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Vasco Rossi Tours with Claypaky and an Extraordinary Lighting Design by Giovanni Pinna

Vasco Rossi decided to delight his countless fans again in 2023 with a short concert tour that crisscrossed Italy. As always, Giovanni Pinna was in charge of lighting, and made extensive use of Claypaky fixtures. “The set design changed radically this year,” Pinna told us. “We mainly used 70-by-26-meter stages based around a triangle: there were three triangles of automated battens of different dimensions around a large central triangular LED wall. Each batten was fitted with a modular rig complete with all the lights.”Read More »Vasco Rossi Tours with Claypaky and an Extraordinary Lighting Design by Giovanni Pinna

Avoid Extinction by Adapting to Tech Changes

PLSN’s LD-at-Large, Chris Lose, notes that, after years of feeling like the “young gun on the crew,” where he could easily “work circles around lighting techs who struggled to adapt to new technologies,” he has once again started to “feel the creep of maturity” set in. The solution, he notes, is to guard against extinction by adapting to technological changes, detailing his journey from working with a Strand 520i to the Wholehog II, grandMA1, grandMA3, while eyeing a future that could include consoles that harness AI to optimize show production.

Virtual Horizons

At NAB 2022, roughly 50 out of 1,200 booths showed Virtual Production (VP) solutions. A year later there were 600 out of 1,500 booths in the segment. InfoComm 2023 also underscored the fact that VP as a market segment has moved from buzzy trend to something worthy of full blown R&D assets for manufacturers.

Product News, July 2023

K&M: Crank Up Stands, plus info on other new products from ADJ, City Theatrical, Claypaky, Martin/Harman, Pangolin, Wenger and Whirlwind

Prolights Makes an Impact at Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023

Prolights was a part of illuminating the world’s largest inclusive sporting event, the Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023. The event was all about visibility, social participation, empowerment, and integration, as 7,000 athletes with intellectual and multiple disabilities stepped  into the limelight to give their best performances in 26 different sports.

Read More »Prolights Makes an Impact at Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023

Ayrton Cobra Hits the Sweet Spot for Zucchero’s World Wild Tour 2023 at Campovolo

With a wealth of platinum and gold records to his name, Italian singer-songwriter and ‘father of Italian blues’, Zucchero Fornaciari, affectionately known as Diavolo in R.E., celebrates his 40-year career this year with his World Wild Tour 2023. The tour kicked off in New Zealand in April, before returning to Zucchero’s hometown of Reggio Emilia on the 9th and 10th of April where he played with huge success to capacity crowds at the RCF Arena, formerly known as Campovolo.Read More »Ayrton Cobra Hits the Sweet Spot for Zucchero’s World Wild Tour 2023 at Campovolo

Cameo Illuminates the Tante Mia Tanzt Festival 2023

On May 18 2023, the sixth edition of the Tante Mia Tanzt Electro Festival took place in Vechta, Lower Saxony, Germany. Top DJs such as Netsky, Steve Aoki, and W&W played on the 68-metre-wide and 14-metre-high stage in front of around 20,000 spectators. As in the previous year, Eventures GmbH was responsible for the technical event equipment of the open-air festival in 2023. Tante Mia also relies on continuity behind the lighting console: Lighting Designer Milan Spira already used a lot of moving lights from Cameo for the 2022 edition, and this time opted for the OTOS, OPUS and ZENIT Series.Read More »Cameo Illuminates the Tante Mia Tanzt Festival 2023

ChamSys Versatility on Display at Glastonbury

ChamSys consoles make themselves right at home in all sorts of FOH platforms. This was brilliantly evident at Glastonbury 2023, as various models of the company’s products powered a wide variety of shows on over a dozen sites, from the Pyramid Stage, where Jason Hyne displayed his virtuosity on the MagicQ MQ250M Stadium console for Cat Stevens, blending soft washes with retro video images; to the Funkingham Palace, where David Howard used his MagicQ MQ250M to support relentless DJ Performances.Read More »ChamSys Versatility on Display at Glastonbury

The Many Hats of CHAUVET Professional at Glastonbury

They might not have been as common as flags at the 2023 Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, but CHAUVET Professional fixtures seemed to be everywhere one looked at Worthy Farm during the world-famous event. The company’s products were used to add extra color and excitement to 17 of the festival’s stages. Included in the group were main attractions like the Pyramid, Greenpeace, Flying Bus and new Levels stages, as well as more specialized attractions like the Avalon Stage, nightclub-like Salon Carousel, The Hive Stage, Outside Circus Stage, and the San Remo Stage, an interzone for dreamers, visionaries and other revelers.Read More »The Many Hats of CHAUVET Professional at Glastonbury

AI and Dynamite

This quandary of good and bad came to my mind when following the conversations raging around Artificial Intelligence (AI). Will AI become this generation’s dynamite? We now have companies producing AI programs to do just about anything and everything. Then, a whole new crop of companies are developing products to detect content created by AI, mainly to prevent cheating and unmask deepfakes. Many in Hollywood are warning actors who are thinking of being scanned and whose imagery can be turned into digital avatars. Tom Hanks said his career could go on forever with the advent of AI. Is that what we really want? Nothing against Hanks, but is that acting, is that a human creating art?