Profession:
Chief Technology Officer, High End Systems

Date & place of birth:
January 22 1956; Hitchin, UK

What was your first job after full-time education?
Instrument and amplifier repair technician.

What was the path that led you to become an inventor of lighting technology?
My father was in the U.S. Air Force, my mother is English and I was born in Hitchin, England. Because my father was in the Air Force we travelled a lot and I attended many schools in Europe and the United States. Growing up, I was that ‘mad scientist kid’ in school.

In high school I earned extra money modifying guitars with humbucking pickups and repairing car stereos. As I was into audio, electronics and music, it seemed a natural transition to become a DJ in the disco era of the 1970s.  While I was working as a DJ I became very interested in the entertainment electronics I was working with. It wasn’t long before I was designing new lighting and audio equipment for entertainment.
   
And co-found the American lighting company High End Systems? 
High End Systems started out in the early 1970s as Blackstone Audio Visual, a sound, lighting and video design and installation company. In those early days I designed and manufactured a line of pro audio sound systems, whereas my partner at that time, Lowell Fowler, specialised in multimedia slide projector systems used for entertainment. In the early ‘80s we even used Barco’s entertainment projectors in some reference installations! But too often our quality reputation was threatened by the weak quality of the lighting products we integrated and hence we set out redesigning existing ones.

I really felt like other install companies would benefit from our equipment in their own installs, but that they might be concerned about the purchase of that equipment from a competitive install company. So High End Systems was created as a way to distribute entertainment electronics worldwide. We distributed both equipment that was manufactured in Texas, as well as from other creative entertainment manufacturers throughout the world.High End’s first remote controlled lighting product was the Laser Chorus. This was a remote controlled laser scanner system that could operated with 12 multi-coloured low powered lasers. In 1986, the company name was officially changed into High End Systems.

What made you turn attention from automated lighting to digital luminaires?
Full colour gobo projection for concerts and corporate events had always been desirable in entertainment. The development team at High End Systems had been working with digital lighting concepts and ideas since the mid ‘90s. Full colour lithographic gobos had become very good (first shown in Cyberlight) but we knew that animations in full colour as created by light valve technology would yield a much better result.

What were the pivotal products or periods in High End’s history? 
Laser Chorus was the first intelligent lighting product, followed by Colorpro. Colorpro used an additive dichroic combining system that allowed a red, blue and green light source to be combined to a single output. Colour deviation is highly perceivable to the human eye, especially when operating lights side by side.

High End’s development arm called Lightwave Research at that time produced an optical laboratory to manufacture high spec dichroic filters. These filters turned out to be essential for the manufacture of today’s automated lighting.

High End Systems has led change from metal gobo type lights to lithography (full colour glass gobos) in the mid ‘90s. Now High End Systems leads the way with patterns projected by light valve technology.

What currently excites you most about lighting design?  
It is apparent that in the entertainment industry, lighting and video are no longer two separate worlds, but instead are growing close to one another, and are to be controlled by the lighting designer from a single console.
In putting the two concepts together, we basically showed people that
video projection could be used as another entertainment instrument
different than conventional video projection.

Was it a good moment when you received the Parnelli Visionary Innovator Award in December?
It was a great honour.

Is there any one person that has inspired you along the way?
My father taught me what integrity was.

What occupies your free time? 
I enjoy playing tournament table soccer.

What would be your advice to a teenage Richard Belliveau? 
Strive for your goals. By striving from one small goal to another a larger picture of success can develop. The goals do not need to be world changing, they can be personal goals or even goals of achieving possessions.