The first time Scott Warner knew what he wanted to do in life was at a concert. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew he’d find it somewhere around the front of house. After studying to become a sound engineer, he realized he really wanted to play with lights. Luckily, his best friend knew a band that could help him realize his dream.
I don’t think there has ever been a more interesting time to be in the lighting industry. The rapid pace of technological advancement is a rich fertilizer for the entertainment production industry and it produces a bountiful harvest of new products. One such product is the Chauvet Colorado 2.
Pixel mapping, as it’s referred to in the world of digital lighting, is the use of a media server (e.g. PRG Mbox, PID Catalyst, or Martin Maxedia) or another kind of software to map an image or video clip to a grid of LEDS and/or lighting fixtures. The image can be displayed across any type of fixture that has intensity (for example, PAR cans). In addition to intensity, an image with color information may also be displayed across automated fixtures with RGB or CMY attributes as well (for example, High End Systems Studio Color or Vari*Lite VL5).
Almost everything in the live entertainment business has been transformed by digital technology. But as much digital gear as lighting, projection and staging companies carry already, there may be yet one more level of transformation to go in the near future.
Many of today’s greatest spiritual teachers such as Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle teach the principle of staying focused on the present moment. They explain that the past cannot be changed and the future is uncertain. The only thing that any of us truly has is this very moment.
“Do few things if you would enjoy tranquility.” —Marcus Aurelius
I received an email from someone who is not from Texas looking for a formula to calculate the current in an unbalanced 3-phase power distribution system. I could tell he wasn’t from Texas because he was going out of his way to find a solution to a complex problem.
There are a lot of social networking sites, including the new one started by this magazine (www.ProLightingSpace.com), that allow many of us in the music biz to keep in touch, or for that matter, find each other after all these years. It can be addictive and fun. It can also be annoying. But there is one feature where people can list 25 things about anything — stuff they hate, love, worship or just wish to blog about. I’m going to hijack that idea this month and list 25 things that shaped my career in music.
When Walt Disney World®’s Facility Asset Management (FAM) group came to Walt Disney World Entertainment’s in-house lighting designer Charley Pogue with a query about replacing the lighting on Disney’s iconic Cinderella Castle, he had little idea what might lie ahead. FAM wanted to see what it might take to replace the 700-watt arc source fixtures that have been lighting the Castle for 10 years. The fixtures had served their purpose and parts for the discontinued luminaires had become scarce, while the labor to keep them working had increased. And there were far more environmentally friendly options available.
Pre-Broadway productions are as high tech as their Broadway counterparts, with projections and LED walls helping to expand the scope of imagery in a cinematic way. For Dirty Dancing: the Original Story on Stage, which has played around the world and recently ended its pre-Broadway run in Chicago, such technology helped to recreate the film onstage.
“This is unsafe. Somebody’s going to get hurt.”
Nick Scirocco, the 6-foot-2-inch plain-spoken IATSE Local One crew chief and John Yorke, lighting designer for the Red Bull Snowscrapers event in New York City, were standing at the top of a 90-foot high structure, the wind howling all around them, when Scirocco made this pronouncement. The structure in question was the Red Bull Snowscrapers Snowboarding ramp, a thin composite of plastic and nylon decking sheets at East River Park in Manhattan.
A few years ago, I toured with a lighting system that had several Chroma-Q™ Color Block™ LED color mixing fixtures lighting a white backdrop. They worked well for washing the 40-by-20-foot surface with color and, because they are small and draw little power, they set up quickly and trouped easily.