Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional My name is Michael Graham and I have tried broccoli for the first time ever this week. I ended up liking it. For the past 37 years I have avoided it like it was some kind of evil stalk of green nastiness on my plate. I […]
Written by Mike Graham, product manager for CHAUVET Professional I love it when a plan comes together. We are almost done with the rig for InfoComm. Again, preshow planning has proved that going over and over (and over) your plans is time well spent. Having five days to load in doesn’t hurt either. Having this […]
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 […]