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    Blog Series: Lighting Education

    Jim Hutchison Talks Lighting Physiology at PLASA Focus Orlando!

    Are you heading to PLASA Focus Orlando next week? Come listen to Jim Hutchison, who creates JimOnLight.com and is our Customer Engagement and Education Manager for CHAUVET Professional and Iluminarc, talk about how to better use your colors to make a more impactful lighting design!

    Register for Jim’s course here!
    https://www.prereg.net/2015/plasaone/

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    SUNRISE, FL – The human eye contains millions of cone cells for detecting color — and Jim Hutchison hopes to tingle each and every one of them in his upcoming LED Color: The Psychological Experience seminar at PLASA Focus Orlando from 2-3 pm Tuesday February 17. Hutchison, the customer engagement manager at CHAUVET Professional and ILUMINARC, will take visitors on a colorful tour showing the effect that different colors and combinations of colors have on human thought and emotion. Along the way, he’ll share some insights on ways LDs can utilize the influential power of color to create more impactful designs.

    “I’ve geared this course to show lighting designers what it means to be able to use color on a level that gives their designs even more depth and a greater ability to convey the story they want to tell,” said Hutchison. “It’s obviously very important that, as designers, we spend time talking about the pixel pitch and batching of LED fixtures and look at their mathematical data and photo metrics, but that’s still only part of the equation. What we also need to do is put ourselves in the audience’s seat to see how we can better tell a story to them and suspend their disbelief more effectively.  This course will offer advice on how you can do that by having your audience experience different colors of light.”

    Some of the examples of color influence that the seminar will explore include the power of red to increase breathing and digestion rates, how heavy yellow hues evoke “an almost a blissful confusion,” and how blues and greens engender states of calmness.  “Individual colors are potent influencers,” said Hutchison. “Then, when you use them in combination with one another, you pump up their power even further. Our seminar will cover some proven examples of this color synergy.”

    Hutchison will be relying on a collection of CHAUVET Professional COLORado Batten Quad-9 fixtures to provide vivid examples of LED rendered colors in action during the seminar. “We’re going to fill that room with heavy hues and induce some color fatigue in everyone’s cone cells for the sake of art,” he said. “It should be fun and I promise that anyone who attends will never see color in quite the same way.”

    FOCUS PALETTES, This Month in LIGHTING INSIGHTS!

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    FOCUS PALETTES!  Let’s start out another year of educational lighting and lighting design videos at CHAUVET Professional

    This month’s video is a basic primer on Focus Palettes — the why, who, when, what, where!  You know, why write cues with your fixtures just pointing somewhere random, right?

    Let’s talk focus palettes with CHAUVET Professional’s own Jim Hutchison!

    https://chauvetprofessional.com/focus-positions-this-month-in-lighting-insights/

    The TOP TEN Lighting Insights Articles from 2014!

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    Happy Friday, lighting industry!!!

    We’ve been watching what your favorite Lighting Insights Newsletter articles have been in 2014, we love to see what you love to read!  The Lighting Insights Newsletter brings interviews, industry stories, and product news — not to mention our video series with lighting industry veteran Jim Hutchison as he takes us through tips, tricks, and all kinds of other great stuff to help you make your lighting designs better!  People love Lighting Insights!

    Check out the Top Ten LIGHTING INSIGHTS articles from 2014 — all chosen by YOU!

    Counting down from #10…

    10:  Christian Hibbard — Creating Moments with Lighthibbard

    9:  Darien Koop — Stepping UP Pixel Mapping
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    8:  We’re Adding RGBW Washes to the ROGUE Series!
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    7:  Visualizing Possibilities with Cory Fitzgerald
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    6:  Beyond DMX — A Lighting Insights Video!
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    5:  Toning Your Truss Rig — A Lighting Insights Video!
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    4:  Michael Meacham — Revolutionizing Space in Club Lighting
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    3:  Pixel-Mapping Your Truss —  A Lighting Insights Video!
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    2:  Joshua Hutchings — A Lighting Imagination
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    The #1 Article on Lighting Insights for 2014, chosen by YOU, the wonderful readership!

    1:  Inside Life in Color with Lighting Designer Collyns Stenzel
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    We’ve got awesomesauce planned for 2015…  check back soon, we’re gonna be rocking!  Thanks for reading LIGHTING INSIGHTS!

    The Weekly Rig #10, from CHAUVET Professional and Trusst – Duas Arces!

    Back by popular demand after a small pause for the LDI Show preparation…  THE WEEKLY RIG from CHAUVET Professional and Trusst!!!

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    This week’s installment is called Duas Arces, which means Two Towers in Latin.  But obviously DUAS ARCES sounds way cooler than Two Towers, right?!  And look — you just learned some Latin!  How cool is THAT?!

    Our imaginary band, Todd’s Crazy Shirt, is rocking and rolling with a mix of keys, percussion, a mix master, and vocals — and a full rig of CHAUVET Professional fixtures cutting through the air and making magic pictures!

    A few things to take away from this week’s Weekly Rig — design liner notes!

    1. Never forget about your background.  Often in venues that you’ll play, you’ll have a terrible-looking back wall that can be made amazing with a simple focus palette that you update from venue to venue that gives you gobos along the back wall.  Spin them, pulse them, rotate them with colors and varying directions, and you just blew the audience’s mind!
    2. A great gobo usage scenario is having projecting heads on a FOH truss.  Sure you can spot the band, you can highlight parts of the band at certain points…  but what about a front gobo wash?  Turn your band from a front-lit bunch of musicians to a gobo front-lit bunch of musicians that are in motion and vibrate!
    3. Toners:  You have the ability to make every piece of your truss into its own member of the band by just paying a little bit of attention to add your toners to your cues…  truss is gorgeous while lit, why not make it part of your stack?
    4. Add a powerful backlight to each band member — in the case of Duas Arces and Todd’s Crazy Shirt, I added a COLORado Batten Quad 9 Tour behind each band member for a burst of LED color and intensity to turn each member of the band into their own silhouette that lives and breathes with every single human movement the band members make.  Try it, you will not be disappointed.  Try it!
    5. A single front light on each band member can give you the control you need to simply highlight each human and keep your rig tight without having to use an entire system of wash fixtures (or PARs, depending where you are in the world, of course) to accomplish the look.  You can definitely still design in the front washes (and maybe a GOBO WASH system from the front!) while having specials for each band member.  It’s all about how you want to control your rig!

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    DUAS ARCES:  CHAUVET Professional Lighting Products
    We’ve got a sizable rig for this week’s Weekly Rig — but for a theoretical band of this magnitude, what choice do we have?!!

    Direct from the virtual truck pack — fixtures on the stage deck:
    30 @ COLORado Batten Quad 9 Tour

    Fixtures on Trusst:
    48 @ COLORdash Par Quad 7
    8 @ Legend 330 SR Spot
    4 @ Ovation E-190WW ERS
    24 @ ROGUE R2 Beam
    28 @ ROGUE R2 Spot

    DUAS ARCES:  TRUSST Trussing Products
    Lots and lots of Trusst!

    32 @ 3m Trusst Arc sections
    3 @ 1m Trusst straight sections
    24 @ 2m Trusst straight sections
    21 @ 3m Trusst straight sections
    32 @ 6-Way Trusst corner blocks
    28 @ 1m Trusst extension pipes
    8 @ 30″ Trusst base plates

    Enough of the bullet points, let’s check out this week’s Weekly Rig!  Ladies and gentlemen, Duas Arces with Todd’s Crazy Shirt on the mic!

    Check out more episodes of The Weekly Rig here!

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    PLEASE NOTE:
    This rig is completely theoretical, and there are lots of things like chain motors and required safety devices that would need to be implemented to make this a reality.  Just keep in mind that no matter what rig you build or how you adapt these designs, you need to consult riggers, structural engineers, and all other appropriate experts before attempting to build any of these designs!  The optimal phrase here is “IF YOU CAN’T RIG IT RIGHT, DON’T RIG IT AT ALL.”  Safety is paramount.  Nothing else is really that important.