At first glance, the design for the Bon Jovi Because We Can World Tour looks extremely simple. When the show opens, there is no video screen, just a wide-open stage and not a lot of lights. On the surface, it seems that Performance Environment Designer Doug “Spike” Brant has taken a severely minimalistic design approach. Nothing could be further from the truth; rather the environment reveals itself, literally at the cue of the video. Building on their dynamic visuals for the last few Bon Jovi tours, Performance Environment Design Group (PEDG) and Brant have taken advantage of a convergence of new technologies and a few innovative companies to realize their most ambitious design to date.

One of the difficulties of life as a freelancer is figuring out how much to charge for your services. They say time is money, but they don’t tell you how much money it’s worth.

TOUR:  Bon Jovi’s Because We Can Tour

GIG: Lighting Director

TOUR DATES:  Through Oct. 25, 2013

With more than 200 DJs and other artists on seven stages over two three-day weekends (March 15-17 and 22-24), book-ending (and dwarfing) the annual Winter Music Conference from which it sprang in 1999, the 15^th annual Ultra Music Festival smashed its own impressive records for growth by drawing some 330,000 revelers to Miami’s Bayfront Park, doubling 2012’s 165,000 attendee count.

One of the most buzz-worthy Broadway shows of the spring season is Kinky Boots, the pop musical from composer/lyricist Cyndi Lauper and writer Harvey Fierstein. Adapted from the 2005 British film of the same name, which was itself inspired by real-life events, it tells the tale of Charlie Price, an aimless twentysomething who moves to London with his success-driven girlfriend Nicola, only to be summoned back to his hometown of Northampton after his father passes away. With the family shoe business deteriorating, Charlie reluctantly takes over to try to save jobs and the company. A chance encounter with a drag queen named Lola inspires him to specialize in kinky boots for cross-dressing men who need strong high heels, but at first it’s a hard sell to his employees, some of whom will need to accept Lola as the designer and accept their change of direction. It’s a story about overcoming prejudice and sometimes embracing the outrageous.

For Miranda Lambert, “it’s all about taking this rock persona of hers and running with it,” says LD Chris Lisle of the Nashville star’s current Locked and Reloaded tour with Dierks Bentley, a sequel of sorts to the Lambert/Bentley Locked and Loaded co-headlining tour of 2006/2007. “I tell everyone she’s a rock star,” he says. “That little five foot four gal just explodes on stage, making her fun to light.”

Since its reportedly shaky start back in Oct. 1999, the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, staged by concert promoter Goldenvoice, is now on solid financial ground. Tickets for this year’s first weekend of events, held April 12-14, not only sold out, they were gone within 20 minutes. Three-day passes for the second weekend, April 19-21, sold out as well, in little more than a day.

Brian Hugh Warner, the artist behind both the man and the band known as Marilyn Manson, has crafted a daunting persona, and the band’s “Hey Cruel World” tour schedule, interspersed with the “Twins of Evil” co-headlining trek with Rob Zombie last fall, was also clearly not for the faint of heart, either. Launched just prior to, and continuing after, the May 1, 2012  release of Manson’s Born Villain album, the tour legs included Australia (six shows in February and March), Asia (five shows in Japan and Taiwan in March) the U.S. (18 shows in April and May) and Europe (24 shows in 24 cities, May-July).

Lighting Co
Deep South Productions

Venue
Trinity Baptist Church
Lake Charles, LA

Lighting Provider
VooDoo Lounge (In-House)

Venue
VooDoo Lounge
Kansas City, MO

Lighting/Video Companies
Paradigm Lighting/Global Trend Productions

Venue
Bayfront Park
Miami, FL

Lighting Companies
DSS Inc./Clearwing

Venue
Various (tour)

Lighting Co
Showtime Sound

Venue:
Georgetown University
Washington, DC

Lighting Co
Christie Lites

Venue
BC Place Stadium
Vancouver, BC, Canada

Sight & Sound, a Christian theatre company founded in Pennsylvania’s Amish country in the mid-1970s by Glenn and Shirley Eshelman, has been entertaining audiences and spreading the story of the Bible ever since.

Rigging has become an important part of our industry as of late. Rigging has always been an important part of what we do, though not to the degree we see today. Putting a rig in the air used to be done by crunching numbers, using sophisticated formulas and knowledge of working loads. Today, we have a wide variety of load monitoring systems to determine the exact load a system is carrying. Most systems even offer the ability to provide warnings and automatic e-stops if something isn’t right.

For floor-mounted fixtures, one of the last things we think of is the actual floor base we typically use — until we get to the gig and notice that it’s missing. I can’t count the number of times floor bases have missed the truck! It can be an honest mistake, of course. But someone back at the shop is going to get an earful. To help keep that mistake from happening, Apollo Design Technology has come up with a simple, lightweight and portable design for a highly stable floor stand that can easily fit into any cramped road case, the Hoop Stand.

Some of the greatest ideas happen in the strangest of places — the bar, while driving or on those long flights for work. Stewart Davis from Axxis Design had one such moment at 30,000 feet.

The “LT” in Philips Vari-Lite’s new VL3015LT Spot stands for “long throw,” and one of the first things you will notice about this fixture is brightness, along with a zoom range tailor made for long throw applications. With an improved output running at 1650 watts using a 1500W Osram double-ended short arc lamp, the VL3015LT Spot combines some of Vari-Lite’s latest technologies with features that designers have been relying on for years with fixtures like the VL3000 and VL3500 spots.

Before 2010, if a lighting crew member said “sharpy,” it was probably in reference to a black felt pen (i.e., a Sharpie). Those felt-tip markers are still around, but these days, so are a lot of Sharpys — Clay Paky’s compact, lightweight and quick moving light fixtures with distinctively bright and hard-edged beams. Last fall, at LDI 2012, Clay Paky launched its Sharpy Wash 330, a little more than two years after the company’s original Sharpy fixture made its big debut at PLASA 2010 in London.

The first thing Robert “Bob” Belanger wants you to know about ChainMaster electric chain hosts and control systems is that they are built specifically for the entertainment industry. You won’t find them on car assembly lines. You won’t see them on construction sites. You will see them on concert tours, corporate events and theater installations.

Good morning class, does everyone have a calculator? Today’s lesson is about calculating the center point of an image so we can align two LED curtains hung with space in between with different pixel pitches so that the image of one continues onto the second cleanly. The trick is to calculate where the center point is and work outward to find the starting pixel of the image. What follows is an example of how to work that math.

After a big meal, you want some time to digest. That’s what mega-lighting entity Philips has done after a six-year tear of acquisitions, including its purchase of LED lighting system manufacturer Color Kinetics (announced in June 2007) and solid-state lighting technology company TIR Systems (March 2007). Then, in 2008, Philips acquired The Genlyte Group, an entity which had previously acquired JJI Lighting Group (May 2006), the U.S.- and Hong Kong-based operations of Strand Lighting (July 2006) and, a few years earlier, Vari-Lite (2002).

Automated lighting programming often encompasses more than adjusting intensities and moving lights around a stage. Quite often, we find ourselves in circumstances that require intense planning, understanding and interconnectivity of lighting elements.

In my travels on Facebook, I happened upon J.R. Clancy’s “Scary Rigging Photo of the Week” page. The (anonymous, to protect the guilty) pictures there capture gasp-worthy rigging situations — rigging setups so obviously dangerous it’s hard to believe they even happen; and yet they do. It cemented even more firmly in my mind the value of a good rigger. But how do you know who is a good rigger? Well, an obvious answer is someone who is been certified in rigging by an independent, accredited organization. I had heard about the Entertainment Technician Certification Program (ETCP) in rigging, and seeing those photos made me decide to take a closer look.

Some LDs seek out assignments during the cold-weather off season for outdoor concert touring. Michael Keller, LD for Ozzy Osbourne and other touring artists, has worked with the auto shows on and off for more than 20 years with titles ranging from designer to master electrician.  This year, Keller was involved with NAIAS in Detroit, LAAS in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Auto Show, the St. Louis Auto Show, and CIAS in Chicago.

Teamwork. It’s a big word. Everyone nods their head and agrees that, on any show, big or small, it’s about the teamwork. But lately I’ve been wondering why so many people in our business don’t really practice what they preach. Don’t get me wrong, I watch them work their butts off, doing great at the task they have been assigned. But the minute they are done with that, they are out of there. Gone from the arena. Waiting for that silly inconvenience between the load in and the load out (the show), to be done.