George Dodworth is at his command post, a corner room in the Wyndham Grand downtown, standing in front of a window facing the Highmark Building. Five laptops are opened on the desk, pulsing with data, while seven lasers shoot thin green beams of light through the window: Batman’s calling card.
The Bat Signal went up for two nights, transforming Pittsburgh to Gotham, thanks to the technical know-how of Lightwave International in Bridgeville.
Lightwave is a creative, technical company that spends lots of time on the road, so catching up with Dodworth is no easy feat. Tomorrow he will be off to Canada. Tonight he’s got several jobs in simultaneous production in addition to the Bat Signal: a Kanye West concert in Queensland, Australia, a blink-182 summer tour.
This summer also includes dates with Rihanna, Tom Petty and M.I.A. And “Cowboys and Aliens,” which hit theatres this week, featured Lightwave’s laser work in all the spaceship scenes.
Lightwave has been in the business for more than 13 years, mounting large outdoor, city-scale events, world tours and corporate and private functions for every occasion. Pink Floyd’s Prison on the “Dark Side of the Moon” tour was one. (Another was the Steelers’ logo, splashed across Mt. Washington during the Super Bowl, a donation from the hometown company.)
Lightwave currently owns the brightest, full color lasers in the world, something it calls “Solid State Excitement,” which is helping to drive company growth. They are hiring this year, hoping to add a few European technical artists to the team.
Dodworth says the inspiration for the company came from visits to Buhl Planetarium as child. His first laser show was in his dorm room as an undergrad at Penn State. It’s an exploding industry as the technology becomes more streamlined, smaller, better and brighter, he explains.
“Visual effects are replacing special effects today. It’s highly artistic,” he says. “The panic of a situation drives the solutions to our problems.”
The Bat Signal was an artistic feat in itself. Looking closely, one may have noticed that the lightbeams were woven between the windows for a higher resolution.
The Bat Signal was a joint initiative dreamed up months ago by the Pittsburgh Film Office and Idea Foundry to highlight a local company and send a clear signal to LA that the region is chock-full of cool film and entertainment technologies.
Source: George Dodworth, Lightwave International
Writer: Deb Smit
Image of George Dodworth copyright Debra Diamond Smit
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