What is show engineering?

A modern show always rests on technical elements — some more common than others — designed to stimulate the audience's senses and immerse them in the emotions it conveys.

Sound and light shows: the principle

The main technical strands are sound and light. The sound side may involve amplifying what happens on stage (voices, musicians, atmospheres) to raise the sound level, or playing back audio elements prepared in advance, in the studio. On the lighting side, part of the work goes into lighting scenes or performers, but it is also used creatively: illuminations, colour washes, effects and so on.

Other technical devices can come into play, such as motorised elements, water jets, flames or stage pyrotechnics.

All of these techniques need to be coordinated by the control room. "Control room" can refer at once to the place, the team and the equipment used to control the technical elements of the show:

• Lighting is handled by a lighting desk (or software solutions) using a digital protocol — known as DMX — to communicate with the fixtures.
• Sound is handled by mixing desks for the mixing stage (with sources such as microphones, audio players and so on), followed by the whole amplification chain.
• The other techniques (water jets, flames, etc.) can be handled by the lighting solutions, as the control technologies are very often compatible.
• Motorised solutions, like pyrotechnics, are often specific and require additional equipment (firing desk, control PLC, etc.). The whole can be directed by what is known as a Show Control (and by the entire technical team, of course). It is a machine that orchestrates all the other control solutions: sound, lighting, pyrotechnics, machinery. In some control rooms, everything can still be done manually.

The role of show engineering

Show engineering, as we understand it at Chronix, is all the technical thinking that turns the artistic project into reality. It starts with a global reflection on the equipment and its capabilities, on the skills and technicians needed for the show to run smoothly, but also on the interconnections between devices — because technicians are there to make everything work, yet cannot always carry out every operation in real time.

This is where our team's role comes into its own: it sets out to develop bespoke solutions that bring even more realism and immersion to the show, by anticipating how the equipment will behave and by simplifying its operation. Some products can be used to factor technical interventions together, reducing a whole sequence of operations to a single button press, or to automate complex processes on a time base — anything is possible.

For several years now, our team of developers has been working on two major areas of innovation: one is a new lighting control solution that simplifies time-based and soundtrack-based programming, and the other is a new approach to managing interactivity and synchronisation tasks.