Although you can’t download lighting design from iTunes, in many ways it is a lot like music. So says up-and-coming lighting designer Rob Koenig. Koenig is the owner of World View Touring and he’s currently viewing the world and touring with Billy Idol. In this PLSN interview, Koenig tells us how music is like lighting design, why he prefers soft edge fixtures, and why he loves rock ‘n’ roll design.
One of the biggest issues facing Asbury United Methodist Church a few years back was parking space. The fast growing church was severely challenged for places to put all of the cars carrying new worshipers. When Senior Pastor Dr. Tom Harrison heard that the ice rink adjacent to the church had become available, he didn’t give it much thought. Then, one day, he drove through the parking lot and started counting parking spaces. He counted 220 of them.
No sooner had Brad Paisley’s highly successful last tour, “Bonfires and Amplifiers”, come to end did he announce his next tour, The “Paisley Party.” Lighting designer and director Dean Spurlock, who has been with Paisley for about seven years, was called on to keep the 2008 Grammy Award-winner and the Academy of Country Music Top Male Vocalist of 2007 and 2008 out of the dark, with visuals that would meet Paisley’s goal of achieving his “most spectacular concert yet.”
Dennis Sheehan has had a backstage pass to rock and roll history. For a quarter of a century he has shepherded U2 to the four corners of the globe and back again. Prior to that, he assisted Led Zeppelin on their historic tours. The one-time professional guitarist has also served a host of acts including Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Siouxie and the Banshees and members of the Sex Pistols, among many others.
Shakespeare & Company was running out of space. The theatre company, founded in 1978 with a mission of combining the strengths of classical British and American acting, first secured residency in the turn-of-the-century estate that was home to writer Edith Wharton, then in 2000 expanded to 30 acres with multiple buildings one mile away in Lenox, Mass.
Some people get themselves stuck in a rut. Erykah Badu is not one of them. Her music bridges multiple genres, she sports an astonishing array of couture and hair styles and she’s not afraid to change the name of her tour or the look of the set two weeks into the tour. The 2008 tour, in support of her most recent album, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), started off as the New Amerykah tour, but became known as the Vortex Tour to reflect, as Badu reportedly put it, “a swirling cloud of energy that sucks everything into its orbit.”
On the surface, the latest version of Vectorworks computer-aided design, visualization and rendering software may not look as if it has had a radical upgrade, but when you replace the 3D modeling engine with a new kernel, there’s a good argument for saying so.
Bandit Lites got its start when founder and chairman Michael Strickland was just 12 years old. In the early years, Strickland would have to “borrow” the lights from a local high school theatre to light the Monkees, the Beach Boys and other bands of the 1960s — hence the name. Today, Strickland’s company has emerged as a global leader in the entertainment lighting industry, with offices in Knoxville, Nashville, San Francisco, the U.K., Hong Kong and Taiwan, and while the company is still called Bandit Lites, Strickland no longer scours local high schools for gear.
I was recently asked to take a look at a new Elation lighting fixture, the LED 36 Tri-Brick. I thought to myself, “Great, yet another LED fixture in the shape of a brick.” But then I turned it on and all I could say was, “Wow.” Elation has once again stepped up and taken the LED fixture to a new level.
On Feb. 17, 2009, at the stroke of midnight, an amazing era comes to a close, and another one begins. It’s called the DTV (digital television) transition, and as mandated by our good friends at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), every chief engineer at almost every television station in the U.S. is going to throw the big “off” switch on their trusty old analog transmitters. From that point forward, all terrestrial video transmission at “full power” TV stations will be blasting out ones and zeros, as the sun sets on analog broadcasting. (Psst— Hey buddy, wanna buy a 50,000-watt analog transmitter?)
“Buy me a seat at the opera house. I don’t care if it’s Mozart or Strauss.” —from “Take Me Out to the Opera”
Today, when most people think about opera (if they think about it at all), they envision an elegant night out with fancy clothes, jewels and a stuffy be-on-your-best-behavior attitude. That’s how it is in the movies, and even sometimes in real life.
The Beijing Summer 2008 Olympics may have been destined to be controversial, and it didn’t take long for the Games to spark public debate. One of the earliest flashpoints centered on what took place — and didn’t — during the opening seconds of the opening ceremony. Leading up to the dramatic, drummed countdown at 8:08 p.m. on Aug. 8, 2008, viewers at home and on giant screens inside the National Stadium, aka the Bird’s Nest, watched as 29 giant footprints outlined in fireworks proceeded gloriously above the city from Tiananmen Square to the 29th Olympiad.