, think low lying haze). Plenty of musicians were on stage to augment the band: professionals from the Milwaukee Symphony sat in as the “Bombastic Symphonic Philharmonic with the Rhythmic Noise Mind Choir,” which allowed the recreation of album’s orchestral arrangements. The second half of the show pulled from hits from the band’s long career.

Forty miles northwest of Los Angeles, on a hill that offers a panoramic view of Simi Valley, sits the Ronald Reagan Library. It was designed to house 50 million pages of documents, 1.6 million photos and other presidential garnishes, like the former Air Force One plane, a Boeing 707.

David Flad of Q1 Designs recently teamed with 4Wall Los Angeles to light the interior of downtown LA's Belasco Theatre. The lighting design and implementation was one of the final stages of the three-year renovation of the 80-year-old venue. Set in a central location not far from Staples Center, the Belasco was renovated so that it could host variety of entertainment events. The challenge for Flad and his team was in making sure the lighting was versatile enough to support a variety of needs.

On one night in February, at the L.A. Staples Center, what happened on the court was more than mere basketball. And here's a clue: If the word "Star" is in the event title – as in NBA All-Star 2011 – the stakes are going to be high. For the 60th time the celebration has been staged, the producers turned to All Access Staging and Productions for an assist.

"IATSE Local One is the oldest entertainment union in the U.S.," declares Robert Score, the organization's recording-corresponding secretary. Founded in 1886, members that year held a torchlight procession down Broadway to Union Square with 25,000 others demanding an eight-hour day and the end of the child labor. Meanwhile, the best-paid stage employees of that era worked for 50 cents a day, and men employed typically put in up to 100 hours per week.

Shea Stadium is so deeply woven into the fabric of New York City's social history that even tearing it down didn't make it go away. New York's equal part loving/maddening relationship with the Mets baseball team is augmented by its profound rock ‘n' roll history. It is, after all, where the Beatles played in 1965.