AARHUS, Denmark — HARMAN’s Martin Professional today announced Garou Blancan as the winner of its 2014 Professional Young Lighting Designer contest. Throughout the month of February, young amateur lighting designers from around the world competed for a chance to win by programming their ultimate show to a music track of their choice and submitting it the Martin Facebook page. Blancan will be presented as the winner during the 2014 Martin Professional Prolight + Sound Press Conference at 4 PM on Thursday, March 14 at the Martin Booth A93 (Hall 9.0).
As the first place winner, Blancan, a 25 year old Belize-born Canadian, has been awarded an all expenses paid trip to the 2014 Prolight + Sound Expo in Frankfurt Germany as well as with a Martin MG20™ lighting controller. The MG20 is a powerful yet compact controller that is easy-to-use and offers 10 fader playbacks, an external video screen, an effects generator, as well as a host of other features.
“The decision to choose Garou as the winner was unanimous,” commented Paul Pelletier, Product Manager for Controllers, HARMAN Martin Professional. “His design contained every element of a great show, including creative positions, movements, color mixing, variation and blackout. Now armed with an MG20 controller to further his already fantastic creative abilities, we are very excited to see Garou put together many great shows in the future.”
A winner was chosen through a simple process: Facebook users voted for their favorite shows and the three shows with the most votes were then judged by a three-person panel consisting of last year’s winner, Brad Helzer, Martin Professional’s Global Product and Application Specialist, Theis Wermuth, and Pelletier.
The contest also awarded prizes for the second and third place winners. As the second place winner, Ricardo Dias of Portugal was awarded Martin’s M2PC™ control surface that delivers a professional suite of features directly from any PC. The third place winner, Mihail Kisiov of Bulgaria, won a Martin USB Duo DMX Interface that offers XLR 5P female connectors and provides two DMX 512 universes from any USB enabled Windows-based PC.
“Congratulations to Garuou, Ricardo, and Mihail on their achievement as the world’s most remarkable young lighting designers,” commented Pelletier. “We are proud to support aspiring lighting design professionals and extend thanks to all the participants and those who took the time to vote to make this contest the best yet. We look forward to putting a new generation of lighting designers to the test next year.”
To view the winning shows, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/MartinProfessional/app_486254294756872
As a world leader in the creation of dynamic lighting solutions for the entertainment, architectural, and commercial sectors, Martin lighting and video systems are renowned the world over. Martin also offers a range of advanced lighting controllers and media servers, as well as a complete line of smoke machines as a complement to intelligent lighting. Martin operates the industry’s most complete and capable distributor network with local partners in nearly 100 countries. Founded in 1987 and based in Aarhus, Denmark, Martin is the lighting division of global infotainment and audio company HARMAN International Industries. For more information please visit: http://www.martin.com.
HARMAN designs, manufactures, and markets a wide range of infotainment and audio solutions for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. It is a recognized world leader across its customer segments with premium brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, and Mark Levinson® and leading-edge connectivity, safety and audio technologies. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of 14,800 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $4.7 billion for the last twelve months ended December 31, 2013.