Television Lighting: Summer 2013 (Issue 109)

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www.stld.org.uk

Issue 109: Summer 2013

Television Lighting

The magazine of the Society of Television Lighting and Design

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Editorial

A little something to whet your appetites for our Winter issue

I

hope the summer is going well for you all. From the mixture of articles we have here, it looks like everyone is pretty busy. Showlight 2013 was a great success and to make the most of everything that happened, we will be providing you with some great articles and pictures from the conference in the next two issues.

For the moment, though, let us whet your appetites with an introduction to Showlight (‘It’s Showlight time!’, p11) and a teaser article (‘Lighting design Icelandic style: A lesson in low-carbon TV’, p12). The rest of the articles will be in our Winter issue.

Our most recent sponsor member, MEMS, invited us to its premises, followed by VIP treatment at Priestfield Stadium, home to Gillingham FC, for a midweek football match (‘MEMS has the power’, p8). We also visited the set of Britain’s Got Talent with another of our sponsors, Anna Valley (‘Anna Valley’s Got Talent’, p14).

The next issue of the magazine will pushed back until early November to allow for post-PLASA news as it is now being held in October. Therefore, the deadline for Sponsor News is Friday 25 October. The deadline for advertising artwork will be Monday 28 October at the very latest.

Have a great summer and see you all at PLASA!

Emma Thorpe Editor

Contents 4

Lighting: Comic Relief

31

STLD visit: MediaCityUK

8

STLD visit: MEMS

35

In memorium: Philip L Edwards & Ian Dewar

11

Event: Showlight 2013

36

A View from Across the Pond

14

STLD visit: Britain’s Got Talent

38

Lighting: A Question of Sport

18

STLD visit: Enron

40

Sponsor News

22

Lighting: Swan Lake in 3D

60

Society Sponsors

28

Event: Plasa Focus

64

Index of advertisers

TV Lighting and Design is the journal of the Society of Television Lighting and Design and is published three times a year. ISSN 2050-4012 Editor: Emma Thorpe and Bernie Davis E-mail: editor@stld.org.uk Web: www.stld.org.uk Production Editor: Joanne Horne Sponsor News: Emma Thorpe E-mail: sponsornews@stld.org.uk Advertising: John King E-mail: adverts@stld.org.uk Cover photo of Cesky Krumlov by: Mike Baker

Printed by: Andus Print, Brighton

Deadlines for the next issue: Editorial: 25 October 2013 Advertising: 28 October 2013 Advertising is accepted only from sponsor members of the Society © Society of Television Lighting and Design 2013

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Lighting

The last laugh Words & photographs: Bernie Davis Comic Relief 2013 was the last live programme to be transmitted from a studio at BBC Television Centre before the iconic building was vacated for refurbishment and redevelopment work after having been infamously sold to developers on 16 July 2012. The show narrowly missed the title of ‘Last live show from Television Centre’ – an accolade that went to a concert staged in front of the building, appropriately titled Madness Live: Goodbye

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Television Centre, for which I imagine a good number of us would like to congratulate the producer responsible!

The current plans for the building involve mothballing studios one, two and three. The largest of these, TC1 was the base for Comic Relief: its size providing plenty of room for a very large set and plenty of audience. Set Designer Rudi Thackray came up with a striking three-dimensional flowing design for the production, and it was decided to

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Comic Relief

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Lighting

use projection to provide nearly all of the dressing. At one point, there had been plans to use a 360-degree white cyc, but this was abandoned in the early stages of planning in order to give full prominence to the set itself.

Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day show has a constant need to show a multitude of video components. Throughout the night, phone numbers, appeal videos and OBs jostle for space with celebrity endorsements, motivational slogans and performance-appropriate graphics. And not forgetting the all-important money totals of course! All these requirements meant that a great deal of planning was necessary in order to ensure the producers had a full artillery available to them at all times, while the lighting team could maintain control over the look of the production. Lighting Designer Chris Kempton quickly identified the need for tight control over the video media aspect of the show and brought programmer David Bishop on board early in the process to join his team of Darren Lovell (generics), Bill Peachment (moving lights), and Gemma O’Sullivan and Rob Bradley (vision control).

After extensive dialogue between all the concerned parties, a system was designed and – apart from some budgetary impact – installed into TC1 overnight on Sunday 10 March.

To cover the set, 14 projectors were flown overhead using new yokes to allow fine adjustment once they were hung on a combination of lighting bars and scenery in a very packed rig.

Five more projectors were concealed under the stage floor to project on the underside of header pieces via hidden glass windows. Between these 19 units, most of the set could be covered in a single continuous image using the inbuilt mapping software of the D3 servers driving the system.

These servers were chosen early in the process and, using Thackray’s CAD drawing, the plan was visualised and a virtual model – complete with demonstration graphics – presented to production. From that point, the power of the D3s was 6

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

harnessed to map the contours of the set structure and manipulate graphic content back to the correct perspective.

Once Kempton and Bishop were introduced to the system, it was clear several modifications would have to be made for it to integrate with the show successfully. The D3 normally runs from a timeline control present on its interface, which stores preset cues and replays them sequentially. As anyone who has worked on or even watched a show such as Comic Relief will know, the sequence of events on the night is anything but linear!

In order to play a successful role in the show, it was clear the system would need to interface with Bishop’s Compulite Vector desk and, as such, a bespoke DMX expression table was built by the Digital Media Department at QED. This would allow very basic control of the system via DMX, allowing Bishop to recall preset cues as well as simple manipulation of colour and intensity. A mask function was also created, allowing the image to be blanked around presentation areas in order to avoid unpleasant colour or images from affecting close-up shots of people’s faces. These modifications were not without their problems – the system had a few tantrums at being asked to work in this way – and not every control requested could be provided, but QED literally worked 24 hours a day, every day, to ensure its system was in the best possible position for the transmission on the Friday night.

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Comic Relief

Having worked on the show on numerous previous occasions, Kempton was also keen to preserve a degree of spontaneity in the graphics department. A graphics company was employed to deliver bespoke creations for the set projection. However, none of us wanted to run out of options should we (or the production) dislike what was presented. To fulfil this need, Bishop specified the system around the D3s to include several Green Hippo Hippotizer HD servers provided by Little Mouse Productions to provide an input to the D3 projection system, and others to deliver content to the studio vision mixer for use in the video walls when they were not displaying appeal videos, event-specific graphics and during music performances.

Peachment controlled 12 VL1000s as keylights balanced

by Lovell, 17 VL2000 Washes, 12 VL3500 Washes, 34 Robe Robin 600 LED Washes, 36 Clay Paky Sharpys, 18 Martin MAC 600s, 12 Martin MAC 700s, 10 Clay Paky Alpha Wash 1200s, 24 Robe MMX Wash Beams and a good number of LED Sun Strips, all provided by Richard Martin Lighting, as well as a quantity of LED product from Light Initiative and 12 Chauvet Geyser fixtures – a smoke machine with RGB LED colour control of the smoke – from Maxaluna.

The night was largely a success. The projection system, which ended up outputting a 50-50 mix of bespoke graphics and Hippotizer content, was well received. Although there were some content playback synchronisation errors between the machines as the evening progressed, there were no lighting errors, nobody in the dark and, most importantly, more than £75,000,000 was raised.

Opposite page, main picture: Last-minute adjustments are made to the set; Inset: Lighting Director Chris Kempton looks confused by the D3 racks; This page: The set realisation TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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STLD visit

MEMS

MEMS has the power Words: Stuart Gain Photographs: John O’Brien It was a cold day in February when a group of STLD members braved the elements to visit one of our newer sponsors, MEMS Power Generation, at its head office in Gillingham, Kent.

MEMS provides all sizes of generators to whoever is in need of one. Chairman Colin Jarvis started installing generators as an electrician and had the idea that a hire company would be the way to go.

MEMS has been providing a full turnkey rental solution since 1998. In that time, the company has grown hugely and it is now recognised as the leading UK supplier in the rental market.

I’ve never seen so many generators in one place in my life, and when walking around the site, what strikes you is the way everything is organised. Generators come on to site, are cleaned, tested and then placed in neat rows ready to go out at anytime. Most maintenance is carried out on site and even a two-week supply of fuel is stored there.

The most impressive part of the operation is the control room. With a commanding view of the whole area, everything can be monitored. A map displayed on a screen (pictured opposite page, bottom right) shows the location of the generators out via tracking devices.

Any driver having problems finding a location can be talked in, and a number of parameters can be monitored, such as fuel levels in the tank, if the generator is running and fault conditions. This system is about to be upgraded to introduce more features, including remote starting.

Another striking thing is the dedication and enthusiasm of the staff.

MEMS prides itself on the retention of the original core family values and this is visible when you meet the employees as everyone seems to be very content working at MEMS. This is borne out by the low turnover of staff, many of whom have been there for years.

MEMS has been providing all sizes of generators to the film industry for

Pictured above: On a visit to society sponsor and generator supplier MEMS, members of the STLD, including Editor Emma Thorpe, left, were particularly impressed by the control room

a while now and is starting to make inroads into TV. It has the advantage of being able to supply any size of generator, from 30kVA to 1,400kVA, with the option of multi-set paralleling up to and exceeding 10MW of prime or standby power. With multiple locations in both the North and South, it is an efficient operation, able to respond rapidly to emergency requests from anywhere in the UK. The company also has a major presence in the provision of generators for hospitals and other power supplysensitive establishments. For some of these contracts, generators are kept on permanent standby in the yard.

We learnt that, on average, generators are kept in service for about six years before being replaced and the old ones sold off. This means all the stock is kept up to date and reliable.

After the tour it was time to warm up with tea and coffee – 26 February was particularly cold! – and then it was

off to Priestfield, the home of The Gills (Gillingham FC).

Colin is a long-time fan of the club and it was his dream to become a main sponsor. Even if you are not a football fan, having dinner in the hospitality suite, with refreshments at halftime and more drinks after the match, makes for a great evening out. I had the advantage of sitting next to Colin, who gave me all the details of the club, and with Dave Roberts sitting in front, who is a qualified referee!

Despite the score (1–0 to Oxford United – much to Colin’s disgust!), the match completed an excellent day much enjoyed by those who attended, and it left us with a real insight into how MEMS as a company functions and what a great role model it is for others companies as to how business should be done.

Our thanks go to Colin Jarvis, Mark Diffey, Iain Maxwell, Scott Millar and the rest of MEMS’ staff, and to Editor Emma Thorpe for co-ordinating for the STLD. TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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www.knight-of-illumination.com

6Knight of Illumination th

Awards

“...The only Awards exclusively dedicated to professional Lighting Designers...”

6th October 2013 Platinum Suite ExCeL London

Organized by:

Sponsors:

Proudly supported by:

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Event

It’s Showlight time!

Words & photographs: Mike Baker Some people will go to any length to avoid the Eurovision Song Contest. You wouldn’t expect TV lighting people necessarily to be of that type but, in the middle of May 2013, a lighting ‘hotspot’ occurred in the south of the Czech Republic when some 400 lighting people from all over the world converged to attend Showlight 2013. Whether the smaller number of viewers for the song contest registered is a moot point.

I have been lucky enough to have attended Showlight on previous occasions – the most recent in Glasgow, which had also been my place of work for some five years around 1980.

I do remember Showlight’s Chairman Ian Dow announcing the name of the intended venue for Showlight 2013, but it sounded as though he was just clearing his throat at the time.

Cesky Krumlov (let’s call it CK from now on) became a name that I struggled with for quite some time. Even when I could say it, I didn’t know quite where it was. Fortunately, Showlight did and, with the huge financial help of ROBE (pronounced Robe-ay and rhymes with P J Proby!), the plan was hatched.

Sometime during the long, cold, wet British winter and spring of 2012–13, I, along with many others, signed up for the list of Showlight wannabes. Cheap flights were booked, as was accommodation in CK itself.

As promised in the extensive emails from the Showlight executive (all volunteers!), Jessica Allan was manning the meet-and-greet stand within Terminal 1 at Prague airport as I arrived at 9.15am. Her cheery greeting to me was ‘you’re a bit early, Mike’, which worried me somewhat as my paperwork said coaches would be leaving from 10am onwards. “No, first one is about 11.45am, Mike, we’ve got about 30 people arriving from Gatwick to meet it.”

To cut a long story short, the wait got longer. The Gatwick flight was delayed for three hours. One of the conference speakers, Hiro Narita, had survived a long flight from California via Frankfurt and was in the same situation.

Jessica’s husband Simon, of Martin Professional, relieved our wait by taking us to lunch at the nearby Marriott Hotel, where the three of us chatted at length about Hiro’s career in cinematography and his hobby in retirement of making bespoke furniture from various exotic hardwoods from around the world. His CV includes Star Trek VI, The Last Waltz, Apocalypse Now, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and many more.

Imagine our shock when, two days later, we heard that his wife had died suddenly and that he had returned home.

His session, ‘One thing leads to another’, was read by Roger Simonsz in his absence.

In CK the sky was blue and warm sun ensured the town looked at its medieval best on our arrival after the journey by road from Prague. The town was an instant visual hit as we wound our way down the cobbled street to our hotels in warm sunshine. Within minutes, we were joining other delegates on the terrace of the Baroque Hotel Ruze drinking Champagne and eating canapés overlooking the River Vltava (one of the few pieces of classical music that I can remember inspired by a river, ‘Má vlast’ – ‘My Country’ – by the Czech composer Smetana). There were colleagues, old friends, sponsors, committee members and also students: potentially the future of our lighting ‘industry’. They had been sponsored by the STLD to enable them to attend: a kind of student grant, I suppose. Meeting and mingling became the order of the day, and very nice it was, too.

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Event

Having been on the STLD committee in the past, I was more than happy to head up a table of students in a nearby restaurant along with other committee members. The small frontage, at which the chef was cooking huge pieces of meat on a giant indoor barbecue, belied the restaurant’s Tardis-like interior, with arched stone ceilings and doorways that seemed to get lower and more atmospheric as we twisted and turned.

The Bohemian beer came in foaming tankards followed by, shall we say, a hearty meal. I will admit to feeling very much like an elder statesman at my table among such youth. Talk of their programming courses went largely, sad to say, over my head.

There was no talk of keys, backlights, kickers or ND, CTB or Brushed Silk, so mostly I sat and listened, which was probably a good thing. My wife has often said I am a better talker than a listener! As the evening wore on, the temperature and humidity rose to such sauna-like levels that, when close of play was finally called, the cool evening air outside was just as exhilarating as the Champagne had been earlier that evening.

The next morning we headed off to the chosen for Showlight 2013. We had been warned it was quite a climb up to the castle. That was not wrong. I have to say, it was possibly

the most spectacular Sunday morning walk I can remember taking. One wanted to keep stopping to admire the views, which just kept on getting better. The venue was in the former riding stables, which had been transformed for the occasion with tiered seating, a stage and, surprise, surprise, a few lights.

Not just any old lights but ROBE’s state-of-the-art LED moving heads. One Bernie Davis had been flown in from the UK to man the ‘lighting board’ on what must have been one of the smaller rigs of his illustrious career.

At 9.30am exactly (once a BBC man, always a good timekeeper) Ian welcomed the 380 delegates and, with his usual excellent sense of humour, got the show under way.

Eager for more information? This, and Iain Davidson’s report on Alfred Sturla Bodvarsson’s presentation, below, is just a snapshot, with more to come in the next issue.

Previous page: A panoramic view of Cesky Krumlov. Opposite page, bottom left: Chairman Ian Dow. Top right and below: The venue was in the former riding stables of the castle, which had been transformed with tiered seating

Lighting design Icelandic style: A lesson in low-carbon TV

It’s a mark of Showlight that the delegates and speakers come from all over the world to share their experiences with their colleagues in the business and it was, therefore, no surprise that we had a speaker from Iceland. As one who worked for nine years at BBC Wales on programmes that were mostly for local consumption, I could empathise with many of the issues of making television programmes for small audiences on a commensurably small budget.

Iceland, though, has an audience and talent pool 10 times smaller than Wales: some 320,000 souls in total. But, as Alfred Sturla Bodvarsson (pictured right) went on to tell us, he managed to recreate such budget-busting shows as Pop Idol, The X Factor and MasterChef, which, from our perspective in the 12

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audience, looked pretty good on screen. He also explained how, by gradually upgrading his lighting kit

year on year, he managed to keep the population of Iceland entertained.

Alfred told us how he helped transform a shopping mall into a studio big enough to stage Pop Idol (above left and centre) and The X Factor (above right), and how luminaires and flat-screen TVs were utilised and reutilised in set after set, show after show. Now that’s what I call lowcarbon telly! Not only the kit, but the same presenters, too, kept popping up in new shows. I guess good ones are not two a króna in this remote and beautiful country.

Alfred’s presentation kept us chuckling but also filled his audience with admiration for his pragmatism, ingenuity and skill at coping with miniscule budgets in the TV world of glitz and glamour.

Iain Davidson

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Showlight 2013

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STLD visit

Anna Valley’s got talent Words: Paul Middleton Photographs: John O’Brien In the current world of entertainment TV, LED screens and video are becoming an essential part of every programme.

There are many companies who supply LED and projectors, but not many that just specialise in the TV market. One is Anna Valley: part of the Shooting Partners Group, which was formed nearly 25 years ago by Phil White. The group offers cameras, lenses, monitors, tripods, lighting, audio, grip, VTR, vision mixing and displays. The USP of Shooting Partners is that it is bespoke and friendly, with experienced technicians and project managers who have knowledge of the entire TV production chain. Eighty per cent of its work is now TV and 20 per cent is corporate. Its goal is to provide what its clients want, not simply to use whatever product it has in stock.

Anna Valley was originally a projector hire company.

In 2001, Phil saw a big future for video and projection and bought the assets of Anna Valley and added them to the Shooting Partners Group. It now supplies high-resolution LED products to top-rated TV shows such as The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and Dancing on Ice. Fantastic sets can be created using products such as Toshiba 6mm LED panels, Barco MiSTRIP, Barco MiTRIX, DuoLED 12mm and Pixled F30 panels. And many shows use all forms of HD projection, be it large enough to cover a building, ice rink or smaller screens.

LED technology has seen a massive rise in popularity over hard-material sets in recent years. There are huge advantages to using graphic images to change a set into whatever the design team can imagine.

Anna Valley Displays has its own team of highly skilled technicians and project managers, who can cater for any size of project.

To cope with the specific demands of high-definition TV production, Anna Valley went to China and commissioned its own product, which is now branded as AV-4 Super High Resolution LED panel.

On many cheaper products, the effects of using LED walls on TV can be unpleasant, with strobing and uneven matching between panels and brightness fall-off when viewed from the sides. Anna Valley wanted a product that solved all these issues as well as being lightweight to rig and having low power consumption.

It achieved its goals by using advanced 20-bit processing for the displays, along with non-reflective Large Surface Area (LSA) blackface Surface Mount Device (SMD) LEDs. The blackface means the display does not catch light when it is not being used and can blend into the darkness. Then, when used, it has a superb contrast ratio. On other products designed to withstand the rigours of rock ’n’ roll touring, 14

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the casing is built to survive being climbed by riggers trying to sort out problems. The AV4 product is lightweight and, as Anna Valley doesn’t supply it to anyone else at present, its own staff know how to look after it, while features such as dual redundant data paths reduce problems if a cable gets snagged or damaged during a production. Each panel is 480mm sq and weighs just 9.5kg. The custom-designed mounting brackets allow both concave and convex walls to be created and, for the benefit of the sound guys, the panels are also fanless. The video controller takes a DVI input at a 1,920 by 1,080 resolution.

We took a look at the work required for the seventh series of Britain’s Got Talent (BGT), the finals of which were transmitted live from Fountains Studios in Wembley over a two-week period from 27 May to 8 June.

For a project like BGT, a high percentage of the LED elements of the set and screen designs are assembled off site by two teams of technicians. One team works on weaving the 1,500 MiStrips into the set, which includes two large scenic ‘chandeliers’, while the other assembles the LED panels into the required arrays and tests out the panel address mapping and cabling. There was a total of 2,000 hours of labour projected in the budget for the preparation and rigging for BGT. On site at Fountain, there is a full Anna Valley team allocated to the five-day rig.

The pixel mapping to the various panels is done by the AV team, led by Peter Jones, the Project Manager for BGT. On-site production liaison is done by Doug Hammond.

The diary for the build week went as follows: Monday 20 May saw two trucks arrive for overnight rigging at Fountain TV Studios A & B, which, at 13,000sq ft, is one of the largest in the UK at present.

On Tuesday, during the day the crew continued to build the Barco MiStrips around the sides of the stage and start the control equipment installation.

Wednesday saw the finishing of the side MiStrips and programming began.

On Thursday, 1,000 MiStrips arrived by truck for insertion on the Perspex stage floor, which would then be covered with further strips of Perspex. The fit between the strips

Opposite page, top right: The lighting plot for Britain’s Got Talent. Bottom row, from left: The view of the BGT set from the lighting desk; the HD Hippo Media Servers, which are operated by Russell Grubiak; the main screens are made of Toshiba 6mm high-resolution units, which are suspended from track, enabling them to act as doors to ‘reveal’

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Britain’s Got Talent

STLD visit

is machined so closely that no extra adhesive or fixing is required. The intention was that the floor and arches containing 100 MiStrips and video would be completed by day’s end. All the while, the technical rig and lighting

by Dave Davey was taking place.

On Friday, the crew started inserting X-Flex LED ribbon into the light boxes, and projection mapping and programming continued, ready for the rehearsals on Saturday and Sunday (the first live transmission took place on Bank Holiday Monday).

Doug Hammond described the close working between the BGT creative team and Weider Design to provide graphics for the screens that closely matched the artist and the music. Florian Wieder, the Production Designer, works in collaboration with the LD to achieve the visual look. The Stage Manager, Diccon Ramsey, passes on any ‘prop’ requirements from the prospective artists weeks, or occasionally just hours, before the performances.

The main graphics team is based in Germany, but here in the UK, Russell Grubiak operates the six HD Hippo Media Servers and Gravity to output to the screens and LED. For this show, the main screens are made up of Toshiba 6mm high-resolution units. These units can be bolted together flat or curved and are suspended from track, enabling them to act as doors to ‘reveal’. The viewing angle of the displays is 170 degrees: ideal for the studio audience and, particularly, for television cameras. Anna Valley uses the lightweight version of the panels but even so, the weight of the main set of doors in this configuration is about five tons.

V

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BIGGER. BRIGHTER. LOUDER.

PLASA London will take place at ExCeL London for the first time from 6-9 October 2013.

New products, world-class speakers, co-located conferences & special events, live demo areas and networking.

ExCeL is a world-class venue located 5 minutes from London City Airport. It is within easy reach of Central London via the Jubilee line and DLR train services. For more info on how to get there, check out the interactive guides on our website.

NEW FOR 2013:

See website for details www.plasashow.com

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STLD visit

Enron on a budget Words: Bob Anderson Photos: Peter Collins & John O’Brien On 26 April STLD members were invited to a performance of the acclaimed play Enron by Lucy Prebble at The Questors community theatre in Ealing. This is a report of the event, but first, an outline of the characters and places involved: Ealing – Home to many television and theatre workers from the BBC and West End, and the source of much of the talent attracted to this amateur theatre for training and experience not easily available otherwise, and the many frustrated thespians glad to find the opportunity to realise their ambitions on the boards with a top-class company.

The Questors – An amateur theatre company founded in 1929 to explore the possibilities of presenting high-standard, nonprofessional serious drama (‘The Quest’). The company collected sufficient funds to build its own purpose-designed playhouse, which opened in 1964 and has been continuously expanded and improved ever since. Made up of unpaid members, it now puts on more than 12 plays a year with support from a small full-time office staff. Members pay an annual subscription for benefits including discounted tickets, and more income comes from letting the facilities.

Enron – The subject of this play was a real-life energy giant based in Texas until it collapsed to worldwide condemnation in 2001. The play claims to reveal the true story about the events and people at the heart of this scandal.

Your reporter – Bob Anderson joined the BBC as an electrical engineer in 1954 and eventually became the BBC Planning and Installation Department contact with industry to purchase luminaires and dimmer systems for Television Centre and the regional studios. At the same time he joined Questors, lit many shows, designed scenery and helped design the present playhouse, where he lit the opening show in 1964. He is still a Questors member and honoured to be a member of the STLD. Ann Neville – The director and chief tormentor of the actors and technicians by asking the impossible and insisting on perfection. She gave us an entertaining talk about the technical challenges of the play before we saw it.

Pictured: Enron required giant displays of Wall Street share prices (main picture) and other graphics such as flashing win/lose slot machine-style displays (bottom row, middle), all synchronised with the action on stage. Video back projection was also used to display the skyscraper skyline of Houston through the ‘office’ windows of the upper-floor sets (pictured overleaf, right). So, three projectors, two two-metre-square LED matrix screens and LED strips were hired.

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Enron

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STLD visit

Andrew Dixon, pictured above, centre – A professional lighting designer employed by the BBC and many others, a Questors member and amateur LD since 1970, and the member of the STLD committee responsible for organising this visit. He also lit this show.

Lucy Prebble – The playwright. Noted in her programme credit as ‘very young’, Enron was only her second play. It was first produced at Chichester and then moved rapidly to the Royal Court theatre in London and then to the West End.

Philip Lindley – Set designer. Worked for the BBC for 25 years and is now associate designer at Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court. Theatre scenery used to be painted on canvas and erected as backdrops or flattage. Now the designer may also use building board, sheet metal, scaffolding, plastic and any other modern material provided they are reasonably fireproof. At The Questors, the designer also works with the director to choose the auditorium seating layout and stage shape and levels. This production also needed an extensive array of video effects.

At 4pm on the appointed day, about a dozen STLD members assembled in the garden/car park in front of the theatre. The public face of Questors seems at first sight to be a large, Victorian house, but somewhat set back from the building line is a glass foyer at first-floor level and the real main entrance is below this. The good repair and tidiness still amazes me.

In his role of meeting organiser, Andrew met us, offered free tea and explained the programme. We then went into the theatre itself: a raked horseshoe seating space with about 200 seats facing a two-level performance area and thrust stage. I was introduced as the oldest Questor member present and invited to give an extemporary talk about the early days, when the idea of pulling down the old tin-hut theatre (a deconsecrated chapel) was planned, and the funds raised to design and eventually start the building work. Taylor Woodrow, a local building firm, won the contract. To provide a home for performances in the interim, members turned to brick laying and DIY steelerecting to build what is now the Studio Theatre.

Ann then talked about the technical demands of the play.

The playwright had specified numerous office spaces, boardrooms and dungeons for the technical geeks who hid or distorted the reality of Enron’s finances, as well as display screen-filled high-tech trading floors for the numerous brokers swept into the ever-growing maelstrom of greed and deceit, so the set designer and lighting designer had to provide all this. The multiple spaces were not a problem – theatre convention deals with this as a routine just by switching the lighting – but the computer trading screens and flashing win/lose slot machine-style displays needed something new. Luckily, Questors have many specialists

Richard Mead – Visual display designer. Scenic visual effects need specialist knowledge and, usually, insider connections with the computer or video electronics industry. Richard is a director of such a company (Pharos Architectural Controls), a Questors lighting designer and, coincidentally, currently chairman of The Questors’ board of management.

For Enron, the playwright required giant displays of Wall Street share prices, live-action TV screens commenting on breaking financial news, and bar graphs showing minute-byminute Enron financial health, all tightly synchronised with the action on stage. Additionally, it was decided to use video back projection to display the skyscraper skyline of Houston through the ‘office’ windows of the upper-floor sets. So three projectors, two two-metre-square LED matrix screens and LED strips were hired, together with the necessary computer control. For the TV screens, contemporary newsreel footage would have been preferred but sky-high royalty costs dictated a rapid sequence of stills and Questors actors videoed in front of green screen (pictured above left).

The lighting control cued everything through the normal digital interface. The results were impressive.

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TV Lighting | Summer 2013

The meeting

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Enron

within the membership and one who could supply and program the LED matrix hardware and software that was needed was willing and available. Easy if, like the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing rig seen earlier this year at Television Centre, there is limitless money available, but harder on an amateur production budget. Amazingly, the challenge was met and the the effects looked very impressive. Richard, the boffin responsible, showed us a few of the technical secrets he used.

Then, with time pressing, we were shown backstage and then rushed away to the STLD supper that Andrew organises so well.

The performance

This is not a review of the play, though I thought it excellent. It is too late to see it in Ealing but do seek it out if another opportunity arises.

Suffice it to say that in this production the actors were excellent, including the ruthless and self-deceiving president and vice presidents, the jealously competitive and ambitious underlings, the cute mice (representing the guileless investors), the fiery-eyed crocodile-headed raptors (representing themselves) and the nerdish boffin that gave the greedy leaders the computerised means to deceive the world.

Technically, Andrew’s lighting showed his mastery of unobtrusive three-dimensional-space rigging and cue design, plus a touch of fashionable mood colour from a tiny rig of LED floodlights. Operation of the long cue list proceeded unobtrusively and synchronised with the sound and video effects without noticeable flaw.

The UK may have just avoided a triple-dip recession, and the banks may still be open for business, but this play shows us some of the lies and dishonesty that were used to serve the wealth and egos of the people then in power at our expense. I think the audience went away happy and I am beginning to appreciate again the need for a powerful investigative free press. Even with illegal phone intercepts.

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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St Petersburg in the third dimension Words & photographs: Bernie Davis

I have been fortunate enough to work in St Petersburg before, the first time being a live transmission of Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel in 1992, when the BBC took a whole OB unit, including a satellite dish, to post-perestroika Russia. And I was pleased to go back again to be involved with an exciting project broadcasting Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake from The Mariinsky Theatre, live to cinemas in 3D. The Mariinsky Theatre opened in 1860. Known throughout most of the Soviet era as the Kirov, it became the most famous music theatre of late 19th century Russia, where many of the stage works of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov received their premieres. Together with the Bolshoi in Moscow, it became the name of Russian ballet, which is now celebrating 250 years of pre-eminence.

The project was being organised by a production company I had worked for before – Glass Slipper Productions, which is based in London – but the two driving forces were The Mariinsky itself, in the name of Conductor and General Director Valery Gergiev, and the US company Cameron Pace Group. James Cameron is well known for films such as Terminator, Aliens and Titanic. With his DoP, Vince Pace, he made the 3D film Avatar, one of the highest-grossing films in cinema history, and together they formed Cameron Pace Group, 22

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

Pictured this page: The Mariinsky Theatre with the new theatre behind (top); The Mariinsky auditorium (above left); the new Mariinsky still being finished (above right)

specialising in 3D cinema and TV. This was not going to be a cheap production!

The creative team all came from the UK, with Ross MacGibbon directing.

Ross is experienced in ballet direction and brought in the usual suspects for the camera team, inviting me to look after the lighting for camera.

In January, a small team of us went to St Petersburg for a recce. We talked about possible presenter positions, recced locations for documentary shots for the introduction and looked inside the new Mariinsky theatre – at that time, still a building site but due to open before we returned. I was now more confused about what we were doing than before the recce but I did have a useful meeting with Sergei Lukin, Head of Lighting at The Mariinsky. He did not speak any English, about the same as my Russian, but on

the lighting team was Gleb Shubin, who spoke very good English, and in 15 minutes we both knew what we were both doing. I knew from then it would be a successful project. And I also was able to see the ballet. It’s a tough job...

My biggest concern after the recce was that I could not see how the show would be affordable. The revenue from cinema audiences could not be that much, and the cost of the production would be astronomical. The crew was paid in advance of travelling to remove any doubts on that score...

Come June, we all arrived on site.

The large Cameron Pace team had already been on site for a week setting up the cameras, and as the show was live, The Mariinsky’s own OB truck was used as a gallery, further adding to the technical complexity of the programme.

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Swan Lake in 3D

Pictured this page, clockwise from top left: The camera technical room; racks for eight cameras; stereographers’ control; stereographer master position; quality control

Day one

Off we went to the theatre to see how things were progressing, and the camera technical room looked impressive. The cameras were all Sony P1 High Definition cameras, two combined on what they referred to as a sled, making one 3D camera. The irises were all software linked, so one joystick drove two P1s, and there was the ability to fine-adjust the balance between the individual irises if required.

I had insisted on bringing two known racks operators as I was not convinced that Cameron Pace Group would understand the dynamic lighting and racking process needed for covering stage productions. With theatre lighting, the exposure can easily go from F2 to F11 in seconds,

and it just isn’t possible to make all these lighting cues work for fixed exposure – the lighting equipment would not cope. To help racks, the method I use is to make notes with racks about the exposure for any scene and then call this on the comms when the lighting cues are running, after which I then iron out the problems within each scene. Luke Chantrell and Steve Williams were my team, both experienced at coping with the worst that LDs can throw at them!

The room was laid out in four operational areas, the first being the traditional racks area. We had eight cameras between the two operators, not made easier by not having the ‘press to view’ feature on the joysticks – oh well.

The next in sequence is the stereography control. They control the servos, which change the distance and the angle between cameras. This is crucial to get acceptable 3D images, and one operator deals with just one camera as these parameters change shot by shot. The controllers are linked by a network, allowing the two wheels of any controller to be connected to any two of the normal operations such as focus or zoom, iris or intraocular distance.

A third operational area is for the head of camera operation, who acts as arbiter for stereoscopic matching and can even take control of any camera if necessary if an operator loses his way. Yet another area acts as the last step in quality control, watching for camera shots that might not work in 3D and warning the camera ops to change their shot, and even advising the director of the state of cameras if necessary.

The cameras come in two types (pictured overleaf): side by side for further from the subject, and with the use of a mirror rather like a prompter hood for nearer the subject – the latter allowing one camera to be mounted vertically, so the effective distance between cameras to be much closer.

As we all know, using a prompter hood reduces the light to the camera by the TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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best part of a stop, and this has to be taken into account with 3D television.

We had just one side-by-side version and seven mirror types.

I was surprised we were allowed to use a MovieBird crane considering that many people had paid good money to be there that night, and the crane and its team of operators took up a large part of the stalls.

Day two

This was our first camera pass, and it was before any lighting time. Well, not quite true. Sergei Lukin, Head of Lighting, is an experienced lighting person and completely buys into the process of making the lighting work for camera. As the rehearsal started, I could see he had already started to re-light scenes, and as I began to point

Pictured this page, clockwise from top left: Side-by-side camera; vertical mount; the camera rig; MovieBird Crane

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TV Lighting | Summer 2013

out things to him via my interpreter, I would find he had already made a note and had even made his own notes of other improvements that could help.

When we came to a scene that was far too dark for camera, I asked if we would be able to get the lighting up to a level that would work, and he said ‘Sure, that is what the night shift is for!’.

There was one wild card I wasn’t expecting, however. You would think the TV format we would be recording in would be known before we arrived on site, let alone by the time we started rehearsing. It seems it wasn’t.

Modern cameras offer more choices of format than ever, and with cinema distribution and, in particular, 3D distribution, there are important decisions to be made.

The standard for 3D cinema distribution has long since been agreed: it is a single video feed with each ‘line’ actually consisting of the left eye followed by the right eye. If you look at the BBC HD channels when and while

they are still broadcasting 3D, you will see this as two side-by-side pictures on your screen. The 3D projectors in the cinemas then separate out the two ‘eyes’ for the 3D projection.

The question was what format should be used for the original capture.

The Cameron Pace team all preferred progressive scan to interlace, partly based on their film experience, and were keen to use a progressive format.

By the time we got to the first rehearsal, nothing had been agreed and so it was decided to record acts one and two in 1080 lines 50 frames interlace, act three in 1080 lines 25 fields progressive and the last act in 720 lines 59.94 fields progressive. The general feeling is that 1080 25 frames gives rather excessive movement judder and so is not good for sport – or ballet; 720 lines 59.94 frames is a compromise that gives much better movement and the maths says that there is not a perceivable loss of definition.

As you can probably tell, I have just passed my limit of understanding, and

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Swan Lake in 3D

I would not have mentioned it at all apart from the problem that the full progressive scan format gives me a full stop less light thanks to the halved rate of refresh of the CCD chip. As we were already working the best part of a stop down thanks to the mirror light splitting to the cameras, I was seriously concerned it would not be possible to raise the stage lighting sufficiently. Well, the cameras switch fairly easily between formats, so it was not too much of a problem to do a test. Much of the monitoring and the vision mixing chain follows the format and so coped well. The transmission monitor and the DVD recording did not, but Chief Engineer Bruno had a format convertor that should have done the trick. However, the last part took much longer than expected to achieve and the dancers almost walked out. Luckily, it all came together and the recording was completed.

I had serious concerns that we should not go along the progressive

route as I could not be sure we could achieve the light levels needed, and made my concerns known.

Day three

In theory, this was a day off for the crew, and the cameramen took a river trip to the glorious Summer Palace.

Back at The Mariinsky, heads of department met for a long production meeting to regroup our plans based on our experience so far. I expressed my concerns about the scan formats again and the production team went off to see how the test recording had worked.

One job before the show was to pre-record a piece for the introduction from the roof terrace of the new theatre, and we went over to see what could be done. As always, production thought we would not need lighting in the open air. Yes, it was outdoors and daylight, as everyone kept saying, but it was to be recorded about midday in strong sunshine with a building keeping the ambient light off the talent with

sunlit St Petersburg as the backdrop.

I reckoned it would take at least a 4K to get acceptable pictures. We didn’t have a 4K and we were not sure how we would power one if we did.

On the way down we thought we would look inside the new building.

Having opened just a few weeks ago it was already in full swing, with performances every night and even a TV recording coming up for French TV. The foyer looked splendid now it was decorated and we all decided an inside piece to camera would be much better than the roof, and somehow the control of being in the foyer appealed. All we had to do was convince the producer.

The rest of the day was spent reviewing my DVD copy of the rehearsal to prepare for the lighting sessions the next day.

Pictured this page, clockwise from top left: The new Mariinsky foyer, Royal Box and auditorium; the new theatre’s exterior; the Summer Palace TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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Day four

A key part of the crew would be an electrician to look after the presenter positions. As they would be live, I was not happy to have a local unknown person doing this. These small set-ups have a habit of changing when the public are in – usually for good reasons – and I needed someone who wouldn’t wait for me to come out and say what was needed. I hired a small LED presenter’s kit from ELP, which travelled with a truck full of other equipment from the UK, and I spoke to ELP’s Darren Fletcher about supplying one electrician. Darren sent himself.

He had arrived the previous evening and I volunteered him to look after the PSC recording. The show would have two live presentation positions. To help with this, Darren supplied two LED light panels, which work on mains or battery, and we used panels for the PSC recording – much easier than finding mains in a new building still being wired.

Pictured this page, clockwise from top left: Lighting session in progress; the lighting control room; the ballet canteen; presenter rehearsal

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Swan Lake in 3D

The first stage-lighting session was that afternoon and I was relieved to see lots of new lighting appearing to boost the set. We got about half the show re-lit before the evening performance, which was recorded as a wide angle for beginning and ending of acts. With so many cameras filling the stalls, it was the only way to get a clean shot, and these could be cheated in at the end of acts.

I don’t think any of them were used for the live version, but they might well be used for the future DVD version. We continued lighting till 3.30am.

Day five

Our second full camera rehearsal, and this time with lighting changes for camera. Luckily, the decision had now been made to use 1080 50 frames interlace as we were still down to F2.4 for some scenes. We ended up with two live presenter positions, an opening link in the foyer and all other pieces in a box by the stage. Sadly, it had to be staged looking into the box from the stalls to make use of the 3D cameras, so one of my LED panels had to be on a stand in the stalls. It was dwarfed alongside the MovieBird crane so no one was going to complain.

Day six

I had a few adjustments to make before the live transmission, but as we didn’t broadcast till late in the evening, there was plenty of time. And the transmission went well despite the crane camera failing at one point, leaving Ross to cut around the problem. The Cameron Pace team were excellent though and got it fixed in minutes, only missing a few shots.

Day seven

Travel home day. But where does this leave 3D? I hear ESPN have dropped all sport coverage in 3D after getting a less-than-favourable response from viewers, and the BBC has announced it is dropping 3D for now due to poor public response – the last programme being the Doctor Who special for Christmas 2013. The Cameron Pace team think that 3D films still have a future, and apparently in China, there is a quota system of 3D production keeping the market alive. Personally, I think as promotional money dries up we will not see much more till they come up with a format that does not need glasses. The next big thing is surely 4K, with TVs getting ever bigger...

STLD Summer 2013:TL 85 Spring 2005 01/08/2013 22:31 Page 27

CUT. SHAPE. FOCUS. TUNE. ARRI presents two additions to the popular L-Series of LED Fresnels: the L7-TT is a tuneable tungsten model that is 20% brighter than the L7-C, while the active cooling option for all models reduces size and weight for location shoots, portable kits, events and studios.

ARRI L-SERIES. TRULY CINEMATIC.

www.arri.com/qr/stld/l-series

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Event

Northern lights Words & photographs: Bernie Davis Plasa Focus in May was again set in the Royal Armouries, Leeds, and this gem of a trade show is always a pleasure to attend. Small enough to allow plenty of time for networking – or chatting as it used to be known – but more than large enough to include plenty of interesting new products, it is one show I try hard to get to every year.

This is not an attempt to report back about everything that was there, but, as always, a few things caught my attention in between chatting.

The Martin Professional stand, showing the now-extended Viper range of moving lights, was always busy and I am told sales are already very healthy. The Viper family now includes a Viper Performance with framing shutters as well as all the expected features of a top-of-therange moving head. The Viper AirFX is specifically designed for excellent beam work. It combines hard edged beams with the qualities of a soft edged beam light and can snap between the two in an instant. The Viper Beam produces pencil beams for larger venues and comes as an optional front-lens replacement for the AirFX. But the novelty product of the exhibition must go to the Viper Quadray, another optional lens replacement for the AirFX, which turns the beam into up to four controllable beams from the one light, making a unique effect almost like a miniature Nova Flower. If you’re one of those LDs who is looking for something different, this could be it!

New to the Martin Professional LED video panels is the VC-Grid (pictured above): a modular 20mm pitch LED matrix coming in 200mm modular squares. On display in Leeds, the panel was broken up by an interesting looking high-power low-density panel offering a further flexibility to the screen design options.

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Philips Entertainment – for anyone who has missed the changes over the last few years – are now an umbrella company for Vari*lite, Selecon, Strand Lighting, and Architainment Lighting. They also have a range of LED products under the family name of Showline, producing a range of their versions of LED battens and bricks.

But the luminaire that caught my eye (you couldn’t miss it!) was the SL Nitro 510: an LED strobe unit firing a massive 68,000 lumens (pictured above). The LED array is arranged into programmable areas but its real value is the powerful strobe capability and, what’s more, a simple locking system allows several units to be combined into a number of design combinations with a flexibility useful for hirers and users alike.

We hope to have an STLD meeting soon to look closer at the Philips Entertainment range – keep an eye on the STLD website for more information.

Unusual Rigging became sponsor members of the STLD recently and at their stand I learnt more about their involvement with the new production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which premiered recently at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. We are going to try to organise an STLD backstage tour at some point when we are allowed in – news of this will be on the STLD website when plans get made.

AC Entertainment have so many products it must be difficult to decide what to bring to these exhibitions, but they whittled it down to a few interesting items for Leeds.

The STLD met some of the latest Chroma-Q products at a meeting last year, and already the range has extended. There is a new take on the venue house light: a neat, black cylindrical unit with RGBW colour mixing offering low power consumption and colour control for mood effects and architectural enhancement. Named the Chroma-Q Inspire RGBW, it comes with a homogenised LED array, so the lens looks good as well as the resulting light, and it comes with a choice of lens angles up to 65 degrees.

Chroma-Q have also brought out a moving head, the

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Plasa Focus

Clockwise from top left: Pulsar used the ChromaPixelStrip 25 for their stand’s sign; AC Entertainment’s stand included a new take on the venue house light; White Light, Stage Electrics and Cooper Controls also exhibited at the event

AutoLED 11 (pictured left), which is about the size of two LED bricks in a moving yoke. It comes in just daylight white and is aimed at the exhibition market.

House lights that can produce all colours and a moving light in just white: nothing if not imaginative!

Cooper Controls produce the well-known Zero 88 range of lighting desks and not only did they have the latest desks on show – the Orb with its 4,096 channels of control, and the Solution, with 600 sub-masters for those who like lots of faders – they also had some very affordable networking products for breaking out from Artnet to DMX. New on the Robe stand was the Robe MiniMe, a baby brother to the DigiSpots. It can’t do all the tricks of the full-blown digital

projectors, but it does quite a lot for such a small package. Only 350mm high and weighing just 6kg, it can project uploaded graphics with the usual colour shuttering and key-stoning control, or if you want more options, an HDMI input can be used to feed live video or even an external server for a more full graphics display. The fast pan and tilt operation makes the MiniMe a versatile unit looking for its place in the video market.

Even newer was a prototype Light Curtain unit (pictured below left). More details will be out soon, and knowing the Robe team, it won’t be long before this is in production.

Pulsar now produce an enormous range of LED products.

The product used for their stand sign is ChromaPixelStrip 25: a low-voltage compact strip with individual control over each 150mm segment. Coming in lengths from 150mm to 1,800mm in 150mm steps, it can be linked to make strips up to 3.6mm in length. The standard lens is 20 degrees and an optional additional lens can change this to 100 degrees.

ETC had a new version of the ubiquitous Source 4 Profile: the Source 4 Mini (pictured next page, top image). At first glance it looks more like a novelty gift – and one that I would certainly like! – as it is a perfect working replica of the famous luminaire but only 230mm long. Complete with shutters and gobo gate (taking U-size gobos) it even comes with a choice of 19-, 26-, TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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Plasa Focus

Event

36- and 50-degree lens tubes, and with its 50W tungsten light source, it is more than just a toy.

I measured a 19-degree model and got 3,800 lux at about 1m throw, with all the optical quality you would expect from a Source 4.

Also on display was the new Source 4 LED Studio HD, designed to produce a high-quality white light from 2,700 to 6,500K. By using seven different LEDs, they can produce a fuller-spectrum white that is tuneable to the camera. Note that this is not a colour-mixing profile: the colours of the LEDS are chosen just to balance the white. For instance, the only green is a pale green to help balance the magenta shift.

And a new optional extra for the colour-mixing Lustr+ LED profile is a lens replacement that turns the profile into a cyc light unit (pictured above, bottom image). The light output looked pretty even on a 3m cyc considering how close the

units were to it, and I would love to see what they can do better placed on a larger cyc.

Chauvet products have been appearing on TV programmes in increasing numbers, where their vast range of LED products at affordable prices has attracted a lot of interest. In Leeds, their stand bristled with interesting products, from the professional-looking Ovation range of LED profiles and fresnels to LED pars and arrays. By the time you read this, Chauvet should be new members of the STLD and we look forward to letting you know more about their product range.

If you didn’t go to Plasa Focus this year, I urge you to do so in 2014; it is well worth the trip! More information on the featured companies and their products can be found at the following websites: Martin Professional, www.martinpro.co.uk Philips Entertainment, www.philips.com/showline AC Entertainment Technologies, www.ac-et.com Cooper Controls, www.coopercontrols.co.uk Robe, www.robe.cz ETC, www.etcconnect.com White Light, www.whitelight.ltd.uk Stage Electrics, www.stage-electrics.co.uk Pulsar Light of Cambridge, www.pulsarlight.com Chauvet Lighting, www.chauvetlighting.com Unusual Rigging, www.unusual.co.uk

Source Four LED Studio HD The many colours of white An LED spotlight worthy of professional broadcast, film and video production

www.etcconnect.com/S4LEDStudioHD

London, UK Tel +44 (0)20 8896 1000 Rome, IT Tel +39 (06) 32 111 683 Holzkirchen, DE Tel +49 (80 24) 47 00-0 www.etcconnect.com

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STLD visit

A quay player Words: Paul Middleton & Nick Mobsby Photographs: John O’Brien TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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STLD visit

Above: The set of Alesha’s Street Dance Stars, presented by Alesha Dixon, which airs on CBBC

On 7 May the STLD visited the new MediaCityUK site at Salford Quays in Manchester. Our guides for the day were dock10’s Simon Littler, Head of Production Development, Gaffer Matthew Taylor and Turnaround Manager Paul McGavin. We were also joined by Studio Manager Jim McNamee, who has recently joined from BBC Pacific Quay. Head of Studios Andy Waters wasn’t able to join us.

Simon started the visit by explaining his involvement in the studios since he left the BBC as a Studio Resource Manager two-and-a-half years ago.

When he joined, the company had just eight employees; today it has nearly 100. From the day he joined he had just 17 days before the first programme – Don’t Scare the Hare – was due to be recorded in HQ1. Alongside him were fellow ex-BBC staffers Andrew Garnett

Move to Manchester put outsourcing into practice The history of how the BBC came to have a new northern headquarters and studios is worth explanation.

At a seminar about ‘The BBC Property Outsourcing Project’ on 23 January 2003 at Templeton College, Oxford, it was reported that the BBC had decided on a comprehensive longterm property outsourcing partnership because its property portfolio was rundown, inappropriate for the new technologies and ill-suited to creative work. Capital investment was essential for its developments at White City, London, and Pacific Quay, Glasgow, but, as a publicly funded organisation, it did not want to be seen to be spending licence fees on property development. Moreover, its property maintenance costs were high and it had 700 people involved in its property portfolio: a number that would be reduced by outsourcing.

In June 2004, ‘Building Public Value’ was published as part of the BBC’s contribution to its Charter Review process. This outlined its vision for a less ‘London-centric’ BBC, including a potential move of major departments to the north of England. It also 32

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signalled the start of the closure of many of its historic bases, such as Bush House, Kingswood Warren and finally, in an unexpected move, Television Centre earlier this year.

The BBC signalled its intention to move jobs to Manchester in 2004.

To accommodate the move, new studios would be needed and, in 2006, the BBC settled on a greenfield site in Salford Quays opposite the Lowry Arts Centre and shopping centre.

However, in a departure from BBC practice, the studios were to be built and owned by a third party and leased to the BBC. In May 2007, it was announced that Peel Holdings was to build the new media centre. The Peel Group was granted planning permission to develop the site in 2007 and construction of the development, with its own energy-generation plant and communications network, began the same year.

Phase 1 of MediaCityUK was to be a 36-acre development with capacity to expand up to 200 acres. Unlike the old days, where everything was planned, designed and equipped by

the BBC, the new studio buildings were to have a number of major players. The land and buildings were to be owned

by Peel Property. The new buildings (like a number of other recent BBC buildings at the Mailbox in Birmingham and Pacific Quay in Glasgow) were to be initially designed and built by Bovis Lend Lease. They would be managed

by MediaCityUK, with studio design

by LSI and studio technical installation

by TSL. (Since November 2010, Peel Media, the owner of MediaCityUK, has been working with SIS in a joint venture, originally called The Studios MediaCityUK and rebranded as dock10 in September 2012, to manage and operate the shared studio services.)

The BBC announced that BBC Sport and children’s channels CBBC and CBeebies, as well as BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 6 and the R&D department, were to be relocated to Manchester, along with about 2,500 staff. This was a big step for the very many who had family ties in London, although, as The Telegraph reported (December 2012 and May 2013), quite generous support was given to ease the transition.

Meanwhile, Cardiff was to become

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MediaCityUK

and Jonathan Harley, along with the exHead of Engineering at ITV Quay Street, John O’Shaunessy. Patrick Steel was Head of Commercial, with Rob Lawson as Scenic Turnaround Manager and Jim Ewart as Lighting General Manager.

The aim throughout has been to have a lean, mean operation, with equipment being worked as hard as possible and crews being mainly freelance. Alongside the two staff LX gaffers, there are two Heads of Scenic Services: Andrew Barnett and Jonathan Harch. Studio lighting and scenic crews are provided

by Gallowglass, and technical craft crew

by FAC365: a new company originally set up by Wigwam Audio, which has now been acquired by SSE Audio. There are currently only 22 Sony HDC-2500 camera channels and these are moved around between studios as needed.

Currently this works, as a number of

the new centre for drama production, with Doctor Who, Casualty and longrunning Welsh soap Pobol y Cwm, along with a number of other major drama productions, moving to the new HD-ready Studio Roath Lock Production Village in Cardiff Bay. The licence fee settlement agreed with the Government in October 2010 saw the licence fee frozen at £145.50 until 2017 and the BBC assuming new funding responsibilities, including for the World Service, S4C, BBC Monitoring and local TV and

studios have semi-permanent or standing sets in use for just a few days a week, and extra cameras can be hired easily in if needed. Items such as pedestals and large zoom lenses are mainly supplied in-house as there is not yet such a ready supply of extra kit locally. dock10 itself recently invested in 10 new Canon lenses leased through Fineline Finance. There were originally only four completely equipped galleries to service the seven studios but, bit by bit, the infrastructure has been increased to give each studio fully autonomous operation. On the lighting front, only HQ2 and HQ3 have a fully installed lighting barrel and winch system, and only recently was each studio finally given its own dedicated lighting desk – all ETC Congos.

Due to their regular use for live programmes, a key feature of the studios is the supply of dual power sources for

broadband. To fulfil this settlement, Mark Thompson set a savings target of 20 per cent, with a goal that 90 per cent of BBC income should be spent on programme making by 2015.

So what does the future hold?

In April 2011, on a BBC Ringmain broadcast, Caroline Thomson said the BBC’s then 400 sites would be reduced by a minimum of 25 per cent by 2015 – and, hopefully, nearer 30 per cent – as the organisation took its money out of bricks and mortar to put into programmes.

key areas, with A & B incoming National Grid supplies, two back-up generators and two UPS for ultra-critical areas.

Audiences are a feature of much of the children’s and comedy programmes produced at MediaCityUK and, consequently, there is a large holding area in the corridors outside Studios 1–3 to guide the audiences into the studios after they have avoided being attacked by the Daleks loitering in the reception area. Audiences for the Jeremy Kyle show have a slightly longer walk past some of the special features installed especially for that programme.

A unique feature of the studios is the Holiday Inn built into the north-east corner of the block. It is not just there for the benefit of visiting crews and guests: some floors, inaccessible to guests, are used by the studios as offices.

After Don’t Scare the Hare, with lighting by Tom Kinane, had baptised the studios, the second production to be hosted was A Question of Sport in HQ2, with lighting by Roger Williams.

HQ2 has a fully saturated lighting grid with memory-controlled lighting barrels supplied by De Sisti.

The next production was Mastermind with LD Andy Stagles in HQ2 & HQ4, followed by the BBC starting its sport coverage with Football Focus, Match of the Day and Final Score in HQ3. Simon explained that, for Final Score, the BBC controls the studio output from its Quay House building. The Corporation also worked for the first seven weeks with the programmes being doublebanked from TVC until everything was seen to be running smoothly in Salford.

The BBC has a landlord/tenant agreement with Peel that runs to 765 pages and covers every aspect of its usage of the studio space for the next 10 years. A unique feature of the agreement for any studio complex is the requirement to become ISO9001 compliant within a reasonable period.

The CBeebies and CBBC Studios are used exclusively by the BBC as they have standing sets for programmes such as Blue Peter. The Philharmonic Studio is used by the BBC for 120 days a year.

HQ1 and HQ4 were not part of the original BBC requirement and were built on spec without any fixed lighting installation. In comparison, the other two main studios intended for BBC use have TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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STLD visit

a full saturated lighting grid and galleries equipped with large multiview monitors.

HQ1 has been fitted out by dock10 and has separate preview monitors for cameras. The gallery was completed just five days before The Voice was due in.

Simon said that, in his view, the £130m building and equipping cost was amazing value for money for the BBC. Originally, it was hoped ITV would be a partner in the complex, but it had pulled out of the original stages. However, now ITV has taken almost exclusive use of HQ4 to host The Jeremy Kyle Show, University Challenge and Countdown.

The complex was to be tapeless, with an Avid ISIS network providing recording and playback facilities to both the studios and the post-production departments. A new feature now available is private, secure cloud editing.

Using remote Avid edit licences and Avid Interplay software, the editing hardware is located at MediaCityUK and a control feed and video feed is fed via the internet to a producer’s office, which could be almost anywhere. The AVID ISIS servers allow material being recorded in studio to be available to edit suites only 30 seconds after recording has started, meaning that rough edits can be undertaken as recording proceeds and the edit reviewed to see if pick-ups and cutaways are needed almost immediately after recording stops.

Two years ago, however, the BBC wasn’t ready to take tapeless delivery of programmes and, consequently, a range of tape bays had to be installed. Tape is still needed to allow producers to take programmes away for full, off-site editing.

The naming of the studios as HQ1 etc is based on the postcode allocation of the MediaCityUK complex. In a change from usual policy, the postcodes were not allocated by the Royal Mail but were decided by Peel to match the name of the buildings. In another change, the streets don’t have names but instead have colours. The studios are also colour coded within the dock10 complex, but to make things a bit confusing there are duplicates, with both HQ2 and HQ4 being red, for example.

Turnover in the first year was £11.5m and then up to £18.3m last year. There have been more than 50 different shows in the past two years, and a number of new series, such as 34

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

In With the Flynns and Citizen Khan, were created at MediaCityUK. As well as the BBC and ITV, the studios have produced programmes for Sky and Channel 4. When hiring the studios, the BBC expects the full crew to be provided by dock10, while the indies bring in their own teams.

As a major complex and employer in Manchester, the studios were opened by the Queen in March 2012 at the invitation of the billionaire owner of The Peel Group, Stephen Whittaker. The Peel Group has extensive interests, among which are the Manchester Ship Canal. dock9 was to have been in the area where the piazza is now situated and dock10 was named as an homage to the canal. Peel Media also has major interests in The Pie Factory and The Pinewood Studios Group, which includes Teddington and Shepperton Studios.

We then toured the studios. One sign of the lengths that dock10 is prepared to go to satisfy its clients was the extra-large door added to HQ1 to allow easy access for items such as Technocranes into the studio without having to go via the main studio doors.

Other buildings in the complex include Quay House, which is home to BBC Sport, Breakfast News and the local BBC North West regional news. Both these studios are housed within a preconstructed office building. BBC Sport on the ground floor benefits from a sensible-height studio with lighting design

by Dave Gibson. According to Nick, the Breakfast News studio should have been aborted due to the ridiculously low ceiling, lack of air conditioning and massive amount of glass on three walls of the studio. However, LD Elliott Carmen has made the studio work. Both these studios went completely LED from day one. Elliott uses a combination of the Desisti 90W and 40W fixtures, with others as colour wash and effects lights.

Elliott is working at 3,200K. Dave stayed with the Desisti 90W units, with some other wall and colour wash, and is working at 5,700K. The BBC Sport studio was originally designed to have a view through the sports newsroom windows on to the piazza. However, the set was later rotated to avoid giving local youths a chance to appear on camera in less-than-desired poses. LSI undertook both these studio designs and installs

via Dega Broadcast.

Originally expected to be a partner at MediaCityUK, ITV decided to retain its studios in Quay Street – run under the 360 Media banner – until recently.

The ITV regional news operation is now transmitted from the Green Tower in MediaCityUK and it has taken charge of Studio D for 117 days a year.

For the time being, it is equipped with a motorised winch Truss Grid system and a fixed lighting rig, which, with just a few changes, copes with the demands of The Jeremy Kyle Show, Countdown and University Challenge. It is a sign of the cost restrictions that there is only one eight-way hoist controller available in the studio, and that means that the hoists can be controlled in small groups only when the studio is being reset between shows. Many of the lanterns in HQ4 sport GTV markings, and Taras Kochan explained that other items, such as the Snell and Wilcox Kudos Vision Mixer, have been moved over from Quay Street.

The studios show that concerns over whether a major complex in Manchester could partially replace TV Centre were unfounded. The concern I have is the loss of training opportunities and career progression the BBC used to offer. Will there come a time when the BBC’s trained staff have all retired and there is no one left fully trained in broadcast TV engineering and operation? It seems the BBC and other organisations have realised this is an issue as, since our visit, the BBC, in association with Red Bee, Arqiva, Channel 4 and ITV, has announced a three-year Broadcast Engineer Apprenticeship scheme .

Applications have closed but the scheme will reopen next year, along with a BBC TV Design Trainee Scheme. Further details are available at www.bbc.co.uk/ careers/trainee-schemes/techapprentices The STLD would like to thank dock10 for hosting the visit. The hospitality was excellent, and the strawberries and fresh-cream tarts went down a treat!

Opposite page, from top: The BBC Sports LED. studio; the rigging for Alesha’s Street Dance Stars; the Match of the Day studio, with plywood protecting the screens.

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MediaCityUK

In memorium

Philip L Edwards, 1944–2013 We are sorry to report that STLD member Philip Edwards died in May this year.

Phil joined the STLD many years ago when he was a Vision Operator at BBC TV Centre and stayed a member all his life, even though his career took him away from television and to the Royal College of Music in Manchester, where he was Lighting Manager and also Lighting Designer for many of its productions over the years.

The RNCM website paid tribute to him saying: “Phil was a consummate professional and committed educationalist. He was presented an Honorary Membership of the RNCM in December 2002, well deserved in recognition of his distinguished service to the college.

“Phil will always be respected and remain in the minds and thoughts of all that met and worked with him. He leaves a dedicated wife, Christine, and two sons, Glyn and Gareth.”

Our sympathies go to his colleagues and to his family.

Philip L Edwards, 18 July 1944–26 May 2013

Ian Dewar We are sorry to report that just before we went to press, we learnt of the death of Ian Dewar following a short illness.

Ian was a well-known and much liked Engineering Manager with BBC Outside Broadcasts, and also a past member of the STLD committee.

We will include an obituary for Ian in the next issue of ‘TV Lighting’ magazine.

Our deepest sympathies go to his family.

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Lighting

Droop: A new buzz word Words and images: Bill Klages

It is only fitting that the intense activity in the lighting world about Light Emitting Diodes should generate its own lexicon of pet phrases and buzz words that sends the onlooker to an internet search. The one that got my attention was ‘droop’.

Somehow, it doesn’t seem to fit the elegance surrounding the development of LEDs and Solid State Lighting (SSL).

From the rather unglamorous sound of droop, one would assume it has a negative connotation. It does.

performance was superior to the performance of a high lumensper-watt arc source, and vastly greater than an incandescent source. Current claims are as high as 250 lumens per watt for a ‘white’ LED, compared to 100 lumens per watt for a fluorescent light source and 20+ lumens per watt for a 3,200K studio lamp.

The only slight rub is there is a peak at the blue excite wavelength that has been shown to be acceptable in practice.

The problem

The droop appears as we attempt to increase the output of this ‘white’ LED by passing more current through it. We reach a saturation point where the output actually decreases as we increase the energy in the device: it droops. As a result, the efficiency goes to pot. This has become a cause célèbre in the LED industry, with press releases being issued at a great rate claiming the droop has been conquered. It has reached a point where even the business section of The New York Times had an article titled ‘Engineers take aim at a barrier in LED technology’.

In this comprehensive article, there are a number of illustrations and discussion about ‘holes’ and photons, which are perhaps of interest to physicists to explain the phenomenon. For sanity’s sake, I believe these explanations are best left to that group.

In the beginning, the early developers of LEDs thought that white could be obtained as theorised by Sir Isaac Newton, using three primary colours. Unfortunately, selecting three LEDs producing red, green, blue primary colours didn’t work as envisioned due to the narrow spectrum produced by each primary source. There had to be a way to fill in the ‘holes’ in the colour spectrum when using these narrow spectrum sources.

Adding additional LEDs to attempt to fill in the voids did result in an improved, but not perfect white. Meanwhile, enter the blue ‘white’ LED. Invented by the well-known scientist in the SSL arena, Shuji Nakamura, it is a gallium nitride-based semiconductor, normally used to produce green to violet, as opposed to the more stable, common gallium arsenide substrate used for red, orange and yellow. He developed a bright blue source and added a yellow phosphor as part of the device that irradiates the blue (like a fluorescent lamp) to create a ‘white’. Besides producing a more even spectrum distribution, it did it with better efficacy – in fact, in many cases, its 36

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Back to the droop

Current fixtures

Do not despair. Clever fixture manufacturers have helped this restriction by employing a very practical, common sense design approach. They have increased the number of ‘white’ high efficiency, lower wattage devices to obtain the light output we

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A View from Across the Pond

need while retaining the efficacy of a high-performance LED. This has provided us with workable fixtures with a ‘white’ light that is usable. We will have to wait for the benefits of the single high-powered white LED with a small source size to be used in collimated fixtures until the ‘barrier’ is breached.

Hopefully, time will also bring the cost down as manufacturing methods are refined and demand increases.

Getting the lumens where you want them

In its standard configuration, the LED emitter is actually a flat surface that radiates light in a hemispherical pattern. It behaves like a Lambert surface in that if you observe the brightness (luminance) of the source, it appears as the same brightness from every viewing angle of the hemisphere. As is true of any light source, in many cases, for efficient utilisation of the light output, we want to direct the light into a narrower, more concentrative cone. In other words, we want to make the ‘fixture’ as efficient as possible. A traditional light source, as an incandescent filament, delivers its light in a spherical pattern.

In many incandescent fixture configurations, we attempt, with limited success, to capture the light going out the back of the lamp by means of a reflector, which attempts to place this light on the same path of the direct light from the front. Trying to reflect light from the flat emitting surface of an LED is even more difficult than from a filament because it becomes impossible to contain much of the errant rays of light. Coupled with the fact that the light output is low, this barrier has disheartened fixtures designers and users from the outset.

TIR lens

An interesting method to obtain more efficiency for sources attempting to create a more directed output (more collimated, if you will) has been the use of Total Internal Reflection (TIR) Optics. The LED surface is fitted with a plastic ‘lens’, which, because of its shape, optically gathers and redirects the light more effectively into a fixed-beam angle. The resulting efficiency can be double that obtained with a simple reflector, with much less light outside the beam. This method has been applied to entertainment fixtures with some success. The downside is that the beam angle is fixed and not adjustable.

Perseverance

The desire to get LED fixtures close to the fixture performance we are familiar with would still appear to remain elusive. But, then again, there have been successful (and welcomed) exceptions that contradict this statement.

It is these exceptions that give us hope for the future.

Bill Klages has won seven national Emmy Awards for TV lighting design and and has received 28 Emmy, Monitor and Ace awards and nominations. In 2012, he was inducted into the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame – the only Lighting Director to receive this honour. We would like to thank Bill for allowing us to reprint his column here and he invites readers to share your thoughts with him at billklages@roadrunner.com.

For more of Bill’s articles, visit newklages.com

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Lighting

Sports quiz has stamina Words & photographs: Bernie Davis In March this year, A Question of Sport celebrated its 1,000th episode (series 42, episode 17, for those who like useless facts) and we thought it was worth looking further into this perennial favourite.

QoS dates back to 2 December 1968, originally coming from Manchester’s Dickenson Road Studios and New BH Oxford Road. More recently, it has returned to Manchester, to MediaCityUK in Salford Quays.

In between, it was shared between BBC TV Centre and Granada Studios.

Present viewers immediately associate Sue Barker with the programme, but of course, she is just one of four permanent presenters, starting with no less than Stuart Hall (whatever happened to him?!). After Hall was David Vine, followed for many years by the legendary David Coleman, who was the face of QoS. We spoke to some of the previous Lighting Designers who worked on QoS in the past.

John Pomphrey recalls that his immediate predecessors were Tommy Mottram (Head of Lighting, BBC Manchester) and John Spicer, Deputy Head of Lighting. “I was the Lighting Director for many of the latter years at BBC Oxford Road as staff and then 38

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

as a freelance. Eventually the show moved from BBC Oxford Road to Granada. To explain: as I’m sure you know, BBC grades in the past used to be TM1 (Lighting) and TM11 (Tech co-ordinator/junior lighting).

My involvement with QoS in both grades was from 1980 until 1998.

The Royal episode with Princess Anne was shot in Studio A Manchester on 18 January 1987. Other contemporary QoS BBC LDs of mine were Alan Wilson and Robin Empsall (he lit the royal episode and I supervised it).

“During my time, it was always shot in Studio A at New BH Oxford Road, Manchester. The only time it moved was annually, on the weekend of Sports Personality of the Year, when we all decamped down to TVC so our guests could then mingle with Sports Personality guests after the show.

“QoS was always shot on Sunday and, after lighting and rehearsal in the morning, the LD, if he wished, could join the teams for a full sit-down lunch in a conference room – the reason given was so we could assess the specific lighting requirements of the guests. This arrangement meant that every Sunday during the run I had a great lunch for free. It was of course, you understand, ‘vital’ for my job.”

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A Question of Sport

Producer Mike Adley came to QoS in the late 1990s from being a sports editor and introduced new ways of recording the show. He would ISO all the cameras, leaving the vision mixer (generally Sara Jane Phillips) to just cut pictures for audience monitors and contestant team monitors. John recalls: “Adley had a full AVID suite set up in his office to offline the show. His other party piece was that he had his own broadcast handheld camera and small lighting kit and always shot his own mystery personality stuff (Christmas: Lapland; summer: Portugal). He was a one-man television station/OB unit and used to come to me for gels or black wrap, and spare bubbles.”

When QoS moved to Granada, Stan Robinson became involved with the show. He relates: “The set went through a few changes in the late 1990s. The new designer introduced the metal arch, which strutted out over the presenter’s seat but was then moved to the back of the audience.

We started with birdies on the arch to give some detail. Later, I moved to chrome par cans to give some more punch and then on to perching MAC 500s (which the Sparks loved rigging!).”

“I’m not sure about now with the show being more LE, but there used to be a very competitive edge to the quiz, especially when Ian Botham was a team captain. On one occasion, he came in early, sat in a dressing room and watched the rehearsal. Not surprisingly, he got all the questions right. At the end of recording, when it was too late to change anything, he told the Director how he had achieved his landslide victory. From that point on, the ‘U’ link was removed from the feed to the ring main.

“I still smile when I think back of how ruthless the QoS Production Team has been to their LDs over the years.

They dropped John Pomphrey after many years of service around 1997, along with the Set Designer, when the show was undergoing one of its many revamps. I continued on the show as Vision Supervisor and worked with John Fyfe on the new look.

“John Fyfe’s no-nonsense approach clashed slightly with the equally bullish Production, and he was quickly removed. I got the call from John: ‘Hi

Opposite page: Today’s set design, top, and below it, screen grabs from earlier shows including the buzzer round, the set with lights up, ‘A Question of Entertainment’ special episode; with a separated ‘Q’ and ‘S’, and with the ‘Q’ and ‘S’ side by side.

This page: The building of the contemporary set, above, and, right, Lighting Designer Roger Williams and Set Designer Alex Craig

Stan, I’ve been fired. I’ve told them that you should take over. If they don’t give it to you, burn the plot’.

“They did indeed ask me and I lit the show from 1998–2005, moving it from Oxford Road to Granada as part of the 3sixtymedia joint venture in 2001. In turn I was dropped as LD without even a text message of consolation or thanks from the production.”

The current team consists of Roger Williams as Lighting Designer and Alex Craig as Set Designer. I spoke to Roger about his design: “I inherited QoS from the late James Campbell for series 37.

We will start to record series 43 at the end of the summer.

“For me (and the show) the most important parts are Sue Barker and the teams: 90 per cent of the show is them so I wanted to make sure they are perfectly lit and there is nothing to distract from watching the people.

“My immediate thought was to lose the haze which had featured for the previous few years. This was quite a shock to production initially, but the

cleanness of the pictures and the rich colours brought out in the set more than made up for the lack of beams.

“Chris Webster designed the previous set and Alex has been the designer for the last three years, producing a very three-dimensional, modern setting.

“The production team are full of ideas for the ‘challenge’ rounds where the captains (Matt Dawson and Phill Tuffnel) compete in interesting and sometimes very strange events! We have had a 50,000-litre dive tank on set, a basketball court, a volleyball court, a bucking bronco, an F1 racing car for a tyre-change challenge and a football pitch – the list goes on. Straightforward challenges take place on the set between the teams but we are fortunate in MediaCityUK to sometimes be in their largest studio, HQ1, where we can expand way off the main set.”

Our congratulations go to all those who have helped make ‘QoS’ so popular over the years. Here’s to the next 1,000 episodes!

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Sponsor news

Sponsors: don’t miss out on being featured here.

Email your news to sponsornews@stld.org.uk for inclusion in the next issue of TV Lighting.

AC-ET AC-ET supplies lighting & rigging solution for popular children’s TV show Igam Ogam

A.C. Entertainment Technologies (AC-ET) Ltd have supplied a complete lighting and rigging solution to new Ireland-based animation studio Beochan for the filming of the latest Igam Ogam series, a popular children’s TV show aired on Channel 5 in the UK. (A Calon/Telegael production for Channel 5, S4C and ZDF Enterprises).

Located outside Galway City on Ireland’s west coast, Beochan is a new stop-motion animation studio, which was set up by Telegael to help foster the growing international appreciation for stop-motion content within the broadcast and commercial sectors.

Having only received the green light for the studio last December, and with filming of Igam Ogam commencing in February this year, it was a momentous task to get the studio up and running on time and within budget.

For this, Igam Ogam’s Director of Photography Ben Jones relied heavily on the fast and efficient service and support from AC-ET’s specialist International Export division, which supplies to more than 80 countries worldwide.

Running up to 12 separate animation bays, and sometimes shooting continuously for up to 12 hours (for only seven to eight seconds of footage), it is crucial that the studio’s kit is rock solid and obtainable at short notice.

For most of their sets, Ben uses 1K and 2K fresnels for the main key lighting and fills in with a variation of 650s, 300s, 150s, 50s, as well as small fluorescents and LED lights.

In addition to the key and fill lighting, the studio also uses a quantity of computer-controlled equipment, including large camera-moving motion control devices and DMX lighting.

Included in the supply from AC-ET were various lighting fixtures from Spotlight, Filmgear & Dedo, Manfrotto stands and grip, Daylight Textiles fabrics, Bristol VFX blue and green screens, Litec QX30S truss and a huge range of consumables, including Lee and ProColor filter, lamps, clamps and cables.

The future is looking bright for Beochan, which is currently shooting the pilot for a new stop-motion series and is also in advanced discussions regarding other potential co-productions.

Chroma-Q Studio Force V 12 Phosphor wins Les Etoiles du SIEL 2013 award

Intelligent LED lighting manufacturer Chroma-Q™, of whom AC-ET are the exclusive UK distributor, received a prestigious Les Etoiles du SIEL 2013 award for the new Studio Force V 12 Phosphor™ white lighting fixture at this year’s SIEL show in Paris, France.

Utilising the same innovative LED technologies found 40

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

in the Studio Force™ range, the new Studio Force V 12 Phosphor is a 3,200–5,600K CCT, variable white fixture, which provides an equivalent soft edge output to a fluorescent unit – up to 6,000 lumens.

Developed specifically for use in TV, film and broadcast studio environments, the Studio Force V 12 Phosphor incorporates fine-tuning of the green and magenta tints and frequency for camera, an extremely smooth uniform wash, extra soft beam, theatrical grade dimming and laboratory calibration to match Black Body Locus.

Selected by the expert judging panel for its innovative linear variable temperature and green/magenta correction abilities, the Studio Force V 12 Phosphor offers new levels of versatility for any studio lighting environment.

ANNA VALLEY DISPLAYS New Broadcasting House – The Hoop

Anna Valley Displays worked with the BBC Creative team and BDA Design to install a spectacular hoop display hanging above the BBC Newsroom at its new central London studios in Portland Street. The Hoop has a circumference of 36m, is 900mm high and is constructed from 18mm LED panels.

New Broadcasting House is a new 10-storey building, with three basement levels, from which all the BBC’s news, current affairs and World Service output will be broadcast.

The accommodation includes radio and television studios, production offices, catering areas, reception, public areas, and all necessary support facilities. The newsroom will be one of the largest in the world.

Comic Relief 2013

Once again, Anna Valley Displays are proud to supply the LED screens for BBC Comic Relief in 2013.

Production Designer Rudi Thackray created a futuristic new set incorporating three Toshiba 6mm LED screens.

The largest of the three being 12m in width and formatted in a super-widescreen aspect ratio – in fact, a wider ratio than any cinema screen format. The end results were very dynamic.

This marathon-length live show was directed by John Spencer, with lighting direction by Chris Kempton, and raised more than £75m for Comic Relief charities in the UK and Africa.

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Compiled by Emma Thorpe – sponsornews@stld.org.uk

ARRI ARRI adds two new versions to its L-Series range of LED Fresnels

ARRI has announced two new additions to the popular LSeries range of LED Fresnels: a tuneable tungsten model – the L7-TT (pictured below) – and an optional active cooling version for all fixtures.

NAB attendees will be able to see the L7-TT (Tuneable Tungsten) in its first U. showing, as a tuneable 2,600K–3,600K tungsten version of the popular L7-C. The L7-TT is more than 20 per cent brighter than the L7-C, while maintaining the same size and weight. It offers the same calibrated colour quality and adjustable green-magenta point as the L7-C, and is well suited to applications requiring precise colour matching to conventional tungsten lampheads.

Additionally, all versions of the L7 are premiering an active cooling option with reduced size and weight (pictured left), making them ideal for location shoots, portable lighting kits and spaceconstrained studios.

L-Series fixtures can reduce electricity usage by more than 75 per cent, with further savings from the exceptional lifespan of the LED light engine (lasting approximately 200 times longer than a conventional tungsten lamp). The reduced maintenance and minimised power distribution combine with other cost-saving attributes such as built-in dimming to provide a rapid return on investment for both studio and location applications.

L7 lampheads provide the same light quality and simplicity of use as conventional tungsten Fresnels, and can easily be used alongside them. This allows studio facilities to make a gradual transition from older tungsten fixtures to the L-Series, spreading the cost over a longer period without workflow inefficiencies or changes to working practices.

ARRI completes M-Series lighting range with new M90 fixture

ARRI has introduced a new fixture from the award-winning ARRIMAX/M-Series, thus completing the range between 1,200W and 18,000W. The M90 introduces a new power

class for daylight fixtures at 9,000W – exactly half the wattage of the ARRIMAX and just over double the wattage of the M40/25.

Like all M-Series lampheads, the M90 (pictured below) is equipped with MAX Technology: a unique, patented reflector technology that unifies the advantages of a Fresnel and a PAR fixture. The unit is open-faced and, as a result, very bright.

The unit is also focusable from 16 degrees up to 49 degrees just by turning the focus knob, producing a remarkably even light field and a crisp, clear shadow. The elimination of spread lenses speeds up the workflow on set and reduces the risk of lost production time due to glass breakage.

To fit this lamphead, a new 9,000W lamp has been developed by Osram according to ARRI’s specification, very similar in size to the 6,000W lamp. This new lamp allowed ARRI to design the M90 in a very compact housing, close to the dimensions of the ARRISUN 60. Since the accompanying EB 6/9 kW ballast uses the housing of the current EB 6000 Baby, and existing 6K head-to-ballast cables, the whole system is highly efficient and comes close to the light output of a traditional 12K PAR (with lens), but within the dimensions of a 6K PAR system.

The new EB 6/9 kW sports ALF (Active Line Filter) and CCL (Compensation for Cable Loss) technology, which compensates for power losses even in very long headto-ballast cables. This new, incredibly small ballast will also be available in a 1,000Hz version for high-speed shooting with minimized flicker.

ARTISTIC LICENCE Artistic Licence Engineering Multichrome Tubes perform at Den Norske Opera, Oslo

Artistic Licence Multichrome Tube LED fixtures have played a central part in the visual presentation of Isslottet at Den Norske Opera in Oslo, where local distributor Rubicon supplied more than 100 units to faciliate Øyvind Wangensteen’s highly imaginative lighting and video design.

Isslottet (‘The Ice Castle’) is a modern ballet based on Tarjei Vesaas’ book of the same name. Set to Terje Isungset’s musical arrangement, with choreography by Kristian Støvind, Isslottet tells the story of Siss and Unn, two teenage girls who find each other in an unlikely friendship.

The story deals with issues of life and death, and how what once was light and delightful can turn dark and dangerous.

Wangensteen’s design called for the creation of dripping ‘ice taps’ that could incorporate a 3D movement that was reflected in the high-shine stage floor and formed a vital part of the overall look of the show.

To create this look, 100 x 100cm Multichrome tubes were hung in clusters of five on motorised battens, each of which could be separately controlled. The tubes were connected to 20 Artistic Licence Multichrome D1 TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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Sponsor news

Above: Artistic Licence Multichrome Tube LED fixtures were used in a production of Isslottet at Den Norske Opera in Oslo. Photography: Erik Berg

controllers distributed in the rig. The D1s were connected to Artistic Licence’s Data-Lynx O/P Art-Net converters, which received data from a videoserver to provide a dynamic 3D video impression on the tubes in combination with two 20ft Ansi Lumen Barco Projectors.

Multichrome Tube is a multi-pixel RGB LED fixture that can be supplied in customised lengths and different configurations, including single or double-sided strips and a choice of pixel pitches. The Isslottet installation used doublesided strips.

The show was operated by video technician Eric Holmberg.

MD Simon Hobday to leave Artistic Licence

Lighting control experts Artistic Licence have announced that incumbent Managing Director Simon Hobday is moving on to explore new opportunities.

Hobday joined the company as a technician in 2000. Over the years, he rose up the ranks, becoming MD in 2010. Now, with many years of invaluable experience built up at Artistic Licence, he feels the time is right to seek a different challenge.

“I am grateful for my time at Artistic,” says Hobday.

“I have learnt a lot about the lighting industry during my time 42

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here, but horizons expand, and I want to move on and face new challenges.”

Following an internal company reorganisation, Artistic Licence founder Wayne Howell will take over as CEO. “While we are saddened to lose Simon, the recent changes provide exciting opportunities for us all – both at a personal and a company level,” says Howell. “Simon is a very talented individual, and it was by no means a given that he would stay with us indefinitely. At the same time, I feel that our concomitant reorganisation has invigorated the company, leaving a highly motivated and focused team.”

Hobday’s departure comes as Artistic Licence marks its silver jubilee.

“Over 25 years, a company will see many changes,” adds Howell. “We understand and applaud Simon’s decision to move on, and wish him every success in his endeavours.”

AURORA Samantha Wiseman joins Aurora Lighting Hire

TV lighting specialists Aurora Lighting Hire, based in Greenford, are pleased to announce that Samantha Wiseman (formally Dean) has recently joined their team.

Samantha has been appointed as Business Co-ordinator and said: “I am very excited to join Aurora in their rapidly

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Above: Four Avolites Media Ai Servers were supplied to the production team of Sky TV’s Got To Dance by video rental house Creative Technology

growing business and happy to be back in the lighting industry. I have had time out getting married and becoming a mum, and now my boys are at school, I felt ready to get back into work and was thrilled when this opportunity came up.”

She started her career at Brilliant Stages just out of college, then moved on to Vari Lite/VLPS for many years and has nearly 10 years’ experience working in the lighting industry.

Nick Edwards, Managing Director, added: “I am delighted to welcome Samantha to Aurora. We have known each other for many years working together at VLPS/PRG. Samantha has a lot of knowledge and experience and will be a real asset to our company.”

Aurora sees the funny side

TV lighting specialists Aurora Lighting Hire Ltd are certainly seeing the funny side of TV. While audiences and viewers are kept smiling watching some of the most popular TV shows and entertainers, Aurora are behind the scenes lighting the shows.

Lighting Director Chris Rigby has been busy lighting shows such as Alan Carr: Chatty Man, The Graham Norton Show and A League Of Their Own for many years now.

Open Mic Production’s Alan Carr: Chatty Man has entered

into its 10th series of the award-winning chatshow on Friday nights on Channel 4. Winning a BAFTA for Entertainment Performance, the show is full of celebrity guests, great music and Alan’s usual mischief!

So Television’s The Graham Norton Show, now in its 13th series, also picked up a BAFTA TV Award for Entertainment Programme. Now his fifth win, Graham picked up the award while presenting the BAFTAs. Sky1 HD’s entertainment show A League Of Their Own, with its forthcoming seventh series, is hosted by funny man James Corden, regular team captains Jamie Redknapp and Freddie Flintoff and permanent panellist Jack Whitehall. Shown on Friday nights this show was also nominated for a BAFTA. The show is joined by sporting heroes and comedians alike.

AVOLITES Avolites Ai Media Server Maps all the Right Moves on Sky’s Got To Dance

Avolites Media’s industry-beating server ‘Ai’ has been powering the fast-paced visuals for Sky TV’s popular spring series of Got To Dance. A total of four Ai Server systems running on Mac Towers, two main and two back-up, were supplied to the production by video rental house Creative Technology.

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Russ Grubiak – who has worked on a number of high-rating shows, including The X Factor, Big Brother and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross – chose to use the powerful Avolites Media Server Ai to manipulate the end visual output for series four of the show, which was created to discover the best dance act in the UK. Grubiak works closely with Visual Effects Designer Julien Rigal to create content for the production, aiming to give each individual act a unique and distinctive backdrop to complement the action on stage.

In fact, the pair say they rely heavily on the Ai to help them achieve the desired look because every different LED product has its own set of characteristics.

With the help of Ai, Grubiak and Rigal were able to see the entire TV studio as one giant canvas, utilising Ai’s ability to scale the outputs to compensate for the varying pixel pitches of the different LED fixtures, including the large screens, Barco Mi-strip dancefloor and edge strip around the set. Ai is equipped to playback to video canvasses up to 8x HD1080 and this was a significant benefit to the production.

Series four of Got To Dance concluded with Lukas McFarlane winning the prize for his own very distinctive and emotional contemporary dance style.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation invests in Multiple Avolites Tiger Touch

The South African Broadcasting Corporation has invested in three powerful touch-screen Avolites Tiger Touch consoles.

Avolites’ South Africa partner DWR Distribution and entertainment lighting service company Blackmotion oversaw SABC’s Tiger Touch investment for its Auckland Park, Johannesburg, studios.

The upgrade was part of a major enhancement of the corporation’s TV lighting facilities.

“The SABC has been using an analogue console for decades, which was an impediment for their LDs to achieve anything other than generic lighting,” says Kagiso Moima, managing member at Blackmotion. “With the new era of lighting technology in South Africa and the digital space every broadcaster has moved into, it was imperative for the SABC to introduce this technology to its employees.

The SABC has three big studios in which it mostly records the variety show and this is where most of the Tiger Touch consoles will be used, enabling the SABC to incorporate moving

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light with dexterity into its shows.

The SABC in-house crew discovered the features of Avolites’ Tiger Touch when they saw Blackmotion supply the console to the television series Roots.

CLAY PAKY Clay Paky Sharpys hit the tight notes on The X Factor 2013 Live Tour!

The UK’s ‘guru of pop lighting’, Peter Barnes, has designed a fresh and diverse pure-beam show for The X Factor 2013 Live Tour! using 54 powerful Clay Paky Sharpys.

Barnes – who has designed lighting for some of the world’s biggest artists and events including The Spice Girls’ Spiceworld international tour and the Live 8 benefit concerts – specified the Sharpys, supplied by HSL, to cut through the brightness of the staging and create dynamic scenes.

With seven different acts from The X Factor 2012 performing each night, Barnes was tasked with designing a light show that was able to create a diversity of looks, reflecting each singer’s style and personality.

The X Factor 2013 Live Tour! toured some of the UK’s biggest arenas, including Echo Arena Liverpool, London’s The O2 and the Metro Radio Arena Newcastle during February.

Clay Paky conquers the 2013 Eurovision stage

Lighting Designer Fredrik Jönsson specified more than 700 Clay Paky fixtures to provide stunning lighting effects forming the centrepiece of the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest, the world’s largest non-sporting television production. This large supply of equipment was co-ordinated by Clay Paky’s Swedish distributor, Interlite AB, which managed contacts with technical supplier Starlight as well as with SVT (Swedish Television), producers of the ESC 2013.

The southern city of Malmö, Sweden, hosted the 57th Eurovision event at the state-of-the-art Malmö Arena. The three live shows, consisting of two semi-finals and a final, were watched on television and online by an estimated audience of more than 120 million people, with a live audience of more than 11,000 at the final broadcast.

The event was televised by host broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT) and featured a core production team working under the leadership of Executive Producer Martin Österdahl and Show Producer Christer Björkman. Technical Director was Ola Melzig, with lighting design by Jönsson and Emma Landare. Stage design was by Viktor Brattström and Frida Arvidsson.

Scandinavia’s largest rental house, Starlight, in close cooperation with PRG, supplied all lighting, rigging and sound equipment and crew for the show, which utilised more than 250 crew members.

For this year’s event, Jönsson wanted a powerful stage rig to surround the 220 square-metre stage surface with which he could create a sufficient variety of visual moods and textures to underpin the tones of the musical performances. With the theme for this year’s show being ‘We are one’, a key element was the ability to include the audience with whatever happened onstage, as part of the televised experience.

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Above: LD Peter Barnes used 54 Clay Paky Sharpys on The X Factor 2013 Live Tour! to create a diversity of looks reflecting each singer’s style

Clay Paky fixtures made up the majority of the stage lighting, making a few ‘firsts’ for some of the products.

It is now the production using the most number of Sharpys in any show, 200 making the backbone of the rig. It was also a big debut for 75 of the new Sharpy Wash fixture: one of Clay Paky’s newest products hosting a 330W lamp but with the light output and optical and graphical performance typical of a 1,000W spot light. Fifty of Clay Paky’s new Glow Up Strip 100s were also utilised, along with 50 Alpha beam 1500s, 50 Alpha Profile 1500s, 129 Alpha Spot HPE 1500s, 40 Alpha Spot QWO 800s (16 in the green room), 58 A.leda Wash K10s and 49 A.leda Wash K5s.

Lighting was controlled via 12 grandMA II Light consoles (six main, plus six back-up) using 24,500 control channels.

Lighting operators were Calle Brattberg, Timo Kauristo, Pontus Lagerbielke and Danne Persson.

In the end, Denmark took home the trophy with Emmelie de Forest’s performance of ‘Teardrops’, putting the competition in Denmark in 2014. No doubt Clay Paky will be invited back for a repeat performance.

DOUGHTY New stronger truss adaptors from Doughty

Doughty has added a set of new and stronger truss adaptors to its existing range, offering riggers a wider choice for theatre rigs and outdoor events.

The new adaptors are made from solid, high-tensile aluminium and fit all major brands of triangular and square truss, enabling it to be lifted into place safely and securely.

With a choice of three hanging sizes – 250, 500 and 1,000kg

– the new truss adaptors are fitted with slimline clamps. The 250kg size is available as either a fixed or a swivel version and comes ready fitted with a 28mm Euro spec spigot.

As with all Doughty branded products, the new truss adaptors are manufactured in the UK and available for immediate shipping. www.doughty-engineering.co.uk

ELP ELP helped say farewell to BBC Television Centre earlier this year by providing lighting services for both live televised events which marked the occasion: a live concert by Madness outside the building (broadcast on BBC Four) and a special ‘outdoor’ version of The One Show on BBC One, which linked live to the concert.

ELP already supplies Lighting Director Dave Evans for the daily, studio-based broadcasts of The One Show. For this outdoor special, Dave specified a completely new rig, which included Arri Junior 650W fresnels; ETC Source 4 profiles; Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300s; Martin Mac 301 LED Wash; Thomas Pixel Pars and Pixel Lines, Chromaflood 200TCs and Chromastrip 900s. These were hung from an open-sided structure built by the ELP crew, including Saul Harris and Chris Rand, from their own Quadralite truss.

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Lighting Director Dave Gibson was responsible for the Madness stage and the lighting of the Television Centre building. ELP provided Dave with the on-stage lights, plus their 200kW twinset power generator. ELP also built the bandstand stage structure.

ELP’s bandstand structure, which has previously been used for Songs of Praise and Eisteddfod events, was ideal for this setting because all sides are completely open, and TV viewers, plus the on-site audience, could see the iconic TV Centre building as a backdrop.

ELP Gaffer Darren Fletcher and his crew tailored the structure to 12m by 9m, so that it fitted exactly, before setting about installing the lighting, which included 72 PAR 36 2 Lights, 32 Sharpys, VL3500s, Robe Robin 100s and Sunstrips.

and MAC 700 Wash. John was also the LD for a Songs of Praise from Llandaff Cathedral, and Bernie Davis was the LD for a live ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ Service from Liverpool Anglican Cathedral.

But perhaps the two biggest televised cathedral events in recent months have been the funeral of Baroness Thatcher from St Paul’s Cathedral and the service from Westminster Abbey to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s Coronation. Both were televised by the BBC, the LD for both events being Bernie Davis. Bernie specified an assortment of ELP’s Source 4 profile spots, Arri Junior Fresnels and hundreds of Par Cans for both jobs.

ELP also provided the power for these prestigious events via a 200kw twinset generator and their compact 110 kw lite power units.

An unlikely client for TV lighting, BBC Radio 2, featured heavily in ELP’s work recently.

ELP have worked with Dave Gibson recently on a special Radio 2 event broadcast live from London’s Hackney Empire. The live event was accessed via the red button on the radio station’s website. Headline acts included Gary Barlow and Mick Hucknall. Dave used ELP’s Clay Paky Sharpys and their MAC Aura LED wash lights.

ETC

Also for BBC Radio 2, ELP worked with LD Nigel Catmur on a special live performance of Rod Stewart In Concert from the BBC Radio Theatre in London. The legendary singer performed a selection of his biggest hits, plus songs from his new album ‘Time’ in an intimate concert. A simple lighting rig befitting of the intimate atmosphere of the venue included ELP’s Clay Paky Alphaspot HPE 1500s and Martin MAC 500s. An arc of ELP’s Sunstrip Active DMX LED Battens provided a simple yet effective on-stage backdrop.

Also with Nigel, ELP worked on the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards from Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. Darren Fletcher and the ELP Manchester team provided Nigel with a lighting rig featuring their Alphaspot HPEs, Alphabeam 700s and Martin TW1s.

ELP also provided Nigel with lighting services for a number of other productions, including Andrew Lloyd Webber – 40 Musical Years, which was filmed at Fountain Studios for ITV and featured songs from many famous West End shows; Urdd Eisteddfod, the Welsh cultural youth festival for S4C, where ELP’s MAC 700s, TW1s and VL1000s featured heavily; and Côr Cymru 2013 from Aberystwyth University, a competition to find the best choir in Wales Great Hall for S4C. Again, ELP’s MAC 700s and TW1s featured in the equipment list.

The past few months have also seen ELP crews in churches, cathedrals and abbeys across the nation: The ELP Manchester team, led by Darren Fletcher, has been to Paisley Abbey with LD Carol Sadler for a live televised Easter Morning Eucharist. A live BBC Pentecost service came from Blackburn Cathedral, where John Penny Williams was the LD, using ELP’s range of Pixel pars, Chromafloods 46

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

ETC brings LED lighting to French TV studios

LED lighting solutions are taking over TV studios and the increase in popularity of ETC LED products across France can be attributed to the meeting of two men: Director of Photography Jacques Audrain and Jean Louis Pernette, Commercial Director at ETC distributor Avab.

As a man who professes himself artistically committed to improving the lighting in TV studios, Audrain is among those who believed in LED from its early days in entertainment technology. His faith in the technology was confirmed with the launch of ETC Selador and its seven-colour mixing system.

Audrain’s lighting design for Le Monde d’après (‘The World of After’), a monthly economics show, combines video mapping for visual illustrations and a subtle combination of colour temperatures for atmosphere. The set is entirely lit by ETC LED sources, including Source Four LED Lustr+ fixtures.

The 26 Source Four LED Lustr+ and 24 ETC Selador Desire Lustr+ fixtures installed on Le Monde d’après were supplied by Lumex and installed by Avab.

For more information on ETC and its products, visit www.etcconnect.com

Pictured: ETC Source Four LED Lustr+ lights the set of Le Monde d’après

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GREEN HIPPO Beta test recruitment: Green Hippo needs you!

We are recruiting for members to our new beta testing team and this is your chance to join one of the most exciting companies in the media server world.

As ongoing progress to our development and testing team, we have now introduced a dedicated and integral beta testing plan.

Once registered and accepted, you will be given access to all the latest builds and tools that make Hippotizer the world’s favourite media server. With these you will be asked to participate in testing, logging issues and suggesting new features.

For the duration of the beta testing programme, you will become part of Green Hippo and have access to the quality control team at our HQ. An internal forum will allow you to engage in discussion with fellow testers, as well as share new ideas, ways of working and experiences with each other.

Hippotizer Product Manager Lee House says: “Our users are the real designers of Hippotizer products. Without their input over the last 10 plus years we would not have achieved the product that we have today. What we have been able to do here is design a programme that allows us to capture this information and include the testers into the heart of Green Hippo in a new way. This is also giving them a chance to see and be part of the future here at Green Hippo.”

To sign up to this programme you will need access to a Hippotizer product, some spare time and a willingness to be part of the Green Hippo team. To sign up, visit www.hippotesting.com. For further information, email beta@green-hippo.com.

HAWTHORN Hawthorn and Anagram join forces

Hawthorn, one of the UK’s largest suppliers of technical and event services, are delighted to announce the acquisition of Anagram, another well-respected supplier to the event, conference and exhibition industries. This being Hawthorn’s 25th celebratory year, the amalgamation is a great triumph.

Currently employing more than 100 full-time members of staff, working across all industry sectors, Hawthorn boasts an annual turnover of £9m, while the Anagram team stands at 15 and turns over £3m per annum. Following the acquisition, Anagram will now dry hire equipment from their base in Cambridge, adding to Hawthorn’s existing bases in both the Midlands and London.

Anagram is a well-established brand with an excellent reputation and will continue to trade under that name. Pete Harding and Neil McGann, Anagram’s founding directors, will continue to run the company from Cambridge.

Hawthorn, renowned as a single-source supplier of lighting, sound, video, staging, drapes and Graphic Frame

systems, will be extending their expansive stock range to the Anagram team. With Anagram’s well-established relationship at Battersea Evolution, it is expected that being part of a larger group will enable them to offer further technical support to future events.

Recent investment in equipment includes the purchase of Christie Spyder Vista X20 VT Controller, Christie J series 20k projectors, Clay Paky Alpha 700 series and Sharpy Washes, taking the two companies’ combined inventory to in excess of £12 million.

HSL HSL and PSI announce dynamic new partnership

The UK’s fastest growing lighting and visuals rental specialist, Blackburn-based HSL, has formed a dynamic new partnership with Production Services Ireland (PSI): a market leader in the territory, with operations in Belfast and Dublin.

The merger sees PSI’s highly successful and well-established operations in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic continue unchanged with the same directors, staff, facilities and distinct identity. PSI now has the additional advantage of access to HSL’s massive equipment inventory and additional resources.

Combined annual sales are expected to reach £15m in the next 24 months. There are more than 100 full-time skilled and talented employees and the new working relationship will enable both companies’ UK and Irish operations to be streamlined, seamless and highly competitive.

PSI will have HSL’s vast stock and resources at its disposa, including more than 5,000 moving lights, three kilometres of trussing and 800 sq m of LED surfaces.

Last year both HSL and PSI expanded and moved into new warehouse premises – in PSI’s case, both their Belfast and Dublin sites.

PSI has three directors: Brian Reilly and Sean Pagel in Belfast (pictured top and centre, respectively), and Ciaran Tallon, who runs the Dublin facility. HSL directors Simon Stuart (pictured bottom) and Mike Oates are based in Blackburn, UK. In recent years, the two companies have been collaborating closely on a number of high-profile projects and that existing healthy crossover of ideas, experience, knowledge and equipment is now cemented in this new relationship.

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Above: James Thomas Engineering supplied 48 PixelSmart LED fixtures and 14 SmartLine 4 LED battens to Let’s Dance for Comic Relief. Photo: Dominic Turner

JAMES THOMAS ‘Let’s Dance for Comic Relief’ gets smart with PixelRange

Lighting Let’s Dance for Comic Relief for the fifth year running, Lighting Designer Steve Nolan, of Chromatic Productions, called upon James Thomas Engineering PixelRange once again to provide sparkling effects lighting for this charity extravaganza.

No less than 48 PixelSmart LED fixtures and 14 SmartLine 4 LED battens were donated by PixelRange to provide extra pace and drama during the show’s title sequences and high-energy dance routines.

Twenty-four PixelSmarts and 12 SmartLine 4s were deployed on stage at floor level to demarcate the upstage and wing edges and define the performance area.

PixelRange’s PixelSmart incorporates 61 individually addressable channels and 40 internal chase effects across 12 high-intensity quad RGBW Cree MCE LEDs and 13 Cree warm-white XPG LEDs, which combine to give a vast colour palette with brilliant bright white.

Nolan also created chases and random strobe effects within each of the SmartLine battens, rippling colours along their length. Like the PixelSmart, SmartLine battens feature individually-addressable, high-intensity quad RGBW Cree LEDs, set in a 50mm deep, slimline housing that allows the LEDs to maintain equal pitch when stacked.

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fixtures were located behind the door reveal for extra sparkle during the competitors’ entrances.

For the 2013 series, Nolan was charged with the additional task of lighting the audience in a way that would draw them into the overall action of the show.

Let’s Dance for Comic Relief is not the only show in which Nolan and Lighting Programmer Tim Routledge have favoured the PixelSmarts and SmartLines, having used them extensively on productions, which include the Royal Variety Performance and Radio 1’s Teen Awards at Wembley in September 2012.

Let’s Dance for Comic Relief ran as a short series of four shows over four weeks, attracting huge television audiences and raising more than £1m.

Full technical details and video clips of PixelSmart and SmartLine in action can be found on the PixelRange website at www.pixelrange.com.

James Thomas Engineering’s new retro PATT 2013 storms Radio 1’s Big Weekend

James Thomas Engineering’s newly-released retro-designed PATT 2013 softlight made its first appearance at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Londonderry (24–26 May 2013) to spectacular and instantaneous response.

The first in a new range of lighting from James Thomas Engineering, the PATT 2013 has been designed to combine a retro aesthetic with modern performance capabilities. JTE designer Sean Aston took inspiration from the current trend

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for old broadcast lighting for the PATT 2013’s appearance and, using JTE’s in-house design experience and facilities, the team were able to manufacture an entirely new retro-style fixture quickly and efficiently in time for Routledge to use it on the Big Weekend.

Radio 1’s Big Weekend Londonderry is widely acknowledged as the first music festival to kick off the summer of festivals. It showcased more than 30 acts, with headliners that included Rita Ora, DJ Fresh, alt-J and Vampire Weekend, and was broadcast live over three nights on BBC Radio 1, BBC Three, the BBC Red Button and online.

Routledge was commissioned to provide two creative lighting designs, which would differentiate between the 1Xtra Arena and the In New Music We Trust stage, identifying the two brands clearly. He chose James Thomas Engineering lighting to theme the stage with two completely different looks.

Using a combination of PixelRange Smartline battens and Robe CityFlex, Routledge created randomly-placed X shapes to brand the 1Xtra Arena on the Friday night. This was then transformed into the In New Music We Trust stage, where a succession of new acts were showcased on the Saturday and Sunday nights. Routledge correspondingly altered the stage’s appearance by introducing 12 of the new JTE PATT 2013 fixtures behind the bands and on side trusses at stage level to act as ‘eye candy’.

LCA – Lights Camera Action LCA – Lights, Camera, Action are delighted to be offering the film and TV industry a number of innovative lights.

This year sees LCA expanding their portfolio, becoming the sole UK distributor for Brother, Brother & Sons (BB&S).

Danish company BB&S are at the cutting edge of LED and remote phosphor technology, developing and producing high-end LED lighting for video, theatre and movie productions. They harness technical and design skills to deliver innovative, high-quality and cost-effective products.

LCA look forward to introducing these products to the British market.

Their range of lighting also includes phosphor technology in the guise of the Area 48 Soft (pictured below). The Area 48 Soft is characterised by an unprecedented light quality and its compact size, with the surface area of A4 paper.

Forty-eight blue diodes behind a remote polycarbonate phosporised diffuser ensure a very even light and an exceptionally soft shadow. In 2012, Area 48 was awarded ‘Best of IBC’

by TVB Europe.

Also in LCA’s extensive portfolio are the Joker 1600 and Alpha 1600,

both designed and manufactured by K5600 Lighting. The Alpha concept is to create a more compact and lighter fixture with interchangeable Fresnel lenses, giving the end user more options than just flood and spot. The Joker Bug 1600 (pictured right) is the new addition to the well-known Joker Bug range. It features a spectacular reflector and a set of four traditional PAR 64 lenses: medium, wide, super-wide and a frosted Fresnel.

Also from K5600 is the popular Joker 800 and Joker 400.

The Joker 400, the Black Jack 400, is the most compact and lightweight of its kind. It is the ideal interior key light.

Optically, the Black Jack covers angles from five to 160 degrees with sharp shadows. The Black Jack features four holes on the front door to receive poles of light banks, avoiding the extra speedring The Joker-Bug 800 is one of the most powerful of the Joker-Bug range. SLI (Sylvania Lighting International) designed a 800W UV-block lamp at K5600 Lighting’s request. The UV coating prevents the dispersion of harmful UVs, allowing the use of perforated safety globes. The JokerBug 800 wattage was chosen to complete a range with a logical one-stop increase between each model. The design of the reflector provides a narrower beam than a Par 1,200W but more punch.

The Softube is an accessory that can be mounted on the Joker-Bugs 200, 400 or 800 in Par configuration (with the beamer). The Softube changes the narrow concentrated beam of the Par without lens into a linear soft-light source.

Softubes have been designed for use in confined spaces: they can be hidden behind pillars, accentuate a window effect and are ideal inside vehicles. Easy and quick to set up, they are lightweight but sturdy.

LCA also sell the DoP Choice Snap Grids. The Snap Grids won the 2010 Cinec Innovation Award and have a number of pioneering features including no tummy (DoP Choice Snap Grids are tightly stretched even upside down because of the integrated stretching frame) and no wear-out (every DoP Choice Grid uses specially developed robust fabric, which keeps the grid stable).

MARTIN PROFESSIONAL HARMAN Professional makes key promotions

With the completion of its acquisition of Martin Professional and the foundation of a lighting business unit within HARMAN Professional, HARMAN has announced two key promotions that, according to Blake Augsburger, President HARMAN Professional, will position the business unit for optimal development while capitalising on selective shared resources and relationships with HARMAN Professional.

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OSRAM Osram’s first LED spotlight for studios

Effective immediately, Lars Dige Knudsen (pictured above left) is promoted to Vice President, General Manager, Lighting Strategic Business Unit, taking over from Martin’s previous CEO Christian Engsted. Villads Thomsen (pictured above right) is promoted to Vice President, Global Sales, Lighting Strategic Business Unit. Knudsen, a 17-year veteran of Martin Professional, previously held the position of CFO and Thomsen, previously Vice President of Sales, EMEA, at Martin Professional, has held senior sales leadership positions over a 14-year career at Martin.

As CFO, Knudsen was central to transforming Martin Professional into the world’s leading supplier of entertainment lighting. In addition to his general management responsibilities, he will continue to head shared services, including finance, IT, legal and human resources. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce, Finance & Auditing from Aarhus Business College.

Thomsen has led successful sales programmes for Martin Professional in several key territories in Europe and Asia. Most recently, he led the consolidation of Martin Professional’s European and Africa organisations into a strong, unified EMEA region. He is a graduate of the Administration and Management programme at Aarhus Business College, holds an MBA from Henley Business School and has participated in several executive programmes at IMD and Insead.

Industry pro Matt Hallard joins Martin Professional

Martin Professional is pleased to announce that industry expert and long-time industry professional Matt Hallard (pictured right) has joined the Martin EMEA sales organisation as Business Area Manager, Rental.

Matt brings with him a wealth of industry experience having worked as Production Manager for P&O Cruises Worldwide, as Regional Sales Manager at PRG Distribution and, most recently, for Philips Vari-Lite as European Sales Manager.

Matt’s primary duties in the Martin EMEA organisation will focus on developing Martin’s Global Alliance Programme, as well as handling a number of key accounts.

Furthermore, Martin plans to utilise Matt’s deep roots in the industry to strengthen as well as develop new relationships with LDs and important customers European-wide.

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The Kreios SL is the first LED spotlight from Osram with a high light output exceeding 3,000 lumens. Adding to this lighting achievement, the Kreios SL also has excellent colour rendering, with a high CRI of 95 and a broad dimming range (five to 100 per cent) making the Kreios SL an extremely versatile fixture.

It is currently the most powerful LED spotlight available on the market and has been designed for a broad range of illumination applications where a zoomable light source is preferred – in particular, for background lighting of TV and studio recordings.

Kreios SL replaces standard 100W to 250W halogen spotlight solutions and is an especially economic alternative for event and studio experts. Its long-lasting and high-quality LEDs give a service life of up to 30,000 hours, therefore, no relamping is required. Comparable halogen spotlights would usually need relamping after about 800 hours’ use.

Another benefit of the use of LED technology is the innovative integrated cooling technology, which means the Kreios SL runs almost silently, ensuring low-noise operation – an ideal choice in many studios. Easy installation can be achieved almost anywhere due to the small and compact size of the fixture. The unit can be attached in various ways to the mounting bracket: side, top and underneath, or it can be removed and mounted remotely if required. The fixture accepts most mounting brackets and attachments.

The high light output from the Kreios SL can also be controlled by connecting the light source to any existing dimmer circuit. A supplied gel frame will accept common sized (9.5cm/3.75 inches) colour, frost, diffusion and other filters. The beam angle can also be easily adapted to fit specific applications by simply rotating the position ring on the fixture body, resulting in a light beam scale from 40 to 120 degrees.

With a spot reflector, a narrow angle of 24 degrees is also possible. Supplied barn doors may also be inserted in the front of the fixture, allowing the operator to minimise the light spill.

For more information, visit www.osram.com/kreios or email displayoptic@osram.co.uk

PHILIPS PLCyc LED luminaire covers TheStreet’s Studios

Around the world, news programmes are updating their TV studios to take advantage of the latest in entertainment lighting technology.

LED lighting and control systems have enabled these productions to significantly reduce the amount of power needed without having to compromise the quality of their broadcasts. Such was the case for TheStreet, which reports on the latest business and financial news from its headquarters at 14 Wall Street, and was in need of a studio upgrade. TheStreet turned to Houpla Inc to help them renovate their studio into a state-of-the-art LED facility complete with 12 Philips Selecon

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PLCyc LED luminaires supplied by Shadowstone.

As one of the latest additions to the Philips Selecon PL family of LED luminaires, the PLCyc LED had never been used in a green-screen application before, and although no one had thought to use them in such a way, this did not deter Teague from believing they would be the ideal solution.

A breakthrough in cyclorama lighting, the PLCyc LED luminaire delivers smooth and even cyclorama lighting in a compact and lightweight design. Using a maximum of 120W, each unit can replace the equivalent of a traditional fourcolour, 500W per cell cyc light. A typical cyclorama can also now be powered from a single circuit using the convenient PLCyc LED Powercon cabling system for power in-andthrough applications.

With the renovated, virtual LED studio now up and running, TheStreet launched its new productions with an updated and rejuvenated identity to each broadcast. Watching behind the scenes, Brassert and his team at Houpla Inc were extremely pleased with the LED fixture recommendations of Shadowstone, and they are also excited about the performance of the PLCyc LED luminaire.

PLASA PLASA London 2013

PLASA London will launch its first show at ExCeL London this autumn. Taking place from 6 to 9 October, the new name, new venue and new autumn dateline aren’t the only changes afoot for the industry-owned event.

PLASA CEO Matthew Griffiths explains: “This year marks the first stage of the show’s long-term strategic development. ExCeL is located just five minutes from London City Airport, which handles 350 flights a day from 40 international destinations, and ExCeL’s seven onsite hotels provide thousands of rooms within walking distance. With increased connectivity to Europe and beyond, as well as new world-class facilities, we hope to send a clear message about the show’s plans for future international growth.”

In addition to the new campus-style experience for international visitors, PLASA Events have announced the AudioLab: a major new development of pro audio content.

Show Manager Jen Barratt explains: “The AudioLab is exactly that: a huge pro audio laboratory incorporating an arena, a theatre and a third interactive space, which allows visitors to experience the cutting-edge of pro audio and watch it being pushed to its limits.”

With a 45m throw, the AudioLab Arena takes up one whole module of the ExCeL centre and will feature largeformat and mid-range line-array demonstrations, shoot-outs of club sound and PA systems and private purpose-built and sound-proof demo rooms.

PLASA Events promise a raft of announcements in the following weeks, including two major new partnerships and a new programme of after-hours activities and events that will make PLASA London 2013 the must-attend international event for networking at the highest level.

Contact jen.barratt@plasa.org for further information.

PRG The GLP Impression Spot One and Wash One are now available from PRG’s rental stock. The Spot One was the first fixture of its kind to be released to the global market, closely followed by the Wash One, and both incorporate groundbreaking LED technology. By harnessing the raw power of numerous LED sources and running it through an advanced optical system, GLP has created an even beam for RGB colour mixing and has produced two very versatile fixtures.

The Spot One offers bright RGB LED output; even light distribution; full, crisp, colour palette; and a clean white range of 3,000K–8,000K with high CRI, instant colour bumps and sharp image projections.

The Impression Wash One boasts a 400W RGB LED light engine and the same groundbreaking technology as the Spot One. The fully featured luminaire is able to deliver delicate colour changes or instantaneous colour bumps over a wide, carefully calibrated colour spectrum and a six to 60-degree zoom range, but the key differentiator is its innovative three-degree narrow beam mode and beam shaping function.

RICHARD MARTIN LIGHTING Comic Relief Does Glee Club 2013

The fundraising show has been so successful of recent years that even if you never watched the series Glee, you would still understand the concept of what it is about.

As part of Comic Relief and Sports Relief, CBBC cheeky chappies Sam and Mark, along with Naomi Wilkinson, presented the all-singing, all-dancing talent contest in which groups performed in front of celebrity judges (vocal coaches David and Carrie Grant and choreographer Sisco Gomez) to be crowned the nation’s best young Glee Club. Those select few groups were whittled down following a week of auditions held across the country.

Long-standing LD Roger Williams designed the spectacular lighting show, which was provided by Richard Martin Lighting (RML). The show was filmed at BBC Glasgow and was overseen by local company TSL and Tony Kennedy.

And what a light show it was! The vast and hugely exciting rig comprised of VL500s, Atomic Strobes, Alpha Beam 700s, Sharpys, Alpha Spot 700’, Chroma Batten 50 kits and a whopping 35 Martin MAC Auras.

The MAC Aura is the first compact LED moving head wash light with zoom that offers never-before-seen, eyecandy aura effect, yet also functions as a highly capable single-lens wash with fully pre-mixed colour.

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Sponsor news

Above: RML provided Sky Sports with the lights for its Living for Sport awards ceremony, including Alpha Beam 700s, Sharpys, Stagebars and Colorweb

Living for Sport Awards

For 10 years Sky Sports has been sponsoring young people in schools by providing mentors from the top people in sport as part of Sky’s Bigger Picture initiatives. This year, Sky Sports mounted a full-spec awards ceremony to mark their achievements.

The awards, which have two categories: Student of the Year and Teacher of the Year, celebrate the successful way secondary schools are using sport to inspire young people through Sky Sports Living for Sport projects. They are only open to students who have completed a project that academic year.

Delivered in partnership with the Youth Sport Trust, the awards celebrate the success of secondary schools across the country in using sport to inspire young people, and provide an opportunity to profile the achievements of both students and teachers.

Lighting Director Iain Davidson said: “Although Sky has several studios it was a tight turnaround to fit the event in Studios 4 and 5 due to other programme commitments.

Studio 4 was available to be rigged at 10pm on Thursday and had to be ready for crew call at 6am and TX at 11.30am.”

Iain and his crew worked through the night to get the rig in place, keeping the design uncomplicated but dramatic enough to give a sense of occasion for the participants.

Richard Martin Lighting (RML) provided Sky with the lights for the event.

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beams’ and a couple of Sharpys to give a fine column of light behind the presenters. Stagebars and some Colorweb were used to ‘fill in some gaps’.

Since the programme started, it has gone from strength to strength and, to date, Sky Sports have worked with more than 2,600 schools and helped benefit more than 45,000 young people. The primary aim of the programme is to use sport stars and sport skills to help increase young people’s confidence, self-esteem, engagement in and attitudes to, learning, and improve their health and wellbeing.

After the success of the Olympics, it’s a great time to get young people involved in positive activities, which is why RML were so pleased to be able to show our support with such a great event.

The Music of the Night

Andrew Lloyd Webber is arguably the greatest composer of our generation. He has achieved popular success in musical theatre and several of his musicals have run for more than a decade, both in the West End and on Broadway.

As well as composing 13 musicals, he has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage for services to music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006.

This year, Andrew celebrated 40 years in the West End and ITV put together a very special evening of music to celebrate

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Above: Robe supplied more than 100 fixtures, including LEDWash 600s and 1200s, for the final of the 2013 Miss Universe Slovak Republic event

this. The 90-minute show, which was filmed at Fountain Studios, was presented by singer Michael Ball. Richard Martin Lighting (RML) provided the lights, with lighting design by Nigel Catmur.

The vast and impressive rig, which was home to many huge stars throughout the evening, included Chroma Batten 50 kits, Chroma Strips, 2 Lights, Sunstrips, VL1000TS, VL2000 Washes, Pixel Par 90s, MAC TW1s and Alpha Beam 300s.

Some of the biggest musical theatre stars right now and celebrities including Nicole Scherzinger and Kimberley Walsh put on a remarkable night of music, which also featured interviews with Andrew at the piano to find out some of the best unknown stories from behind the scenes.

Performances included songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, The Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love, Evita, Cats and

Tell Me On A Sunday, performed as you’ve never seen them before. And, of course, there will be a few surprises for Andrew along the way.

ROBE It’s a beautiful thing for Robe

A substantial Robe moving-light rig was used for the final of the 2013 Miss Universe Slovak Republic event: a high-profile co-production between the In Agency and the Miss Universe Organisation, staged at the Aegon Arena National Tennis Centre in Bratislava and broadcast live on national TV channel RTVS 1.

Lighting was designed by Martin Kubanka, Slovakia’s top television LD, and included more than 100 Robe fixtures, including LEDWash 600s and 1200s, ROBIN MMX Spots, ROBIN 300 and 600 Beams and LEDBeam 100s.

Kubanka worked closely with set designer Dano Šichma on creating the show aesthetics, which also featured a plethora of LED screens and lightsources in addition to all the Robes. The majority of the lighting and video, together with the L-Acoustics Kara sound system and more than 50 points of rigging, was supplied by leading Slovakian technical solutions provider, Q-99.

The slickly choreographed presentation was directed by Thomas Eibner and was certainly a cut above the average beauty pageant in terms of production values.

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Kubanka has been using Robe products in his work for more than 10 years and now even more than ever with the latest ROBIN ranges.

Kubanka’s biggest challenge was to keep the lighting looking interesting and different throughout, offering new and inventive pictures, as well as to light the 12 contestants perfectly for the camera – for which they must have fabulous skin tones. For this task he used 10 carefully positioned LEDWash 1200s as 3,200K soft lights in the central area of the stage.

He also worked closely with Eibner and DoP Vladimir Durcansky to ensure the cameras could get a diversity shots and that there were no ‘black holes’ in any of them.

Additionally, there were a number of entertainment sections to the event, which needed a different approach to lighting. There were a couple of ‘full-production’ dance numbers and a solo performance by singer Peter Cmorik: a former ‘Slovakian Superstar’ winner.

The ROBIN 600 Beams, LEDWash 600s and 1200s, MMX Spots and 300 Beams were positioned on a series of over-stage trusses, including six striking S-shaped mini-beam trusses over the mid and forestage area.

The 10 MMXs were in the back and on the upstage sections of the S-trusses, used for beam effects, as ‘sharp lights’, as well as for texturing the floor.

For Cmorik’s rendition of Robbie Williams’ ‘Angel’, the side LED screens split apart to reveal vertical trussing loaded in with 24 additional LEDBeam 100s and some active Sunstrips for extra wow factor and to surprise the audience!

Kubanka programmed and controlled all the lighting, which included other moving lights, generics, strobes and several other LED lightsources from a grandMA2 full-size console.

Another grandMA2 full size ran all the playback video – stored on MA VPU media servers – and was operated by Michael Brna. The pyro was fired from a grandMA series 1 light by Robert Plunar, which included a Power Jet CO2 system.

Robe in Clash of the Choirs, Soweto

Once again Robe was right at the heart of the action in South Africa when specified for filming of the newest South African TV talent show series, Clash of the Choirs.

The Endemol SA-produced talent show presented by Bonang Matheba was broadcast on DSTv channel Mzansi Magic and had a massive impact in a country with a fantastically rich musical culture of choir music and performance.

Seven amateur choirs from different provinces were

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mentored by celebrity musicians. They were competing for a prize of 500,000 ZAR, 250,000 ZAR of which goes to the winning choir and 250,000 ZAR to a charity of their choice.

Lighting for the series was designed by Peter Reick from Blond Productions. The rig included more than 100 Robe moving lights,which were a combination of Blond’s own hire stock and the Soweto Theatre’s in-house rig.

The full Robe count totaled 12 MMX Spots, 48 LEDBeam 100s and 12 Scan 575XTs supplied by Blond. They were joined by 12 ROBIN 600E Spots and 30 LEDWash 300s owned by the theatre, all programmed and controlled by Reick running a grandMA2 light console.

Blond devised the whole visual concept for the show and also supplied the sound, LED screens and set – the latter designed by Wayne Sproule from Pendragon Dezigns and built by Dream Sets.

Two imposing sets of steps onstage provided different levels on which the choirs – of 20 members each – could perform.

The challenge was fitting an elaborate stage set into a relatively compact space, but the results were pleasing and expanded the perceived size of the space, making it appear far larger.

The stage area needed lighting carefully to perpetuate this impression of largeness, so lights were integral to the visual plan from the start. Lighting also had to be capable of covering the whole stage area evenly – at peak times, up to 140 people could be on it!

The MMXs were positioned upstage at the back behind the horseshoe and used for gobos and beam effects, for which they are renowned. They were supported by the ROBIN 600E Spots, which produced variations on these effects.

The judges’ table, meanwhile, was internally lit with Anolis ArcLink 4 RGBW. The theatre setting provided an interesting and atmospheric backdrop for the new series, complete with live audience and with the lighting helping to create a studio vibe, and the show quickly attracted a massive following.

ROSCO Rosco acquires GAM

Rosco Laboratories has announced it has signed an agreement to acquire the assets of Los Angeles-based GAM Products Inc. The addition of GAM’s widely regarded products, such as GAMColor, GAM Patterns, Blackwrap and TwinSpin, among others, will dramatically expand the creative solutions Rosco offers to designers, technicians and artists.

For more than 35 years, GAM has provided high-quality lighting products to the theatre and film community. Rosco will continue to market and promote them worldwide through its extensive global distribution network.

GAM was founded in 1975 by Joe Tawil and has pioneered a range of tools now considered to be indispensable to generations of lighting professionals.

Founded in 1910, Rosco Laboratories provides unique and effective solutions to the global community of lighting professionals in entertainment, film, architecture and photography. With 13 offices and more 600 distributors, Rosco products are available virtually anywhere in the world.

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VIEW window panels, six Rosco VIEW motorised camera filters and a Rosco VIEW Graphic User Interface, which allows the control room to rotate all of the camera filters remotely and ‘dial-in’ the exact window exposure they need at that exact moment.

London-based Scena Productions conceived, designed and installed a custom frame system to meet landlord requirements by avoiding any penetrations to the window mullions, which allowed the Rosco VIEW panels to be installed quickly and easily in front of the studio windows.

A decorative strip that attached to the frames magnetically added the final touch, which was to replicate the internal appearance of the windows.

For more information, visit www.rosco.com/VIEW

SCHNICK SCHNACK SYSTEMS Schnick Schnack Systems gives The Voice an accent

Schnick Schnack Systems’ LED accent lighting was chosen

by Designer Oscar Dominguez, of Darkfire Lighting Design, for NBC’s The Voice.

The quality, camera-friendly, calibrated colours light the triangular podium on the front of each judge’s chair.

Naturally, whenever a critical red decision button is pushed, the LEDs behind the Plexiglas podium change colours and the chair spins around.

“The system consists of 42 10-inch LED S-Strips and 14 fiveinch LED S-Strips, all driven by a Schnick Schnack Systems’ Long Distance (LD) Controller,” says Melanie Lekaj, of TMB Sales.

The strips used on The Voice are ideal for backlighting set elements such as stairs, edging strips and translucent surfaces, or for accentuating set edges and profiles. They can be used as a backlight with only three-inch clearance from the backlit material, creating a harmonious blending of the individual LEDs within a strip. Without diffusion material in front, they can also be used as a low-resolution LED video matrix for direct flicker-free viewing.

LumenRadio wireless control at Grammy Awards

ITV Granada Reports shows off its new view

Manchester, UK – ITV’s BAFTA award-winning Granada Reports recently relocated to MediaCityUK and installed Rosco VIEW to enable the studio to balance the exposure through the window in order to feature the iconic Manchester backdrop outside their new set.

Rosco VIEW, a unique two-part window control system consisting of wide-width polarising panels installed on windows and a matching polarizing filter for the camera, ended up being the solution they chose to control the exposure of the external light as seen through the window.

The scope of the project involved 30 custom-cut Rosco

How do you control 28 four-foot lighted spheres suspended above award winners at the 2013 Grammy Awards? Easy – with LumenRadio Receiver Cards inside each sphere and a LumenRadio Flex transmitter located backstage.

Conceived and produced by Moment Factory of Montreal, with content by Hubert Gagnon of Blackout Design, the fun set was designed and built by Quebec-based Teksho. Featuring illuminated spheres rising from the stage floor like gigantic champagne bubbles in slow motion, the number climaxed with an actual on-stage rainstorm. LEDs inside each of the orbs were controlled by a grandMA2 at FOH, driving an NPU backstage, sending DMX to the LumenRadio Flex Transmitter. The Flex Transmitter sent wireless DMX to each of the frosted white spheres, with continual control feedback of the entire wireless system.

LumenRadio dealer Theatrixx Technologies of Montreal supplied the LumenRadio units to Moment Factory, worldrenowned designers/producers of prestigious multimedia environments for events, tours and installations such as the TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show, Powerball NBA Halftime Show, Madonna MDNA Tour, Jay-Z at Carnegie Hall, Microsoft Windows 8 launch and much, much more.

STAGE ELECTRICS Stage Electrics completes management buyout

Stage Electrics has announced a management buyout of the business from the estate of David Whitehead.

The management buyout was fully supported and agreed

by David prior to his stepping down from the role of Managing Director in May 2012 as a way to position Stage Electrics for future growth and security.

The new shareholders combine considerable business experience with a strong knowledge of the entertainment technology industry and are made up of: Trevor Smallwood, Dan Aldridge, Bob Smith, James Irvine, Anna Western, Adam Blaxill, Adrian Searle and Ian Tregaskis.

Under the new ownership structure, Trevor Smallwood will continue as Chairman of the Board and the executive directors remain unchanged.

Dan said: “Stage Electrics is in a solid position; we have an order book that is in growth, an experienced team and a strong operation. With a business plan for growth and clearly identified market opportunities, there is a strong future ahead of us. In order to meet these opportunities, I will continue to build my team to ensure we have the best mix of talent and relevant experience to support our strategy. As we enter our next phase of growth, I am determined to ensure that Stage Electrics retains the integrity and brand values that it is known for.”

David sadly passed away in February 2013 after a courageous fight against cancer.

UNUSUAL RIGGING Ant & Dec’s Unusual tower of terror

With Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway challenge standing at two all, the series decider on Saturday 6 April saw the pair climb a ‘Tower of Terror’ at ITV Studios on London’s South Bank. Giving an added edge to the challenge, the 50ft tower, designed and built by Unusual Rigging, was suspended 120ft above the ground.

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Describing the tower, Unusual’s Technical Director Robin Elias said: “The challenge for us was to design a safety system that would allow them to perform a daring and exciting challenge without taking anything away from the feat itself. We were responsible for the safety management of the event and, specifically, the safety management of working – or in this case, playing – at height.”

Working to a brief from Producer John Adams, Unusual had just three days to come up with the structure, which would challenge the boys to the limit. The two 50ft square truss columns with randomly placed Perspex panels forced the climbers to constantly change sides on the way up. Once at the top – and standing on just a 20-inch square platform – the winner had to reach a large button to ignite the pyro contained within a circular truss.

To add a certain frisson to their climb, the Tower of Terror was suspended from a crane and swayed in the wind under the trained eye of Unusual’s Jason White, the approved lift supervisor.

Elias added: “We used our own GP truss because it doesn’t have pins or clips sticking out, which could catch hands or clothing, and also provided the crane, crew and all safety equipment. The system was designed so that if either Ant or Dec lost their footing or hand hold, they would fall away from the structure and be belayed down to the ground.

“We had no margin for error. The tower was set up the day before and stand-ins rehearsed to enable the lighting and camera crew to get the right shots, but Ant and Dec did it live and completely unrehearsed. They were both extremely appreciative once they were back on terra firma!”

WHITE LIGHT White Light supports 2013 Olivier Awards: Paule Constable wins Best Lighting Design

Paule Constable has won the Best Lighting Design Award, supported by White Light, at the 2013 Olivier Awards, which celebrate the best productions to open in London’s West End over the last 12 months. The awards were presented on 28 April in a star-studded ceremony at London’s Royal Opera House.

Constable won the award – her fourth, having previously won in 2005, 2006 and 2009 – for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which opened at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre and is now running at the Apollo Theatre in the West End. The show ultimately collected seven awards: for Best New Play, Best Director (Marianne Elliott), Best Set Design (Bunny Christie and Finn Ross), Best Sound Design (Ian Dickinson and Adrian Sutton), Best Actor (Luke Treadaway) and Best Supporting Actress (Nicola Walker) as well as Best Lighting Design.

Other winners during the evening included Top Hat, for which Jon Morrell received the Best Costume Design Award, Bill Deamer won Best Theatre Choreography and the show itself collected the Best New Musical prize; Sweeney Todd, for which Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton collected the Best Actor and Actress in a Musical Awards; The Audience, for which Helen Mirren won Best Actress in a Play and Richard McCable

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won Best Supporting Actor in a Play; A Chorus Line, with Leigh Zimmerman winning Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical; Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Best Revival); and Billy Elliot the Musical, which won the BBC Radio 2 Audience Award.

As well as being Olivier winners, all of these productions have one other thing in common: they use lighting rigs supplied by White Light.

In addition to supporting the Best Lighting Design Award, White Light also supplied the lighting rig for the ceremony itself, designed by Ben Cracknell, as well as for the outdoor stage in the Covent Garden Piazza and the red-carpet area.

The annual spectacle was the perfect opportunity to introduce the award-winning Clay Paky Sharpy Wash fixtures, which appeared on the outdoor stage of the Covent Garden Piazza, while Clay Paky Sharpy profiles were put to good use on the indoor stage. A new addition to White Light’s hire stock, the Sharpy, Wash was recently named winner of the LDI 2012 Debut Product Awards.

This is the third year White Light has supplied the show and the second year it has been held at the Royal Opera House, where careful logistical planning is required to get the rig in around the theatre’s performance schedule. For the first time in 10 years, the results could be seen on television with a highlights show on ITV immediately following the ceremony.

“We congratulate Paule, all of the other winners, all of the nominees and all of the people who’ve worked so hard over the last few years to raise the profile of the Olivier Awards, to the point where it made it back on to national TV this year: a fantastic opportunity to show what theatre is all about to those who might not normally be interested in it,” said White Light’s Managing Director Bryan Raven.

Pictured above: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the Apollo Theatre. Photo: Brinkhoff/Mogenburg

White Light announces enhanced sales distribution network

Entertainment lighting specialist White Light is pleased to announce its streamlined White Light Distribution network, focused on business-to-business sales and support for exclusive products and brands.

The enhanced distribution network will provide sales and support to dealers across the UK, Europe and worldwide.

The new structure allows dealer access to products from

13 exclusive lighting, rigging and effects manufacturers, including ADB Lighting Technologies, Altman, ArKaos Pro, CORE Lighting, Chromlech, Galaxia Electronics, Interactive Technologies, James Thomas Engineering, JB Lighting, Look Solutions, LSC Lighting, Rainbow Colour Changers, and Wireless Solution.

White Light Sales Director Peter Threadgold explained the company’s focus on these essential brands, paired with expanded services. “We have always been dedicated to bringing quality, innovative products to the industry,” he said.

“We are strengthening our commitment to that initiative by focusing on technology and support that will add real value to our network and the industry as a whole.”

Fully backed by White Light’s industry knowledge, extensive resources and experienced development team, White Light Distribution will give dealers the resources they need from a name they trust. Business customers will benefit from additional sales, technical and marketing support, as well as product demos and training.

White Light named authorised UK distributor for ADB Lighting

ADB Lighting Technologies is pleased to announce White Light as its main distributor for the UK, continuing a long relationship between ADB and the UK-based lighting specialist. White Light provides sales, hire and technical services to entertainment, presentation and event industries across the UK, Europe and worldwide. The company recently supplied ADB Eurodim TwinTech dimmers to the English National Opera for installation at the London Coliseum.

White Light will offer sales and support for ADB’s extensive range of high-performance lighting solutions, including luminaires, dimmers and control systems for use in theatrical, television and film applications.

ADB Lighting Technologies, founded in 1920, has more than 80 years of experience designing and manufacturing stage and studio lighting equipment. The team at ADB has a wealth of experience in stage and studio lighting that, combined with a comprehensive range of high-quality products, is a key strength that makes ADB the preferred partner for theatre and television lighting professionals around the world. For more information, visit www.adblighting.com

XL VIDEO & EVENTS XL Video supplies The BRITS 2013

XL Video supplied LED screens, projection, camera, PPU and screen management system for The BRIT Awards 2013 with MasterCard, staged at London’s O2 Arena and presented by James Corden.

It’s the 11th consecutive year that XL and Production Manager Paul Wood have been involved as video supplier for the high-profile annual music awards, again working with BRIT Awards Productions (Papilo) and BRITs TV. This year’s show featured show-stopping live performances from Muse, Justin Timberlake, Robbie Williams, Taylor Swift, Emeli Sande and One Direction, among others.

Peter Bingemann’s set design included a dynamic TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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backdrop of three-dimensional ribbons of varying sizes, half of which were simple light boxes and half ‘video ribbons, using a total of 120sq m of Pixled FX-11 LED tiles to fill them.

The main stage screen – which flew out to allow band entrances and exits – was made from Absen 6mm LED and measured 6m wide by 10m high.

During band changeovers, a 6m wide by 3.5m high ‘closedown’ screen built from Lighthouse 12mm LED screen and three video ribbons flew in downstage, while awards were presented on the B Stage in the middle of the audience.

For One Direction, XL supplied the two LED screens needed for an oversized scenic pinball machine on which the UK’s number-one boy band performed. A five-metre-square section of Barco NX6 (6mm resolution) formed the scoreboard and the playfield floor was made up of Pixled F12 (12mm resolution), 3m wide by 6m high.

Two 8m wide by 4.5m high Lighthouse R7 screens were supplied in the standard stage left and right positions, with four 16ft by 9ft ‘repeater’ projection screens positioned around the O2 Arena to ensure that everyone had a good view of the stage action and nominations’ packages.

XL Events joins CBeebies on Tour

For the sixth year of BBC Worldwide’s CBeebies on Tour, XL Events joined in the fun once again, supplying LED, camera system, playback and custom LED set elements.

The tour saw Justin Fletcher, MBE, bring together his favourite CBeebies characters for the first time. It toured UK arenas across the three-week Easter school holidays, playing up to three shows per day, and included Robert The Robot and Little Monster from Justin’s House.

The main upstage screen was made up of XL’s Lighthouse R7 LED, with five additional custom-built moveable screens on the stage constructed from Pixled FX-11.

Content for the screens was played back via one of XL’s Catalyst media servers, driven by a grandMA2 Wing controller. Nev Bull managed the Catalyst for XL, with Tim Bolland and Ade Moore looking after the LED screens.

XL Video supplies video package for the Oliviers

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for the awards ceremony.

At London’s Royal Opera House, XL supplied the centre-stage LED screen, built from Pixled FX-11, 12 tiles wide by seven tiles high, which linked up with the ITV broadcast feed and displayed live camera relay, VT clips and nomination packages.

The main screen was matched on either side by two dynamic portrait-orientated screens measuring five by six tiles and five by eight tiles, respectively, which showed nominee logos, special guest awards and Olivier logos.

Content for the side LED screens was fed by XL’s Catalyst media servers (main and ‘hot’ backup) programmed and operated by Dan Bond, with the main screen fully operated by the ITV broadcast team.

XL Video also supplied scenic LED for the band risers in the form of Barco MiStrips. These were controlled via an additional dedicated main and backup lighting Catalyst unit, triggered from a grandMA2 console supplied by White Light.

For the presenters, Sheridan Smith and Hugh Bonneville, XL supplied a 65-inch Panasonic plasma screen for autocue, supported by several more plasma screens providing relay feeds to the press office, winners’ area and Royal Box. All of XL’s LED at the Opera House was managed by Graham Vinall, Jolyon Oliver, Rob Smith, Steve ‘Spooky’ Parkinson and Dan Bond, led by Project Manager Ed Cooper.

In addition to the Opera House ceremony, XL supplied video for the live, outside broadcast site in Covent Garden Piazza. During the ceremony the broadcast feed cut to the piazza for the announcement of the special BBC Radio 2 Audience Award – to Billy Elliot the Musical – and for a oneoff performance from the cast of Loserville.

In Covent Garden two four-tile-by-three-tile IMAG screens, formed from Lighthouse R7, showed a live relay of the ITV feed. Prior to the show, XL’s Catalyst media server, running via a Roland V-800HD mixing desk, supplied the screens with footage of the award nominees interspersed with advertising from the Society of London Theatre.

XL’s screens and Catalyst in Covent Garden were managed by Ed Goddard, Catalyst Programmer Ingi Bekk and LED technicians Jan Van Geet and Gary Burchett.

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sponsors@stld.org.uk

members@stld.org.uk

Publicity Andrew Harris

Iain Davidson 07811 256 283

07973 745 583

paulmiddleton@stld.org.uk

Advertising Sales John King 07860 759 294

publicity@stld.org.uk

iaindavidson@stld.org.uk

Diary Lee Allen

Website Ian Hillson

07711 088 964

johnking@stld.org.uk

Website Richard Bowles 07973 152 682

Picture courtesy of Chris Capstick

leeallen@stld.org.uk

Les McCallum 07940 280 268

lesmccallum@stld.org.uk

ianhillson@stld.org.uk

Rick Dines

07780 707 169

rickdines@stld.org.uk

richardbowles@stld.org.uk

Jonathan Taylor

07774 698 847

jonathantaylor@stld.org.uk TV Lighting | Summer 2013

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Society sponsors

A.C. Entertainment Technologies Ltd (Gordon Smith) Centauri House, Hillbottom Road, Sands Industrial Estate, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire HP12 4HQ Tel: 01494 446 000 ~ Fax: 01494 461 024 ~ E-Mail: gordon.smith@ac-et.com ~ Web: www.aclighting.com

Ambersphere Solutions Ltd now incorporating MA Lighting (Glyn O’Donoghue) Unit 3 Alliance Court, Alliance Road, Park Royal, London W3 0RB Tel: 020 8992 6369 ~ E-Mail: glyn@amberspere.co.uk ~ Web: www.ambersphere.co.uk

Anna Valley (Part of Shooting Partners group) (Mark Holdway, Doug Hammond) Unit J12 Brooklands Close, Windmill Road, Sunbury-On-Thames, Middlesex TW16 7DX Tel: 020 8941 4500 ~ Fax: +44(0)1932 761 591 ~ Web: www.annavalley.co.uk

ARRI CT Ltd (Andy Barnett, Siobhan Daly, Lee Romney) 2 Highbridge, Oxford Road, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 1LX Tel: 01895 457 000 ~ Fax: 01895 457 001 ~ E-Mail: sales@arri-gb.com ~ Web: www.arri.com

ARRI Lighting Rental Ltd (Tommy Moran, Mike O’Hara) 2 Highbridge, Oxford Road, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 1LX ~ Tel: 01895 457 200 ~ Fax: 01895 457 201 Manchester 0161 736 8034 (Jimmy Reeves) ~ E-Mail: mohara@arrirental.com ~ Web: www.arri.com

Artistic Licence Engineering Ltd (Wayne Howell) 24 Forward Drive, Christchurch Industrial Estate, Harrow, Middlesex HA3 8NT Tel: 020 8863 4515 ~ Fax: 020 8426 0551 ~ E-Mail: sales@artisticlicence.com ~ Web: www.artisticlicence.com

Aurora Lighting Hire Ltd (Nick Edwards) Unit 4, Bristol Road, Metropolitan Estate, Greenford UB6 8UW Tel: 020 8813 2777 ~ Mobile: 07710 261 838 ~ E-Mail: nick.edwards@auroratv.co.uk ~ Web: www.auroratv.co.uk

Avolites (Koy Neminathan) 184 Park Avenue, Park Royal, London NW10 7XL Tel: 020 8965 8522 ~ Fax: 020 8965 0290 ~ E-Mail: koy@avolites.com ~ Web: www.avolites.com

Barbizon Europe Ltd (Tom McGrath) Unit 5 Saracen Industrial Area, Mark Road, Hemel Hempsted, Hertfordshire HP2 7BJ ~ Tel: 01442 260 600 ~ Fax: 01442 261 611 E-Mail: tmcgrath@barbizon.com ~ Web: www.barbizon.com

BBC Studios and Post Production Ltd (Danny Popkin) 77–79 Charlotte Street, London W1T 4PW Tel: 020 3327 6900 ~ E-Mail: danny.popkin@bbc.co.uk ~ Web: www.bbcstudiosandpostproduction.com

BBC Academy (Tim Wallbank) Room A16, BBC Wood Norton, Evesham, Worcestershire WR11 4YB Tel: 0370 010 0264 ~ Fax: 0370 010 0265 ~ E-Mail: bbcacademy@bbc.co.uk ~ Web: www.bbcacademy.com

Chris James & Co. Ltd (Barry Frankling) 43 Colville Road, Acton, London W3 8BL Tel: 020 8896 1772 ~ Fax: 020 8896 1773 ~ E-Mail: info@chrisjamesfilter.com ~ Web: www.chrisjamesfilter.com

Cirro Lite (Europe) Ltd (John Coppen, David Morphy, Frieder Hockheim) 3 Barrett’s Green Road, London NW10 7AE Tel: 020 8955 6700 ~ Fax: 020 8961 9343 ~ E-Mail: mail@cirrolite.com ~ Web: www.cirrolite.com

Clay Paky S p A (Davide Barbetta) via Pastrengo 3/B, 24068 Seriate (BG), Italy Tel: +39 335 72.333.75 ~ Fax: +39 035.30.18.76 ~E-Mail: davide.barbetta@claypaky.it ~ Web: www.claypaky.it

Cooper Controls Ltd (Ken Berreen) 20 Greenhill Crescent, Watford Business Park, Watford, Herts WD18 8JA ~ Tel: +44 (0)1923 495495 ~ Fax: +44 (0)1923 228796 Mob: +44 (0)7921 742803 ~ E-Mail: Ken.Berreen@CooperIndustries.com ~ Web: www.coopercontrol.com

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Please mention Television Lighting and Design when contacting sponsors

Doughty Engineering Ltd (Julian Chiverton, Mervyn Lister, Stephen Wright) Crow Arch Lane, Ringwood, Hampshire BH24 1NZ Tel: 01425 478 961 ~ Fax: 01425 474 481 E-Mail: sales@doughty-engineering.co.uk ~ Web: www.doughty-engineering.co.uk

ELP (Ronan Willson, Tony Slee, John Singer, Darren Fletcher) 15 North Gate, Alconbury Airfield, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire PE28 4WX Tel: 01480 443 800 ~ Fax: 01480 443 888 ~ E-Mail: info@elp.tv ~ Web: www.elp.tv ~ Elstree Office: 020 8324 2100 ~ Manchester Office: 0161 300 2922

Electronic Theatre Controls Ltd (Mark White, Jeremy Roberts) Unit 26-28, Victoria Industrial Estate, Victoria Road, London W3 6UU Tel: 020 8896 1000 ~ Fax: 020 8896 2000 ~ E-Mail: mwhite@etceurope.com ~ Web: www.etcconnect.com

Film & TV Services Ltd (Julie Fegan, Eddie Fegan) Unit 3, Matrix Park, Coronation Road, Park Royal, London NW10 7PH Tel: 020 8961 0090 ~ Fax: 020 8961 8635 ~ E-Mail: mail@ftvs.co.uk ~ Web: www.ftvs.co.uk

Finelight Ltd (Simon Perrott) 708B, Tudor Industrial Estate, Abbey Road, Park Royal, London NW10 7UY Tel: 020 8453 0049 ~ Mobile: 07968 581 440 ~ E-Mail: simon@finelight.co.uk ~ Web: www.finelight.co.uk

Flashlight Ltd (Andy Dodd, Rob Williamson) Unit A3, Axis Point, Hill Top Road, Heywood, Greater Manchester OL10 2RQ Tel: 01706 625 866 ~ Fax: 01706 620 756 ~ E-Mail: sales@flash-light.org.uk ~ Web: www.flash-light.org.uk

Fountain Studios (Mariana Spater) The Fountain studios, 128 Wembley Park Drive, Wembley HA9 8HP Tel: 020 8900 5800 ~ E-Mail: Mariana.spater@ftv.co.uk ~ Web: www.ftv.co.uk

Gekko Technology (Ian Muir) Units 3–4, Cotton Drive, Dalehouse Lane, Kenilworth CV8 2UE Tel: +44 (0) 844 800 5326 ~ E-Mail: ian@gekkotechnology.com ~ Web: www.gekkotechnology.com

Green Hippo (Samantha Bailey) Unit 307 Parma House, Clarendon Road, Wood Green N22 6UL Tel: +44 (0)203 301 4561 ~ E-Mail: sam@green-hippo.com ~ Web: www.green-hippo.com

Havells-Sylvania Ltd (David Short) Havells-Sylvania Ltd, Avis Way, Newhaven BN9 0ED E-Mail: david.short@havells-sylvania.com ~ Web: www.havells-sylvania.com

Hawthorn Lighting (Dave Slater, May Lee) Head Office 01664 821111 - London Office 020 8955 6900 info@hawthorns.uk.com - www.hawthorns.uk.com

HSL Group Holdings LTD (Simon Stuart, Mike Oates) Unit E&F, Glenfield Park, Philips Road, Blackburn, Lancashire BB1 5PF Tel: 01254 698 808 ~ Fax: 01254 698 835 ~ E-Mail: hire@hslgroup.com ~ Web: www.hslgroup.com

James Thomas Engineering Ltd (Paul Young) Navigation Complex, Navigation Road, Digilis Trading Estate, Worcestershire WR5 3DE Tel: 01905 363 600~ Fax: 01905 363 601 ~ E-Mail: pauly@jamesthomas.co.uk ~ Web: www.jamesthomas.co.uk

Key Light Hire Ltd (Alex Hambi) Unit 24, Sovereign Park, Coronation Road, Park Royal NW10 7QP Tel: 020 8963 9931 ~ Fax: 020 8961 236 ~ Mobile: 07949 686 802 ~ E-Mail: alex@keylight.tv ~ Web: www.keylight.tv

Lights Camera Action (Nick Shapley) Unit 30, 8 Taunton Road, The Metropolitan Centre, Greenford, Middlesex UB6 8UQ Tel: 020 8833 7600 ~ Fax: 020 8575 8219 ~ Web: www.lcauk.com

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Society sponsors

Lee Filters Ltd (Eddie Ruffell, Paul Topliss, Ralph Young) Central Way, Walworth Industrial Estate, Andover, Hampshire SP10 5AN Tel: 01264 366 245 ~ Fax: 01264 355 058 ~ E-Mail: ecruffell@leefilters.com ~ Web: www.leefilters.com

Lightfactor Sales Ltd (Peter Coles) 20 Greenhill Crescent, Watford Business Park, Watford, Hertfordshire WD18 8JA Tel: 01923 698 080 ~ Fax: 01923 698 081 ~ E-Mail: info@lightfactor.co.uk ~ Web: www.lightfactor.co.uk

Lighting Logic Ltd (Mick Cocker, Matt Miles) The Hopkilns Building, Goblands Farm Business Centre, Cemetery Lane, Hadlow, Kent T11 0LT Tel: 0845 260 0540 ~ Fax: 0845 260 0541 ~ E-Mail: mick@lightinglogic.co.uk ~ Web: www.lightinglogic.co.uk

LSI Projects (Russell Dunsire, Nick Mobsby) 15, Woking Business Park, Albert Drive, Woking, Surrey GU21 5JY Tel: 01483 764 646 ~ Fax: 01483 769 955 ~ E-Mail: nickM@lsiprojects.com ~ Web: www.lsiprojects.com

Martin Professional Plc ( Mike Walker) Martin Professional PLC, 7.G.2, The Leathermarket, 11–13 Weston Street, London SE1 3ER Tel: 020 3207 2975 ~ E-Mail: michael.walker@martin.dk ~ Web: www.martinpro.co.uk

MEMS Power Generation (Mark Diffey) Beechings Way, Gillingham, Kent ME8 6PS Tel: 08452 230 400 ~ Fax: 01634 263666 ~ E-Mail: sales@mems.com~ Web: www.mems.com

MGC Lighting Group (James Greig) 1 Sovereign Centre, Farthing Road, Ipswich, Suffolk IP1 5AP Tel: 01473 466 300 ~ Fax: 01473 240 081 ~ E-Mail: uksales@mgc-lighting.com~ Web: www.mgc-lighting.com

OSRAM Ltd (Terri Pearson) OSRAM House, Waterside Drive, Langley, Berkshire SL3 6EZ Tel: 01753 484 275 ~ Fax: 01753 484 165 ~ E-Mail: displayoptic@osram.co.uk ~ Web: www.osram.com

Panalux Limited (Ed Pagett, Simon Roose) Unit 21, The Metropolitan Centre, Derby Road, Greenford, London UB6 8UJ Tel: 020 8832 4800 ~ Fax: 020 8832 4811 ~ E-Mail: info@panalux.biz ~ Web: www.panalux.biz

Philips Entertainment BV. (Mike Goldberg) Marssteden 152, Enschede 7547 TD, the Netherlands Tel: +44 (0)7974 752646

Philips Lighting UK Ltd (Sharon Banting) Philips Centre, Guildford Business Park, Guildford, Surrey GU2 8XH Tel: 07774 122 735 ~ Fax: 01296 670 956 E-Mail: sharon.banting@philips.com ~ Web: www.lighting.philips.com

Photon Beard Ltd (Peter Daffarn, Mike Perry, Simon Larn) Unit K3, Cherry Court Way, Stanbridge Road, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire LU7 8UH Tel: 01525 850 911 ~ Fax: 01525 850 922 ~ E-Mail: info@photonbeard.com ~ Web: www.photonbeard.com

Pinewood Group (Simon Honey – Head of Studio Ops, Peter Lawes – Production Lighting Manager, Paul Darbyshire – Operations Director) Pinewood Road, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire SL0 0NH Tel: 01753 785 200 ~ Fax: 01753 656 103 E-Mail: simon.honey@pinewoodshepperton.com ~ Web: www.pinewoodshepperton.com

PLASA (Norah Phillips) The Professional Lighting and Sound Association is a trade association representing companies and individuals who work in the TV, film, entertainment, installation and leisure industries. Its aim is to develop and promote all aspects of the industry on a worldwide basis, acting in the common interests of its membership.

Redoubt House, 1 Edward Street, Eastbourne, Sussex BN23 8AS Tel: 01323 524 120 ~ Fax: 01323 524 121 ~ E-Mail: norah.phillips@plasa.org ~ Web: www.plasa.org

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Please mention Television Lighting and Design when contacting sponsors

Production Resource Group (Mick Healey,Kelly Cornfield, Martin Locket) The Hoover Building, Western Avenue, Perivale UB6 8DW ~ The Cofton Centre, Groveley Lane, Longbridge, Birmingham B31 4PT Tel: 0845 470 6400 ~ Fax: 0845 470 6401 ~ E-Mail: prglighting@prg.com ~ Web: www.prglighting.co.uk

Projected Image UK Ltd (Jim Douglas) Unit 17, Hoults Estate, Walker Road, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne NE6 2HL. Tel: 0191 265 9832 ~ Fax: 0191 265 8742 ~ E-Mail: gobo@projectedimage.com ~ Web: www.projectedimage.com

Pulsar Light Of Cambridge Ltd (Andy Graves, Paul Mardon, Snowy Johnson) 3 Coldham’s Business Park, Norman Way, Cambridge CB1 3LH Tel: 01223 403 500 ~ Fax: 01223 403 501 ~ E-Mail: andy@pulsarlight.com ~ Web: www.pulsarlight.com

Richard Martin Lighting Ltd (Richard Martin, Steve Wells, Amy Helps) Unit 24, Sovereign Park, Coronation Road, Park Royal NW10 7QP ~ RML Admin: Lantern House, Old Town, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire GL56 0LW Tel: 020 8965 3209 Fax: 020 8965 5562 ~ E-Mail: info@richardmartinlighting.co.uk ~ Web: www.richardmartinlighting.co.uk

Robe UK Ltd (Ashley Lewis, Mick Hannaford, Steve Eastham) 3 Spinney View, Stone Circle Road, Round Spinney Industrial Estate, Northampton NN3 8RQ Tel: 01604 741 000 ~ Fax: 01604 741 041 ~ E-Mail: info@robeuk.com ~ Web: www.robeuk.com

Roscolab Ltd (Denise Piguet) Blanchard Works, Kangley Bridge Road, Sydenham, London SE26 5AQ Tel: 020 8659 2300 ~ Fax: 020 8659 3153 ~ E-Mail: marketing@rosco-europe.com~ Web: www.rosco.com

Schnick-Schnack-Systems GmbH (Thomas Werr) Mathias-Bruggen-Strasse 79, 50829, Germany E-Mail: thomas.werr@schnickschnacksystems.com ~ Web: english.schnickschnacksystems.com

Sony UK Ltd (Daniel Robb) The Heights, Brooklands, Weybridge, Surrey KT13 0XW Tel: 01932 816 368 ~ Fax: 01932 817 014 ~ Neil: 07774 142 724 ~ E-Mail: Jane.Green@eu.sony.com ~ Web: sonybiz.net/uk

Specialz Ltd (Dave Smith) Unit 2, Kingston Industrial Estate, 81-86 Glover Street, Birmingham B9 4EN Tel: 0121 766 7100 & 7110 ~ Fax: 0121 766 7113 ~ E-Mail: info@specialz.co.uk ~ Web: www.specialz.co.uk

Stage Electrics Ltd (Mark Burnett, Adrian Searle) Third Way, Avonmouth, Bristol BS11 9YL ~ Tel: 0117 938 4000 ~ Tel Mark: 07890 271 535 ~ Tel Adrian: 07836 540 421 Fax: 0117 916 2828 ~ E-Mail: sales@stage-electrics.co.uk ~ Web: www.stage-electrics.co.uk

The Hospital Club Studios (Samantha Dunlop) 4 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ Tel: 020 7170 9112 ~ Fax: 020 7170 9102 ~ E-Mail: samd@thehospitalclub.com ~ Web: www.thehospital.co.uk

The London Studios (Dave Stevens) Upper Ground, London SE1 9LT Tel: 020 7157 5555 ~ Fax: 020 7157 5757 ~ E-Mail: dave.stevens@londonstudios.co.uk ~ Web: www.londonstudios.co.uk

TMB (Paul Hartley, Bill Anderson) 21 Armstrong Way, Southall UB2 4SD Tel: 020 8574 9700 ~ Fax: 020 8574 9701 ~ E-Mail: tmb-info@tmb.com ~ Web: www.tmb.com

TSL Teknique Systems Ltd PO Box 3587, Glasgow G73 9DX Tel: 07860 290 637 ~ Web: www.tekniquesystems.com

Unusual Rigging (Mark Priestley) The Wharf, Bugbrooke, Northamptonshire NN7 3QB Tel: 01604 830 083 ~ Fax: 01604 831 144 ~ E-Mail: mark.priestley@unusual.co.uk ~ Web: www.unusual.co.uk

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Please mention Television Lighting and Design when contacting sponsors

VectorWorks (Martyn Horne) Computers Unlimited, The Technology Park, Colindeep Lane, London NW9 6BX Tel: 020 8200 8282 ~ Fax: 020 8358 9479 ~ E-Mail: 3ddesign@unlimited.com ~ Web: www.vectorworks.uk.com

White Light Ltd (Bryan Raven, John Simpson, Jason Larcombe) 20 Merton Industrial Park, Jubilee Way, London SW19 3WL Tel: 020 8254 4800 ~ Fax: 020 8254 4801 ~ E-Mail: info@WhiteLight.Ltd.uk ~ Web: www.WhiteLight.Ltd.uk HireTel: 020 8254 4820 ~ Hire Fax: 020 8254 4821 ~ Sales Tel: 020 8254 4840 ~ Sales Fax: 020 8254 4841

XL Video Ltd (Malcolm Whittall) 2 Eastman Way, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP2 7DU Tel: 01442 849 400 ~ Fax: 01442 849 401 ~ E-Mail: info@xlvideo.tv ~ Web: www.xlvideo.com

SPONSORS DIRECTORY

XTBA (Chris Cook, Fiona Fehilly, Simon Peers) 35 Fernleigh Road, London N21 3AN Tel: 020 8882 0100 ~ Fax: 020 8882 9326 ~ E-Mail: dmx@xtba.demon.co.uk ~ Web: www.xtba.demon.co.uk

The STLD interactive Sponsors Directory has been available for sponsors’ use for over a year now. It is proving a very useful tool for the STLD and, we hope, for those of our sponsors who now use it. Its main advantages are that it enables the STLD to display up-to-date and accurate information about your company on its website.

In doing so, it also helps us update our records and ensure that we have accurate mailing and invoicing details.

STLD sponsor companies can make use of this facility by contacting Bernie Davis at sponsors@stld.org.uk with the name and email address of the person who will become the company’s ‘sponsor user’. They will be registered on our secure database and will then be able to modify their company’s information within the sponsors directory.

Please note that the directory can now enable companies to be searched for by category and area.

Bernie Davis – STLD Sponsor Liaison

Index of advertisers Anna Valley ARRI Clay Paky Doughty 64

TV Lighting | Summer 2013

16 27 10 21

ELP ETC Lee Filters Martin

IBC 30 IFC BC

Plasa Unusual Rigging White Light

17 37 7

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THE ARRI L7-C COLOUR LED FRESNEL IS NOW AVAILABLE FROM ELP All of the functions can be controlled via DMX, an ideal feature for broadcast studios. And the L7-C will be seen but not heard thanks to its dead quiet passive cooling system. You’ll also have the same ability, as with conventional Fresnels, to cut and shape with barndoors and flags.

The L7-C LED source produces the equivalent of a 750W tungsten light while drawing only 220W. This saves a whopping 75% over similar output tungsten lights. And low heat means lower AC bills in the studio.

Features at a glance Colour Temperature Controllable DMX Control Full RGB Colour Mixing

On-board Control

Quiet Passive Cooling

Upgradeable Via USB

8 leaf barn door

Long Life LEDs

Sliding Stirrup

Very Low Electrical Draw

Next Steps For further information, to arrange a demonstration, obtain a dry hire quote or to discuss a production package please contact either our Elstree or Manchester offices.

To find out more about ELP visit:

www.elp.tv

t ELP Elstree t ELP Manchester

T: 0208 324 2100 T: 0161 300 2922

Lighting t Power t Rigging t Staging

STLD Summer 2013:TL 85 Spring 2005 01/08/2013 22:33 Page 68

T H EAT R E

TELEVISION

C O R P O RAT E

TOURING

EVENTS

The smart substitute!

Not only does the 50,000+ lumen output from the MAC III Wash match that of a conventional 2.5 kW daylight Fresnel, it offers all the benefits of a Martin Professional automated luminaire: internal barndoors, CMY colour mixing and colour temperature control, fully linear zoom, intensity control, power savings and much more.

What would you choose?

www.martinpro.co.uk