Scuola di Musica

The "Scuola di Musica" (The School of Music ) is a small non profit organisation with more than 170 students. It has operated for 15 years in Desenzano, a mid-size town on the shores of Lake Garda, the largest Italian lake between Milan and Venice. At the end of every academic year the Scuola di Musica puts on performances to show the quality and the level reached by the students. The main event in this series is the concert of the School Orchestra, an all ages ensemble of 25 musicians.

Opportunity For Improvement

"Two years ago we decided to change the way we were doing the final concert," says Alberto Cavoli, the school director. "We had the sensation that the performance did not show the level of our quality: the music was excellent but the show was 'poor' and not capturing the audience the way we wanted. As all non-profit organisations, we had, and still have, very little money to spend, and we thought that adding a lighting system [might be] the simplest way to create the right atmosphere to enhance the performance. We had no experience and we could not hire a professional service to do it, so we searched the web for the right solution and we discovered Light Factory. That seemed the perfect fit for us."

Big Step

One of the students, an over-fifty cello player with good computer expertise, helped the director define the right configuration and cheapest solution for the task, and asked parents and some local businesses to sponsor the initiative. The budget was just 1500 Euros (about 2000 US Dollars). This doesn't sound like a lot of money when you're going to start buying up lighting equipment, but for them it was a big step to take.

Requirements :

Results

"Light Factory was very easy to test and set up" confirms cellist and show manager Gigi Tagliapietra, "and it runs on my Mac in the VMWare Windows manager from the very first moment. I appreciated having a full featured version of the program to download and test carefully, so that with perfect confidence we could later buy the license and install it on an external USB dongle. Now we move the show from design (at home) to rehearsals (at the school) to the theatre using different machines. The DMX USB Pro is also the interface from computer to the DMX environment, and we found it a very convenient, solid, and practical one."

"I decided to pair Light Factory with eight Par-Leds," Mr. Tagliapietra explains, "because we needed to have a colourful stage but had very little money to buy a lot of pars. Light Factory could dynamically change the LED colour and intensity, and with just eight sources we could cover all the musicians. The LED solution was perfect also because they don't need a large power source and the necessary infrastructure in cables, plugs etc. The total wattage consumption of our lighting system could compare to three normal household lamps.

First Show

“The final touch was a slide show of pictures on the back of the stage using a video projector with some little animations and the presentation of the various tunes." The first show in May 2008, "La Musica Ti Colora" (Music Colours You) was an immediate success: parents were enthusiastic and, most important, student-musicians were stunned to see their music and performance highlighted.

Some videos of the show are available on YouTube so you can see for yourself how good the result was. see for example the Hymn to Joy

from Beethoven's 9th Symphony

or the The Aristocats Suite

Further Refinement

LightFactory became a standard in all performances of the Scuola di Musica, from little essays, to lectures and music evenings, it was easy to add a special touch with the lighting system and preparing the sequences and playing them with show runners was child's play, a "push-the-button" job.

The task for the 2009 Show then became how to do it better. "We designed the new show with the idea that we could create a special atmosphere, with music and lights," says director Cavoli, "to create an immersive space in which music played the main role but lighting would have helped the audience to better appreciate the sensations that music raises. So we came out with the idea of "Stagioni" (Seasons) grouping the different tunes in more intimate (autumn and winter) and joyful (spring and summer) and using the lights to underline the different moods.
We had a donation of four new ParLeds and adding them to the show was a matter of minutes. The lighting impact was really powerful."

More To Come

"Next year?" concludes Mr. Cavoli "We are still enjoying the success of 'Stagioni' and we have a couple invitations to perform it in cities around here. For sure we will produce a new show and we are sketching already possible scenarios but we have a dream: a motorized fixture to spot musicians when they play their solos and LightFactory can allow us to switch instantly form one to another. Who knows, maybe Santa Claus will read our wish list."
As with Lego blocks, disassembling and reassembling the show runners of the previous show into the new one, was an easy way to get the things done in a very short time and a proof that LightFactory increases its value over time: every show sequence becomes an asset that can be adapted and changed with a mouse click.

In Conclusion

"LightFactory is a great product" says Gigi Tagliapietra "but the thing I like the most is the team around it: in two years I had just two problems and the response from tech support has always been a matter of minutes or just a few hours considering the time difference between Italy and Australia or the USA. The tech support forum is a mine of information and hints and the community around it is a real value. Once I posted an issue and a few hour later I received an email from Paul Reeves, a gentleman in the UK with very good knowledge of LF which offered to help, we exchanged the file via the internet and in few hours he fixed it. Yes, the automatic backup feature in LightFactory is a great one, I do my work always confident that in the worst case I have always my last show saved but the things that really reassures me is that there is a safety-net of splendid people around LightFactory."
The standing ovation at the end of the show "Stagioni" was the seal of approval that LightFactory was the perfect choice for the Scuola di Musica and will be a long lasting companion of their success.

We at Enttec are very proud to be part of such a success and we are confident that LightFactory is the right choice for small organisations, schools, and performers who need a high level lighting system that can grow as they do, to even rival those used by professionals all around the world.

- Reported by Gigi Tagliapietra and Jeremy Kumin