The Pipes Are Leaking

Fred Foster lit up with an LED Source Four. on Flickr.

This is how our CEO dressed to give a keynote presentation to ~300 people this morning where he announced a new product that will revolutionize the theatrical lighting industry as we know it.

In his classic style, he walks around in Birkenstocks and part-way through today’s presentation slipped them off and gave much of his presentation barefoot.

Barefoot and sitting down, he gave news today that will rock the lighting industry into a new era of how theatres will light their events.

One moment he was taking questions from the audience, and then next moment he dropped a bomb on the audience and began showing off the capabilities of the dream lighting fixture that every lighting designer has been waiting the last several years for.

1 year ago | 22 notes | Reblog |
theatrical, theatre, lighting, fred foster, ceo, birkenstocks, electronic theatre controls, etc,

I love this piece, especially because Nighthawks is what our lobby’s reception area at ETC is modeled after. The entire lobby (aka Town Square) is modeled after various pieces by Edward Hopper.

This is the first thing our visitors see when they enter the building, and it’s where we sit down and have meetings throughout the day:

And just behind the diner — before you walk out onto the factory floor — is a full deli that makes some excellent sandwiches.

(via biorhythmist)

Source :

2 years ago | 12 notes | Reblog |
nighthawks, edward hopper, diner, etc, reception, electronic theatre controls, town square, middleton,

I have a hard time explaining to people what it is that I do. With schools, the lighting company I work for, and the internet forums I check in on everyday — it’s hard to make any real sense out of it all.

So if I had to sum everything up, I’d say what I do is teach people what’s in this video. Not how to produce the video, or change the camera angles, but how to make their lighting consoles help them design shows like this.

This concert was performed by a Swedish pop/jazz/rock group, Silverpennies, and the lighting in it was programmed on a console my company makes and I’m one of several people who help people learn how to use that console. It doesn’t look very amazing because it’s just a rendering the designer uses to make sense out of their designs, but here’s what the final show looked like to an audience member that night:

The designer’s vision is what bridges the gap between a rendered video that the average person wouldn’t think is all that amazing and the awe-inspiring final design that the audience sees at performance. People who have the vision of a lighting designer can stare at these videos for hours in utter amazement while the rest of the world would be too bored to finish watching it the first time through.

(Rendering & Photo by High Voltage Designs)

2 years ago | 0 notes | Reblog |
silverpennies, high voltage designs, lighting, concert, left behind, capture polar, electronic theatre controls, congo, work,

Photograph by Filipp Penson

2 years ago | Notes | Reblog |
electronic theatre controls, etc, source four, light, fixture, ellipsoidal, ers, lighting,

This is that $25,000 piece of hardware that ETC is donating to us. It’s a work of art.

It’s hard to grasp the scale from this photo, but we have to replace the counter in our control room with one twice as large to make room for this thing.

Who needs to actually turn stage lights on with this when they could just stare at it and admire its beauty?

2 years ago | 3 notes | Reblog |
electronic theatre controls, etc, congo, lighting, theatre, entertainment industry, console,

Bastards, Every Last One Of Them: