We are thrilled to hear that Lighting Designer Tom Sutherland won the Concert Touring & Events – US KOI (The Avolites Award for Stage) for Pitbull’s Time Of Our Lives, Las Vegas Residency.

We’d like to Thank Tom for mentioning us in his acceptance speech. This production was an extremely fun and challenging project to be a part of. An incredible looking show put together by a great team. A truly Deserved award.

We look forward to the next project with Tom.

We are extremely Proud to finally have some pictures and videos of the huge production we where involved in over Christmas and New Year.

We where asked by Lighting Designer Tom Sutherland and Set Designer Florian Wieder if we would Programme and Operate the Video Content for this show.

The Show was based in Shenzhen China, working for Hunan Television and Fremantle Media China to produce there 2016 – 2017 New Year Concert with over 10,000 in the stadium and over 1.6 Billion Viewers this was certainly an exciting project to be part of.

The set was mainly constructed of video eliments of which we designed and spec’d the Media Server set up. We settled on Green Hippo V4 Products for our media servers and Grand Ma2 Lighting Consoles for our programming.

1 X Grand MA2 Full Size (Main)
1 X Grand MA2 Light (Backup)
3 X Grand MA2 NPU
8 V4 Green Hippo’s
12 mixes
15 View ports
116 Layers
10556 Parameters
Over 300 Cue’s
50 Artist + show opener

Please take a look at the show reel of this production.

We are excited to annouce we are spending 5 weeks working in Miami, Florida. Working for Lighting Director Tom Sutherland we will be programming the Generic Lighting for the exciting Univision Music show, La Banda.

Pictures to follow.

Last week we where pleased to be part of the Rotana TV Lighting team programming and operating the lighting for a one off live concert at the World Trade Centre in Dubai.

For this show we have spent two days in the venue getting the lighting rig of 500+ Fixtures up and running and building looks ready for the event.

This weekend we are pleased to be part of the Adam Lambert World tour team programming and operating the lighting for his Headline performance at Redfest in Dubai.

For this show we have spent two days in a WYSIWYG suite in London pre-programming and time coding the busy light show for Adam Lambert’s Set.

This weekend the six chair challenge returns to ITV’s The X Factor, as the celebrity judges aim to whittle down their selection of contestants as we are within touching distance of the live shows.

Lighting Designer Tom Sutherland of DX7 Design, who designs the lighting set-up for the audition
shows before handing over to Dave Davey for the live shows explained:

“The six chair challenge was a new feature introduced last year to spice up the show, basically each judge has to narrow down numerous contestants by rewarding them with a place on one of the six seats which will carry them through to the next round. But, even if they’ve been given a seat, they can always be kicked off and replaced by somebody else, which makes a really intense and emotional atmosphere in the arena. When I design for this part of the show, I try to come up with something profound and dramatic, but also recognisable to the theme of The X Factor.”

Tom began working on The X Factor six years ago, originally as a programmer and operator, before stepping up to design the audition rounds three years later. PRG Account Director Kelly Cornfield said “Tom’s a designer who always dreams big and wants to leave his mark on a show, he’s brilliant at having bold and ambitious ideas, but still keeping an element of realism and working within a budget. He’s a great guy and an absolute pleasure to work with.”

Tom continued: “We were going to stick with last year’s rig for this year’s show, but I was playing around in WYSIWYG one night and came up with a concept where all the lights were mounted on curved pipes and look as though they’re falling in on the stage. I showed the design to Dave Hallett, the X Factor Gaffer, and PRG’s Kelly Cornfield, who both saw it as a huge challenge, but together they made it possible. Dave said that he’s never done as many 3D drawings before as he did to calculate the curvature of the pipe, the guy worked so hard to realise my idea in little over a
week. It’s easy for me to plot a bunch of lights on a computer, but it’s thanks to Dave and his fantastic crew this design came off.” When the team arrived on site it came down to programmer Nick Hansen to bring Tom’s vision to life which he easily accomplished, exceeding Tom’s expecations.

This year’s six chair challenge was shot in Wembley Arena in early September, aside from The X Factor, Tom has been working alongside PRG in North America on another Simon Cowell TV show, La Banda, a show dedicated to the search for the next Latin American boy band.

Tom’s design for last year’s six chair challenge earned him a Knight of Illumination nomination in the television category. The awards are announced Sunday evening at London’s Troxy venue. PRG would like to wish Tom the best of luck at the awards and are excited to see his design on television this weekend.

Since returning from China, Nick has been asked by Lighting Director Tom Sutherland to Operate the lighting and media servers for this years X-Factor Stadium Audition stages.

With over 500 Fixtures on the lighting rig and the Media servers this is a huge step up for Nick Hansen Lighting and a proud moment for us as a company moving forward.

This year has seen some huge steps for Nick and the company but all in a positive direction.

Using the Grand MA2 Light lighting console we controlled, the huge array of equipment including: VL1000’s, VL3500’s, VL5’s, GLP X4S’s, Sunstrips, Alpha Wash 700’s and Green Hippo V4 Media servers to name a few.

Working with Tom has been a pleasure and a huge learning curve.

Exciting times for Nick Hansen Lighting Ltd, Nick has been asked to fly out to Macau in China to program the lighting for a Frank Dragone production of Taboo a cabaret show in the City of Dreams.

Using an MA2 Light in session with the video programmers using a lighting rig of around 150 Fixtures of various types, Nick has programmed the whole show including several music numbers and specialty acts. It’s been a huge learning curve but a fantastic experience.

I spent a lot of time, time coding the show to the click track from the band ready to hand over to the in house tech for the session to run.

The show was quite complex from a programing point of view as the show was based around gambling and audience interaction meaning that the specialty acts could be on in any order at two very different points in the show leading into a final face off style competition at the end.