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Airline gripes

    The airlines charging for every little item has got to stop. I am losing my mind. Charge me extra on the actual fare (because the client pays for that), but give me my free can of coke!

 

Let’s Put A Smile On That Face

Buenos Dias Todos,

                         Well my Spanish isn’t quite where I’d like it to be but it is good enough to strike up small talk with some of the Mexican crew and band members I have been working with on the Marco Antonio Solis U.S. tour. Most do speak alright English and the ones who don’t speak too quickly to me so my brain won’t spin. So at the end of the day the communication barrier I once thought was going to be hard to break was quite simple to step through if you’re willing to try.

Coldplay’s Viva La Vida Tour

“Where do you get your ideas?” The question is trite, perhaps, whether you’re a novelist or a lighting designer, but it gets asked so often because the answer is so mysterious. For lighting designer Paul Normandale, it’s “the most exciting part of what we do” — that outpouring of creativity in the “scribble-CAD-to-fruition” zone. For Coldplay’s Viva La Vida tour Normandale designed the lighting, Mark “Sparky” Risk served as lighting programmer/director, and Justine Cat-terall worked as part of the video content production crew. Here are a few details on how they achieved the looks for the tour.

Jamming Along with O.A.R.

LD Joe Labbe is concentrating hard on the stage. The lights are out and he’s waiting for the band to come back into a song. It’s just like any other night until Of a Revolution’s lead singer Marc Roberge says to his bandmates, “Let’s go into another song.” Labbe, who is on his first tour with the band, hears about the switch in his personal monitors and panics.  “In a matter of seconds I had to find the right page where the song is,” he recalls. “I thought, “Why are you doing this to me?’ It turned out to be a fun night. I made it through and got it to where it needs to be. It was one of those nights that I walked away feeling awesome.”

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Green, from Radiohead to Toe

If others see that this is both beautiful and that it works, then they just might be willing to try it themselves.  Such is the hope of the lighting and visuals designer Andi Watson and the planet-friendly band, Radiohead.  Lead singer Thom Yorke is a member of the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth, and the other band members and crew join his interest in taking the steps necessary, however inconvenient, to tread as lightly as possible on a fragile planet.

The best production ever

     Every once in a while you get to work on a gig that you wish would never end. An event that delights you and makes you happy to go to work every day. Last week I started work on a production that should take at least 18 years to complete.

PLASA 2008 Show Report

Fifteenth century Italy had its Renaissance men, but we have our Renaissance machines — software and hardware in a variety of areas that will redefine the entertainment lighting industry as we know it.  This year’s PLASA differed from last year’s in that there seemed to be much more change and more innovative new products. And unlike years past, there was more than LEDs and media servers.