JimOnLight with tieline dredlocks. Oh yeah, and Kung-Fu Action Grip:
I’m back at the helm in Toronto; LDI 2012 has come and gone, I got to see lots of really amazing people, and I got blinded by not one, not seven, but eleventy (yeah, eleventy) freaking LED sources and screens. It was so refreshing to see a tungsten or an HMI source around the convention center just as a reference to something that has more than one wavelength in a row together. Holy schmoly!
LDI was full of pretty striking stuff, from lasers and salvo systems to new gobos and moving moving light systems, which was pretty awesome! Now obviously seeing photos is a lot less ridiculous than reading me talk about photos, so check this out below – a ton of photos from LDI and the show floor!
This is what I made for the BlackTrax guys to go do their magic, which they do very well. BlackTrax is out and on the market. If you were at the show, you saw the demo up in N256 at the LVCC:
The BT guys calibrating the system. They have it down to about five minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen: The HOG 4.
The High End Systems booth:
DMX controlled AirStar balloons! Awesome!
This was next to us on the show floor — VER’s “upside-down-porno-bedroom-ceiling” thing. Oh, f*cking hell it was amazing. I mean absolutely amazing. I was so proud to be in the view of this booth with my CAST booth, it was absolutely awe inspiring. I’ll figure out the model of the beautiful equipment being displayed here, but believe me when I say it deserved the award for Best Product Display that it won:
InLight Gobos!!! Oh, I have to report that some real winner stole a glass gobo from the InLight Gobos booth, over next to the High End booth. It was set up on the table, Adri bent down to attend to something in a bag on the floor, and *poof* it was gone. If you read this blog and you took that gobo, it means that you had an absolute error in judgement. Mail that thing back to InLight Gobos, 2348 Irving Blvd, Dallas, TX 75207 — be a good human. Write “I’m Sorry” on the back of the package, too. It sucks they had to deal with that.
On a lighter note, hey lighting designers — you ever used the rubber band ball gobo from InLight? That thing is a breakup, an aerial, a wash, and a great atmospheric look maker too. Every color of the spectrum gives it new characteristics. Trust me, try it. You can try it in wysiwyg R29 now too, thanks to Rick and Adri at InLight and Peter Debreceni at CAST for getting the catalogue into the release. People at LDI who use WYG really seem to dig the InLight lineup — I believe in it, so I figured why not spread the good art word?
There is this guy I know named Peter Kirkup, and he is absolutely one of my favorite people on planet Earth; not because of his ridiculously polite bedside manner, but because he is an industry visionary that has been right since I’ve known him. I call that a feat in itself; I look to Peter for answers on anything regarding wireless what-have-you, and Peter is now the Vice President of Entertainment for LumenRadio in Sweden. You might know hime from Cooper Controls and Zero88 fame, when he was just a lowly Product Manager. Dude, remember — köttbullar i Sverige är inte svenska köttbullar, de är bara köttbullar!
Seriously though, we need to listen to peter’s brain, lighting industry. He explained something to me that was so amazing, so ingenius as I see it – that I just had to hear him explain it again. More on that later. Peter’s a genius. Ladies, grab him before he’s off the market, Peter’s like the John Holmes of brain power.
Mac Viper Profile. I have to say that I am impressed — I spent a lot of my time on shows working with a lot of Martin gear, lots of Mac 2K profiles and washes as you can imagine, Performance versus Profiles was always an argument you had to have in your head when making up a shop order. “Do I want the FX ribbon, and are framing shutters that important for this one?” I have no apologies for rocking the living daylights out of Mac 2000 Profiles. They are absolutely awesome fixtures, despite what your opinions are on it. I’ve had them apart on the truss while in a basket too, for the bang, they are perfect fixtures. It looks like the Viper is going to be exactly the same way, and I am so absolutely excited to get my hands on some. As it was put to me, the Viper is the “Mac 2000 replacement for this decade.” It is awesome. Ooh, so is the Mac III AirFX too, just as a side note.
Oh hey look, another Chinese copy of a Sharpy.
POINT OF ORDER: The handles on the VL3515 are very cool. I yanked around on them quite a bit while I was standing there (perhaps much to the dismay of the guy who I met right there at that point), and they seemed solid and non-conforming.
What a beautiful booth!
Me and Susan Rose! Yes, this Susan Rose. This guide got me through the teething gigs of the Hog II!
THIS IS EXCELLENT. The V276 is now available as a piece of gear for sale! It works on your MAC! Also, the BAD BOY and BEST BOY are available for SALE! I think that they are two of the best fixtures built in the last five years, and I really do hope to see them explode in popularity. They’re solid. No matter what you think of PRG – whether you’re a fan or a non-fan – Bad Boy and Best Boy rock. Now there is the V276 on MAC, which allows you the use of the pretty slick V-Series software. You can run MBOX on this panel, too! Miguel Ribeiro showed me some amazing things at LDI about MBOX, I am pretty excited to check it out.
The Clay Paky booth at LDI — oh the Sharpys!
DTS’s continuously panning beam fixtures. You have to see these things to believe it, they are poppy and bright, punchy and presentable. Their booth was one of my faves, designed by a cool LD from Europe, Georg Telos. Great work, Georg!
The rest of the photos I took at LDI are below in a few different types of Flickr galleries, check out which one works best for you! Let me know if one or the other floats your boat better than, uh, the other. Just leave a comment.
Another Flickr show:
