USITT welcomes POET Technical Services as a new Contributing member of the Institute. The company, whose website is www.poet.cc, includes components featuring theatricals, post production, marine theatricals, design, and corporate entertainment.

To Top

ETC (Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc.) recently named an official distributor in India and had its products used to upgrade the lighting system in a Seattle theatre.

Responding to the increased demand for its lighting products and technical expertise worldwide and now specifically in the growing Indian market, ETC has chosen long-time United States dealer Barbizon Lighting Company Inc. as its official distributor in India. With its newly established office in Bangalore, Barbizon Lighting is a sales, service, and educational center for ETC products. Barbizon is also working with dealers across India to inform customers on the benefits of ETC’s lighting. The Barbizon office in India can be contacted via www.barbizon.in. For general information on ETC products and services, visit www.etcconnect.com

Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre is renowned for its high-caliber live performances, music revivals, and Broadway shows. In 2008, 5th Avenue began the upgrade of the lighting system in its 2,115-seat proscenium theater in order to keep pace with the changing world of theatrical lighting – productions adding more moving lights and special effects, and a faster turnaround time between shows. They chose ETC’s flagship Eos control system.

To Top

When completed this fall, the Palladium Center for the Performing Arts' 1,600-seat concert hall will be used for a range of music from classical to country and western, R&B, and jazz. In order to allow this range of performance types, variable acoustics are used to tune the hall for optimum acoustics for the different musical types in the Carmel, Indiana facility.

Four glass ceilings, each weighting 23,000 pounds, are key elements to the tuning process. The elevations of each ceiling can be adjusted to create the desired response. J.R. Clancy, Inc. designed and built high capacity hoists. These needed to have very high reliability, because they are holding massive loads over people. In addition to standard braking systems, each hoist has dual air brakes acting on a 30 inch brake disk. Due to space constraints every hoist was designed to be disassembled, craned into the building, and reassembled. See a video here.

To Top

Vortek, a division of Daktronics Inc., recently celebrated the completion of an installation using Classic hoists configured for an inverted, or grid mount application, marking yet another milestone for the product’s ability to consistently adapt to non-standard layouts. Blending traditional counterweight line sets with Vortek motorized line sets, the Cheyenne Civic Center Performing Arts Theater in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is sure to deliver a sophisticated, yet practical, theatre for many years to come.

For additional information on Vortek and its rigging systems, visit the company’s website, e-mail the company at sales@vortekrigging.com, or call 1-866-4VORTEK.

To Top

Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 tour combines the artist’s urban edge, innovative video technology, and live camera content. The city skyline video wall set offers multiple video surfaces to create compelling imagery throughout the show, but the real technical magic is in the complex video system which integrates the Control Freak Encore DMX Bridge system with the PRG Mbox EXtreme v3 media server. Production Resource Group (PRG) provided a five-server system for the tour which has played arenas and stadiums around the around the world.

For more information on PRG, visit www.prg.com.

To Top