Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional When we left our heroes, they were sitting at the front of a theatre trying to decide — to pixel map or not to pixel map? Ideally, you want to do both, but let’s hope that this decision was made weeks ago during pre-production. The Wall […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional I can remember sitting in the audience during a show on one of the ships, I was auditing. There was a banjo player on stage and he was working on creating a mood. He was trying to create the image of sitting on his grandfather’s front […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional Now, more than ever, having elements of video in staging is really popular. If you look at successful shows like Roger Waters’ The Wall, U2’s 360 Tour, any of the WWE shows and television shows like The Voice, American Idol, or The X Factor, you can […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional Keeping your equipment running is critical in this day and age. No one can afford to have a broken fixture just sitting there collecting more dust than if it were in the rig. Scheduling preventative maintenance protects your investments and brings more money in the long […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional Question: How many grains of sand are in the desert? Answer: Not one more than there has to be. When you are working on your design of your light plot, it is important to not throw every single light you have at the stage…unless it absolutely […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional So here we are, LEDs are everywhere: RGB, RGBW, RGBWA, tri-colored, quad-colored, color temperature control. And what do we do with it all? Is there a standard for all of these colors and lensing combinations across the industry? Absolutely!….not. So, how is a designer or specifier […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional A universal theme among us in this industry is that we have to travel to do our jobs. Planes, trains, and automobiles, that’s us. I have to say; sometimes I really envy people who only go on planes for vacations. Since the unfortunate events of September […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional “I know nothing, but you know less. Together, we will learn and become Masters.” ~ Michael Thomas, Bartender and friend 1995 When you start working on a show, you walk in a blank slate. You know nothing of what the show will be. Often times, the […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional I have seen The Matrix a ton of times. Not only do I like the story, but the effects were really cool. The problem with cool effects is that you start to see them over and over again. The effect known as “bullet time” was developed […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional Back when I was in college–yep, I actually have a degree in theatrical technology–my professor told me that the learning would never end. I don’t think he realized how right he was. Given today’s world of ever-expanding technology and the co-mingling of different fields of the […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional You just picked up a rental package of lights from CHAUVET. But do you know how to get them out for rental, and more importantly, back again in one piece? Can you just keep them in the box and hope for the best? How about cables? […]
Academy of Production Technology: Day one. What is electricity? The scope of the first day was about entertainment electricity and electrical theory. For example, how to measure current, voltage, wattage, calculate phase angles, Ohm’s law and AC and DC power. There were quite a few ‘did you know?’ moments as well. Did you know you […]