Taking cult sci-fi figure Dr Who from the small screen onto the stages of nine major UK arenas around the UK was no small feat for events specialist XL Events and sound, lighting and audiovisual solutions company Adlib Audio. Visuals, pyrotechnics and video content were accompanied by Murray Gold’s scores, delivered by a 16-piece orchestra and combined with cast dialogue, choir, additional orchestral stems, VT playback character dialogue and special effects.
With the theme of ‘Turning the City Upside Down’, the Perth 4 Jesus gathering took place in late October near Perth in Western Australia. Inside the Joondalup Arena, 2,500 people gathered for a three-day healing crusade and to hear invited guest speaker Ps Robert Kayanja from Uganda, who is gifted with the power of healing. Essential to the event were the sound and lighting.
I recall a novel demonstration of audio cable given at an IBC show a few years back. Well, it was as much a demonstration of a piece of wet string as what you’d call audio cabling. In fact it was just that – a simple playback system using wet string to help deliver the Eagles’ trade show eternal demonstration favourite, ‘Hotel California’.
We are making a serious mistake with our recycling.
You can come at this from various angles, but probably the simplest is terminology. We have become comfortable with ‘recycling’ as a term that legitimises our use of natural resources. Through it, we choose to believe that we are somehow replacing the natural resources that we are using. And that makes us feel better about our lives and our business.
Had we chosen to use the term ‘down-cycling’, however, we would be far more aware of the true state of affairs.
In my previous Wideangle post, I raised the question: ‘is there any point in trying to be ‘green’ in professional audio? And the conclusion I proffered was that it was, for two main reasons.
First, because of the increasing expectation from society in general that businesses act responsibly. Second, that there’s good evidence suggesting that not being green drives negative perceptions; while being green is strongly associated with leadership and innovation.
The 30 years since its founding have seen Florida’s Full Sail arts design and entertainment media school has grown beyond its highest ambitions. Today, it offers a broad spectrum of accredited degree programmes encompassing music and sound, as well as film, design, show production, games, animation, web design, and music business. Three years in planning and a year-plus in construction, its Full Sail Live is one of the largest, dedicated sound stages for live concert training at an educational facility.
In the popular press, green covers everything from recycling newspapers to using public transport. It allows multinational companies to market ‘green’ groceries, politicians to adopt ‘green tickets’ and vehicle manufacturers to claim ‘green’ emission levels with equal ease.
Over the past couple of decades, environmentalism has moved from being the domain of a vociferous minority into the mainstream of society, and consequently into almost every business activity. But it still doesn’t appear to have made any significant impact in the worlds of audio, video and lighting (AVL).
Is that because 'being green' has has nothing to offer to AVL, or there’s no demand? Is it seen as a costly luxury the industry can ill-afford to adopt? So is there any point even trying to be green in the first place?