In the Information Age, the least high-tech items tend to be the most overlooked. The high-flying but low-tech catwalk is chief among them. Both the balm and the bane of riggers worldwide, the catwalk is as cumbersome and expensive as it is necessary, which explains why they are often routed worse than flying commercial out of a small town in northern Wyoming.
It was a weekend that went from the ridiculous to the tragic. On Friday, July 23, the Kings of Leon stopped their concert mid-show after being bombarded by pigeon droppings from the rafters of the Verizon Center in St. Louis. The remainder of the concert was cancelled, though fans were not informed as to the reason at the time, resulting in bottle tossing and other moderate crowd turbulence.
Nashville's staging business is the anchor component of the increasingly-elaborate productions that chug out of Music City every year. But like the sets that the handful of companies here fabricate, the business is glossy on the part that the audience sees and less so back in the shop.
The sine wave that is country music's fortunes periodically intersects with the boundaries of the larger mainstream pop music paradigm, and this summer, Nashville-based music finds itself all over that map. Artists like Lady Antebellum, Rascal Flatts and the ubiquitous Taylor Swift have kept country on the cover of People magazine and on the broader cultural radars. One other thing they have in common is major video projection systems out on tour with them.
Shortly after Dan Daley compiled and submitted the information for this column, the Nashville area was hit by what locals are calling a 100-year flood. Many of those who Dan interviewed for this column were directly or indirectly affected when water levels on the Cumberland River exceeded 50 feet – more than 12 feet above flood stage. For more details on the flooding and its aftermath, please CLICK HERE .
As goes Maine, so goes the nation," according to the adage that putatively predicts American presidential elections. Replace "Maine" with "Las Vegas" and you'd get a pretty good predictor of the health of the corporate event market in the U.S.
"Nice house. Would you like to see it with Ionic instead of Doric columns? No problem. Click." That conversation is not uncommon when architects or real estate developers and clients are working with scale models or 3-D animation. But imagine what it would be like when the scale was 1:1, no matter how big the building.
Lighting and projection have always been considered technical crafts that support the artist, but what about when the lighting and projection are themselves the art, extensions of an artist?
Michael Jackson’s untimely death in June shocked the world. It also shocked accountants at more than a few companies. Jackson died less than three weeks before he was to kick off a series of 50 concerts at London’s 20,000-seat O2 stadium on July 13.
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.
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.
Overlooked amid the meltdown of the financial industry was the cooling of speculation in metals that had driven prices to record levels. Gold, which touched $1,000 per ounce at one point in 2008, was simply the most visible of an array of industrial metals whose rising costs began to impact those who manufacture, sell and use metal stage gear such as aluminum trusses and steel catwalks.