The Katinas: Lighting Assist Experience

Working on a live production and knowing that you set up a lighting fixture or ran the front of house console is a great experience. During the show or after all the work is done you feel a little proud of yourself, even if you didn’t do the best job.

I was working on the Katinas show last week in Full Sail Live 1 as a lighting assistant. This was my first time being a lighting assist and it was a fun position to fill. I helped set up 4 Technobeams on boom trusses behind the stage, 2 Mac 700 profiles, 2 Mac 500’s, and 2 Mac 600’s. I was placing the fixtures in their locations, running power, and data cables to them. I didn’t do any of the addressing because I wasn’t familiar with that. After those lights were setup, there were a total of 111 lights in the rig. The 111 fixtures included movers, conventional, and stage bars. At first I was excited to see all those lights, but I was quickly realizing that there could be too many lights for such a small venue. I don’t know what the designer was trying to accomplish, but I couldn’t say anything, I only had to wait and see. Before the show the lighting designer was going through the fixtures and making cues. I wasn’t too pleased with the lights just because I had that initial thought of too many fixtures. I was sitting there wondering and trying to figure out what the LD’s idea was with all these lights.

Once the show started I finally saw what he was trying to do. It finally hit me when he played back the first cue. He was only experimenting with the tools he had at his fingertips and he made it work. The lights were placed well and filled everything little gap in the venue. The lighting designer wasn’t afraid to walk into a venue with 27 moving lights and add 18 more to create something bigger. The transitions from cue to cue were great and the additional lights just blended well with the previous ones. From what I saw, the lighting designer wasn’t trying to create a noticeable light show. He was only trying to experiment with what he add and create something great on the fly. Being apart of that experiment will only encourage me to try new things in lighting in the future.

Special thanks to Ross Blitz and Adam Stachow.

Black Eyes Peas Concert Central Park, New York City.

Back in September of 2011, I won a couple of tickets to a free Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park, New York City. This was a couple of months before I started school at Full Sail. Even though I didn’t know anything about lighting, I was excited to see all the gear that was being used and the type of production they had. The production was more than I thought it would be for a free concert and the concert lasted more than 2 hours, which was amazing.

The lighting design was what amazed me the most about the production. It was as much of a light show, as it was a musical show. They were moving lights and lasers going to the beat of the music and others just wandering and waiting for the next section of the song to start. I’m not too sure what lights they were using, but I was standing about 70 yards away from the stage and the lights were still blinding me from the distance. There was a point in the concert, I decided to look behind me, and there had to be at least 50 laser beams pointed at the trees and buildings surrounding the park. The lights were acting as if they had a mind of their own and were enjoying the music themselves. When a slower song was playing, the lights were playing along with the music as if they weren’t just jamming to the last fast paced song. It’s as if the lights weren’t capable of doing all the movement and strobing they were doing before. There was also a huge LED wall that was used for video, and it was also apart of the light show. It created backlight for some cues and even had strobing effects during some songs. The overall production was wonderful and the lighting design was amazing. After that show, I was excited to know that would be learning about moving lights sometime in the near future.

Here are some pictures that I took that night.

PixelFlex LED Curtain

LED lights are becoming a big addition in many live productions in the entertainment industry. They are more efficient than incandescent and arc lamps, they produce less heat, they are easy to handle because they aren’t very fragile, and they are capable of producing many different colors with out the need of plastic or dichroic glass gels. LED isn’t only used for lighting. It is also used for projection.

A company in Nashville, Tennessee called PixelFlex, created a product called the PixelFlex LED curtain. Just like a regular LED screen, the PixelFlex LED Curtain is an LED screen that uses LED lights to project images. The unique thing about PixelFlex is that they are lightweight and flexible LED screens. They are easy to install and can be set up everywhere and anywhere. The screen has multiple LED panel sections that work together and can be expanded to any custom screen dimension. The screen panels connect via a Cat5 Ethernet cable. Each panel has two Ethernet ports one for input and another for output. Any video output device that has a DVI-D connector, such as a computer, can be connected to the video sending unit used to send signal to the panels. The PixelFlex LED Curtain screen has 3000 LED pixels per square meter.

Longwood University in Virginia recently installed one of the PixelFlex LED curtains on their campus. The screen is a total of 15 panels creating a 17 by 32 foot screen. A great feature about the PixelFlex screen is that it can be used as one big screen or can be physically divided and into multiple sections and used in different locations using different video sending unit. The PixelFlex can be a great addition to large lighting and video productions. It can provide multiple sections of video and can also be used as an addition for backlight on a stage.

The greatest feature about the PixelFlex LED curtain is that it is lightweight and easy to transport. A live production can be more time efficient with using the PixelFlex and it can create screens that are larger than life with the unique capability of easy expansion.

References:

 http://www.plsn.com/projection-connection/10319-longwood-university-installs-pixelflex-led-curtain.html

http://www.ledcurtain.com