I have written before about how certain tools of the Internet have been useful to the automated lighting programmer, but recently I realized just how important YouTube is to our profession. The Internet has come a long way in recent years, and now surfing the web at high speeds is commonplace.
Over the years I’ve watched technology grow in leaps and bounds. America always seems to be a step ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to new gear and ways of setting it up, but eventually everyone catches up. I like to watch as they do, just as much as I like teaching in countries that are way behind. Last week I went back to Africa for the first time in years and noticed quite a change.
For 10 long years, the Dallas Cowboys football organization worked to open their new stadium in Arlington, Texas. On June 6, the $1.15B stadium was launched in grand style with a George Strait concert before a crowd of over 60,000 people. Longtime Strait production manager Paul Rogers and lighting designer Stacey La Barbera of Onstage Systems were in command at the FOH overseeing the production of the Texas-sized event.
“There were no limits to the imagination and no limits to creativity.” —Peter Morse, LD for Michael Jackson’s later tours
By the time you read this, most of you will have had your fill of the media’s coverage of the untimely demise of a certain King of Pop. But the industry owes him a great debt of gratitude for setting the high mark in production standards.
With all of the bombastic, turbocharged productions that have invaded Broadway recently, it’s nice to find a show that gets back to the basics: a compelling story, great acting and powerful lighting, sound, and direction. Mary Stuart delivers the goods.
There was a time when the reputation of a production company was more important than its profits. Those were the days when a FedEx shipment could fix just about anything and damn the cost. If it meant that the show would go on then the company would survive another day, and the deposit in the karma bank just might yield enough dividends to pay back the loss of revenue. If not, then another hopefully more profitable project would be coming along soon.
By the time the show floor for InfoComm ’09 opened at 9 a.m. on June 17, dozens of seminars and workshops had already taken place and over eight hundred exhibitors had spent countless hours setting up in the Orlando Convention Center, including roughly 50 lighting companies. The show, which started as an audiovisual show (why does the term “audiovisual” conjure images of overhead projectors and 16mm film in grade school?), has been growing the lighting side as evidenced by the increasing number of lighting exhibitors and lighting-related seminars.
Bill Sapsis has been at the forefront of rigging for the past 28 years. His company, Sapsis Rigging, is one of the leading rigging companies in our industry, and he’s spent countless hours helping develop programs that make rigging safer and easier.
Elation has stepped up their product line considerably in the last year, and the introduction of their latest hard edge light is no exception. They have become the first company to build a 1,200-watt fixture with a body the size of everybody else’s 700-watt models. And the light produced from the double-ended MSR 1,200-watt lamp is pure white with a perfectly flat field.
ChamSys, Arkaos and Capture, three of the fastest growing software developers in the lighting and media server markets today, have developed an open network protocol called CITP/MSEX. Companies like Martin, ETC and Green Hippo are beginning to join the parade by implementing the protocol into some of their latest products including Maxedia, Congo and Hippotizer.
When you look at a hybrid automobile and a conventional car side by side, you wouldn’t necessarily notice any difference until you looked under the hood. That’s kind of how Sustainable Waves, a turnkey staging/lighting/sound systems provider in Austin, Texas, likes to think of itself when it delivers portable music and events stages complete with wash lighting and audio. Except when you look under their hood, you’ll see solar panels, not an internal combustion engine.
In the mid-1990s, automated lighting consoles started to incorporate effects engines. With the single press of a button, a ballyhoo or color cycle could be created, eliminating the need to spend a long time building positions and steps of a chase.