Author: Leigh Mulpeter

Having built up a good relationship with both Director and Choreographer Gareth Walker, and artiste management company & Producers The TCB Group, we were delighted to have been asked to design the current UK tour of Remembering Fred. Remembering Fred is a nonstop feast of dancing and singing of the classics as performed by Fred Astaire. The show stars Strictly Come Dancing’s Aljaz Skorjanec and Janette Manrara and a team of high energy dancers and singers performing songs from the great American songbook. The set is an Art Deco style set of Stairs with curved panels flanking them on either side, designed by the fantastic Steve Howell. The panels have practical globe lights on the top of each column and the treads all have LED built in to add colour and movement. The centre piece is a high resolution LED video wall giving beautifully designed backdrops for each item, designed by the brilliant team at CS Media, and then inter-woven with video clips to give the cast time to perform their costume changes backstage between each section. Lighting was supplied by Imag (As was the screen element), supplying a selection of Robe 600e spots, Robe 600 LED wash units, Clay Paky Sharpy fixtures and SGM P5 LEDs to uplight the set panels. Control is via a GrandMA2 Light console fully timecoded to run in sync with the video and...

January was a very busy month indeed. After the success of ‘Rip It Up Tour’, we were once again approached by TCB Group to design a new show that they were working on in collaboration with Natalie Lowe for P&O Cruises. The brief was to design lighting to compliment the show and work in harmony with the set and custom screen footage. Natalie Lowe had been working on a 45 minute show for P&O guests to experience on-board the ship Oceana as art of their entertainment programme. The show is ‘Natalie Lowes Dream Lover’ a 50’s / 60’s style show telling the story of two guys and one girl and their search for love, through dance and music. This is performed regularly in repertorary style with P&O’s ‘Headliners’ cast. P&O have a fixed lighting rig of Robe DLF and DLS fixtures controlled via a GrandMA2 light, and a hippo V4 media server to play back content from. Due to being a working ship all programming had to be done at night once that evenings shows had finished and the sets had been turned around to our set. Programming would take place from around midnight each night until the cast came in to warm up at 0800hrs, then we would run what we had programmed in sequence with the action on stage. This enable us to see what worked and...

We have been very busy as of late. We was thrilled to have been asked by the producers of Rip It Up the show to design the lighting for their UK touring production. TCB group approached us after being requested by Director and Choreographer of the production Gareth Walker. We were thrilled to have been asked to design this. The show is a celebration of the music and dance from the 50’s era. Excellent musicians and vocalists from Leo Green and his band, with dancing by a hugely talented cast led by Natalie Lowe of Strictly fame, Jay McGuiness (Strictly winner and The Wanted) and Louis Smith MBE (Strictly winner and Gold medal winning gymnast). Programming was done on an MA2 Utra light over the course of 4 days using the built in visualiser before being transferred to an MA2 on command PC wing after the tech period for touring. Eurohire are technical suplliers to the show, so using their stock of equipment we crafted the design. Design wise it is kept simple for daily fit-ups and de-rigs in each venue. Consisting of: 4x Robe Pointes, 6x Robe 600 LED wash, 8x Lanta Quad par 64 and 10x Lanta Fireball Pars. Generics are picked up in each venue which consists of top and shin side booms, 3 section area wash from FOH and band specials, finished off with 6...

We have recently invested in the GrandMA2 range of lighting console, due to the ever increasing control demands required for the wider ranges of moving and intelligent fixtures and media servers on the market. We took the decision to purchase an MA2 Ultra Light console from our good friends at Ambersphere Solutions. After an intense three day course at their head office in London Park Royal, we then put the desk to action preprogramming a new UK tour using the MA3D visualiser suite. The console is the Ultra Light, which give 4096 parameters of data. It has one touch screen on the main control surface, and another on the upright section of the console. We also supply two DVI-D monitors with this for screen layout (at some stage soon we shall upgrade to touch screens). The desk is fully flight cased, and has mouse, keyboard and desk lights in the case. Pricing from £135.00 Per day to £400.00 Per week. For more information on this console or any other items that we stock, please contact us via the contacts page on the...