With up to 50,000 people in and out of the Georgia World Congress Center each day over a two-day period in February, the Cheersport National Cheerleading Championship in Atlanta may be the largest event to have taken place in the world under the COVID pandemic. Rental and production company Lite Tek Entertainment supplied and designed lighting for the event and turned to an Elation lighting package of Cuepix™ and DTW™ blinders, Protron™ strobes, SixPars™ and more to highlight team routines across five different stages. 

Florida Georgia Line’s highly-anticipated fifth studio album, LIFE ROLLS ON, launched February 12 to worldwide acclaim. As part of the album release, the superstar duo, comprised of Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley, filmed multiple promotional performances at The Steel Mill, a turnkey studio and production space that features a Bandit Lites rig outfitted with more than one hundred moving light fixtures, a video package from MooTV, staging from Gallagher Staging and a sound system from Clair Global. 

The Shiki Theatre Company is one of the largest and most reputable in the world, staging 3,000 performances to an audience of over three million in a typical year. The organization is comprised of ten performance venues across several major Japanese cities, where artists from around the world can take the stage. The Shiki Theatre Company requires flexible and reliable communication technologies to support the diversity of their productions, employing Clear-Com®’s Encore® Analog Partyline System across all performance spaces, including the two newly renovated theaters that reopened in October of 2020.

Dan Ridd, Steven Haynes and a team from Clearsound Productions in Shipston on Stour, UK, marked the culmination of a week of #LightItInRed ‘heart’ actions around the country with a spectacular livestream broadcast featuring mixmaster DJ Benji surrounded by a cool heart-shaped lighting rig designed by Steven and featuring Robe moving lights! With overall direction by Dan Ridd and camera and humour direction by Andy Cox, the multi-camera broadcast included two drone feeds plus assorted visual highlights from the last year of #LightItInRed campaigns. These have focused on keeping the entertainment, production, and performance industry visible and relevant during the pandemic and consequent shut down, and this content was eloquently wrangled by #LightItInRed’s Sarah Berryman.

Innovation Nation, the CBS Saturday morning TV show about change-making technologies, recently called on Verge Aero, a leading innovator and creator of drone light show systems, to find out more about the new aerial technology that is transforming entertainment events and celebrations.

The Collectv, the Emmy award-winning broadcast solutions and workflows consultancy, is pleased to announce its involvement in the production process of Netflix’s fly-on-the-pitwall F1 documentary series Formula One: Drive to Survive. The third season of the Box to Box Films production, covering the dramatic events of the 2020 Grand Prix calendar, will air on Netflix from March 19, a week before the 2021 F1 season commences at the Bahrain International Circuit in Bahrain.

• New Zealand OTT operator leverages The Switch’s MIMiC cloud-based production service to edit, package and deliver clips to social media
• Taps into The Switch’s global network and connectivity to premier sports venues around the world

Lighting designer Vladimir Lyubimov continues to use Astera Titan Tubes as a key lighting feature for concerts by acclaimed Russian rock musician, singer and poet, Svetlana Surganova.  The most recent of these took place at Crocus City Hall in the Krasnogorsky District of Moscow, staged in the autumn – at the time this was during a brief period when concerts and large gatherings were allowed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Live in Leith’ is a series of PPV (pay-per-view) digital gigs recorded at the fabulous Leith Theatre, Edinburgh, UK, combining some of the best rising star music talent in Scotland with spectacular production values – including Robe moving lights – which were used for two of the three initial set of broadcasts. The four featured artists – two per gig – were lit by two of Scotland’s leading lighting designers, Grant Anderson and Sam Jones and played captivating sets. Ransom FA and Nova Scotia the Truth brought clever and intricate verbiage and cool beats from the edge of Scottish grime, while power pop and post-punk rocked the house with Lucia and The Best Boys and The Ninth Wave.

The Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down (SoaD) recorded two new songs, “Protect the Land” and “Genocidal Humanoidz,” last fall which addressed the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.  To enhance awareness of the situation in the band members’ ancestral homeland, they also shot a music video for “Protect the Land” with proceeds from the song and fan merchandise earmarked for the Armenia Fund and the humanitarian needs of families displaced by the war.

Hands on experience in the live events industry is crucial, especially when navigating the tenuous first steps. Belmont University offers students the opportunity to garner real-world training in all aspects of concert production with their Showcase Series, funded by the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. Bandit Lites supplied the lighting system for the performances, including Christian, Pop/Rock, R&B and Hip-Hop as well as Country music.

Miami-based creative multifunctional studio, darmah, specialises in production design enhanced by the latest cutting-edge tools, and known for its exceptional attention to detail and extreme quality control. Last year, it once again demonstrated its industry-leading service by announcing the turnkey dXR stage with the latest Extended Reality (XR) Technology. From set design, creative direction and video content, to developing and delivering the final product, darmah is a much sought-after one-stop shop that uses state-of-the-art technology to bring emotion to the audience and create unforgettable moments. A big part of that is Brompton Technology LED processing, which has been key to the company’s success story over the last six years.

Palm Beach Opera has brought joy to Florida’s classical music fans with an innovative opera festival with nine days of performances at the iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach. The socially distanced event was the company’s first outdoor, open-air festival which implemented a variety of measures to ensure the safety of performers, crew and audience members alike.

For the TV broadcast of the Grammy Awards last Sunday, RailCam Robotic Systems premiered the new RTS MagCam paired with a NEWTON stabilized camera head. The MagCam is a remote-controlled wheeled dolly with telescopic tower, that follows a magnetic tape line on the floor. This tape can be attached or adjusted in seconds and this allows for very quick and agile installs of remote TV cameras with repeatable moves.

The pandemic period will surely be remembered for many things including the invention and creativity manifested by an entertainment and technical production industry determined to keep music and performance accessible and relevant during a world public health crisis and the resulting enforced isolation.