The LDI2007 Awards Ceremony was held at 6pm on Saturday, November 17 right on the LDI show floor in the Stage Pro booth, following a 20th anniversary cocktail party in the Live Design booth. The awards ranged from the Wally Russell Awards to best booth and best debuting product awards, as well as A Light In Life Award presented to Patricia MacKay, the founder of LDI. There were two products in each awards category, as well as an Honorable Mention given in both the Lighting and Sound categories. Special thanks to Stage Pro and Le Maitre Special Effects for their support of the awards presentation.
Wally Russell Lifetime Achievement Award: Fred Foster, ETC
Wally Russell Newcomer Award: Patrick Dierson, Artfag
A Life In Light: Patricia MacKay
Booth Awards
Big Booth Award: Chauvet, for its stylishly elegant blend of lighting, video, and LEDs in a comfortable lounge setting. The baby grand piano in the center of the booth added a nice touch of class.
Small Booth Award: Selador added a touch of green to its booth by showcasing its range of LEDs on simple white paper. The judges admired Selador's creativity; no doubt other exhibitors will be admiring their ease of teardown come Sunday afternoon.
Creative Use of Light Award: Robe effectively showcased both its core range of moving fixtures as well as its Anolis line of LED products in a booth that was part club, part lounge, and part show stage.
Product Presentation Award: The judges loved the Rose Brand booth, which highlighted its wide range of soft goods by combining movement and color, not to mention a very stylish range of lighting fixtures that would be at home in a high end furniture catalog.
Best Debuting Products
Lighting
Zap Technology for the Mini-Big, a compact 3K xenon search light with CYM scrollers, shutter, and strobing that only requires 16amps single phase power.
City Theatrical for Show DMX, a powerful wireless system with the ability to co-exist with other signals in the busy 2.4 giga hertz band, and RDM enabled world.
Honorable Mention: Strand Lighting LightRack
Projection
Coolux for version 3.5 of Pandora’s Box which allows fast and set up and easy design of projection, video, and multi-media.
Goboland for their Blacksteel Line of gobos and donuts, featuring a thin film coating which reduces image distortion and eliminates halo effects.
Rigging and Staging
Stagejunk.com for the Ultimate Focus Tool, which features a continuity tester, pin splitter, wrench, and bottle opener.
Eilon Engineering for Ron StageMaster, a portable, wireless solution which takes the guess work out of determining the loads in a multi-point hang.
Sound
Neutrik for both the PowerCon 32—which is a compact high-current connector
for high-density use—and also for the EMC – XLR connector, for use in increasingly hostile RFI noise-sensitive environments.
C.B.I. Professional Wireless Systems for the Shield series of Noise-Free microphone cables, utilizing the aforementioned Noise-Safe XLR and Belden cable in a series of pre-made microphone cables in a low-cost off-the shelf solution that sound designers have been waiting for a long time.
Honorable Mention: James Thomas Engineering for the Thomas Audio Tower designed by senior engineer Scott