Welcome to 2012, the start of a new year. So what will your New Year’s Resolution be? It’s the perfect time to turn a new page. (Please, wait till you get to the end of the column before turning this page!) New Years always gives us a fresh start. It’s our annual opportunity to eliminate bad habits. It’s our chance to start new routines to make us healthy, wealth and wise. Of course, resolutions are much easier to make than to keep. By the end of January many will have abandoned their resolve and settled back into old patterns. Will this be you or will this be the year your resolve outweighs your temptations?

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Rent-All BV

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Although Noël Coward’s witty play Private Lives is an intimate tale told with only five characters, the set design for the latest Broadway production (which just closed), imported from London’s West End through a run in Toronto, offers impressive and visually striking sets to accompany the bedroom farce. But it makes sense to have grand sets for emotionally explosive comedy, which finds a divorced couple (Kim Cattrall and Paul Gross) accidentally staying adjacent to one another while honeymooning with their new spouses on the French Riviera. Naturally, all sorts of nostalgic sexual shenanigans ensue. Originally written in 1930, the play resonates with modern audiences in its mischievous tone and sly views on marriage and divorce.

Twists, Turns and Automation for the Get Closer Tour

His last name doesn’t sound very rural, and, geographically, at least, his roots are Down Under. But Keith Urban has a huge following among country music fans in the U.S. and Canada.  For his 2011 Get Closer tour, supported by Bandit Lites, SGPS and Chaos Visual Productions, long stretches of curving truss evoke roller coasters and Ferris wheels. And the structural elements move during the course of the show, transforming the lighting fixture positions along with the visual design possibilities.

Koen de Puysseleir Adds Lighting and Video to the High-Energy Mix

Tiësto wrapped up The College Invasion Tour with the largest single-headliner DJ show in U.S. history, performing for 26,000 people at Los Angeles’ Home Depot Center stadium. The massive electronic dance music party underscored why Tiësto is considered one of the top DJs in the world, and the show did not disappoint. Playing off of the night’s pulsing musical mixes, creative designer Koen de Puysseleir, principal of Belgium-based Light in Motion, conceived a show of high-energy lighting, striking video and special effects that took full advantage of both the scope of the historic show and the scale of the venue.

A Cool Blast of Holiday Spirit on the Las Vegas Strip

Every year around Christmas, Sin City outdoes itself. The 2011-2012 season is no exception. With its holiday spectacular, “Winter in Venice,” which began November 21, 2011, and runs through January 8, 2012, The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino is currently staging its greatest outdoor show since its owners, Las Vegas Sands Corp., broke ground in 1997.

Controlling lights can be as simple or as complicated as you like.  Traditionally, lighting designers have been limited on how the control surfaces are laid out by the desk manufacturers.  Depending on which lighting desk you get, you are limited to a set amount of faders or how you access and control parameters of a moving light.

LEDs have been the talk of the town for the past couple of years in the industry. The LED began to show up in wash fixtures, displays and video walls.  Everyone was excited about the LED. The savings in energy consumption and operating costs and the dazzling number of colors you could mix all hold high promise for LDs. The question everyone seemed to be asking, however, was, “When will there be an ellipsoidal with an LED light source?”

Protecting an asset as valuable as our hands is important in a field like ours. We work with our hands daily. We are a hands-on profession.  If we have injured digits, it can cost us, not just money but our ability to work. Protecting our hands is a simple as putting on a pair of gloves.

Sure, you can pick up a cheap pair at any hardware store, but you get what you pay for. I have gone through countless pairs of simple leather gloves working focus and pushing my fair share of cases. They never seem to hold up past one season.

Creative LED products have been around a while in various shapes and sizes. Products like Barco’s MiSTRIPS, Element Labs’ Versa TUBEs and Mega Systems Inc.’s Mega-Lite Bright Stripe are examples of products that let the user essentially map video content to LEDs to create unique visual effects. An LED product that takes mapped low-res video content even further in terms of configurable flexibility is the Solaris+ LED Video curtain from G-LEC. Solaris+ builds on a network of flexible strings with 360°-viewable LED pixel spheres. Unlike fixed LED displays, Solaris+ can be gathered up to form 3D shapes; hung in drapes; or attached to moving hoists, enabling the video display to transform its shape in 3D space.

“Hometown Heroes” Going Strong in 30th Year

Here’s the thing: we’ll do a big American Airlines event in the convention center, or something in your backyard.”

That’s Terry Cain, speaking like a true hometown hero. And it’s not surprising: In October, in Orlando, Cain’s company, Dallas-based Gemini Light, Sound, Video, received the 2011 Parnelli Hometown Hero Award for Best Lighting Company of the Year.

Santa Claus came early for me this year, and as a result, I’ve been propelled into the exciting world of the iPad2. I spent the first few days with it loading games and magazines (i.e. PLSN, http://plsn.com/app), but then I thought about what else might be available for lighting professionals.  And that’s when a whole new world unveiled itself for me.

What OWS Might Show Us about Staging

Just about two months to the day it began, the original Occupy Wall Street’s run was over. It didn’t exactly get the kind of perceived permanence that shows like Miss Saigon or The Lion King achieved a few miles north around Times Square, but it’s not simply coincidence that the terms “staging” and “staged” appear frequently in conjunction with news stories about OWS locations around the U.S. That’s because, like any interactive phenomenon, organic or premeditated, these protests have shown some level of production values.

As you begin this New Year of 2012, resolve to learn more about the clock/calendar features of your console.

It is a New Year and time for a new calendar.  As you prepare to look ahead to all the wonderful gigs that await you in 2012, you should consider not only your personal calendar but also the calendar functions on your automated lighting controller.  Because lighting controllers are built on computer platforms, they can provide many functions including automated tasks at specific times and/or dates.  Although the exact method will vary from console to console, the basic principles of programming to a calendar remain the same.  As always, be sure to read the user manual of your console of choice to learn the exact keystrokes required.

Imagine this: You have been having a programming marathon for the past 12 hours. You are in the groove. Everything is going great. Your fingers are flying across the desk. You have programmed over 300 looks, numerous cues, the timing is down. Then, without notice, your screens go dark. You have lost power. Your desk is dead in the water. Some unknowing stagehand decided to plug something in. That overloaded your circuit to the board and tripped it.

What was special about the New Year’s Eve show? A punter would say, “The pyro, the confetti cannons, the balloon drop!” A production person, meanwhile, might answer, “Oh, it was the usual: pyro, confetti cannons, the balloon drop...”

I’m feeling pretty humbled this holiday season. Apparently I have a lot of friends in this wacky business of ours. And they thought enough of my work to cast a vote my way for a Parnelli Award this year. I cannot give enough thanks to all of you who helped me win this award for best lit concert tour of the year (Kid Rock’s Born Free tour). But I could never have gotten where I was, nor created a show that looked this good, without the help of a lot of people. Nor could I have gotten where I am without a lot of breaks from others. And I believe in paying it back.

Theatre lighting designer. Concert lighting designer. Television lighting designer. Professor. Lecturer. Author.

Jim Moody has many vocations, but despite an amazing career so far, producing a head-spinning list of great rock acts he’s worked with, there’s one role that he puts above all those: Mentor.