Lighting the Next Generation: Luther Frank, Battle of the Busk, and Designing with Depence
When production designer and lighting designer Luther Frank talks about light, it’s clear he sees more than fixtures and cues, he sees opportunity. Based in New York City, Frank works across concerts, fashion shows, theatre, and corporate events, but his true passion lies in light art installations and immersive experiences. Together with his colleagues at House Lumina, he helps design and support countless of projects each year, always with a focus on thoughtful use of light and space.
That philosophy is at the heart of Battle of the Busk, an event Frank and his team launched five years ago at LDI as a passion project during the early days of the pandemic. What began as a friendly competition among seasoned designers has evolved into something far more impactful: a fast-paced educational platform that takes newcomers, often with little to no console experienc, and turns them into confident festival-level buskers in just two days.
Battle of the Busk: Education at Festival Scale
Battle of the Busk is now a cornerstone of LDI’s opening night, blending education, mentorship, and live entertainment. Participants are guided by legendary designers and judged by industry leaders from around the world, including Ola Melzig of Eurovision. The result is consistently jaw-dropping.
“We take students who have sometimes never touched a lighting console,” Frank explains, “and in two days they are busking at a festival level.”
For Frank, the event is deeply personal. As an alumnus of the original Hog Factor competition, he sees Battle of the Busk as its spiritual successor, one designed to pass along the same networking, confidence, and career-launching opportunities he once received to the next generation of designers.
A Stage Designed to Challenge and Inspire
The stage design for Battle of the Busk is intentionally demanding. Frank’s goal each year is to create a rig that is challenging but fun, pushing participants to think creatively and find their own visual language.
Traditional festival elements, like a top row of blinders, sit alongside unconventional choices such as angled trusses and oddly shaped video surfaces. The complexity is increased further by the needs of sponsors, who often want to showcase brand-new fixtures, sometimes still running beta firmware. This year’s rig included nine different fixture types, many of them newly released.
At the same time, practicality is key. The stage is built by a mix of experienced professionals and newcomers learning technical production skills, so the design must be achievable within tight time and labor constraints.
Adding another layer, video has become increasingly central to the show. With Pixera joining in recent years and VisualArtform introducing a dedicated VJ competition this year, video surfaces were elevated in importance, ensuring VJs faced the same creative challenges as lighting buskers.
Designing with Depence: From Sketch to Virtual Stage
Frank’s design process begins away from the computer, on pen and paper, sketching abstract gestures. Once a direction is chosen, the ideas move into Vectorworks and are reviewed with the technical director for feasibility. Fixture selection then becomes a months-long collaboration with sponsors before the design is finalized and exported via MVR into Depence.
This year marked Frank’s first time using Depence, and it quickly became indispensable.
“Due to the size and complexity of the rig, most console onboard visualizers simply aren’t optimized enough,” he says. “Depence is fast and realistically rendered.”
Only one brand-new fixture was missing from the library, and Syncronorm added it rapidly. Frank then connected Depence live to an MA3 console in his studio, testing profiles, identifying quirks, and cleaning up issues before the files ever reached the stage or the training teams.
Leveling the Playing Field
One of Depence’s biggest impacts was giving each busking team access to the same high-quality virtual environment while the physical rig was still being built. In previous years, teams relied on basic console visualizers. With Depence, they gained approximately ten additional hours of meaningful previsualization time, compared to just two hours on the real rig before showtime.
The result was transformative: higher visual fidelity, greater stability, and, crucially, a level playing field for all competitors.
Frank also highlights Depence’s MVR and 3D model import, as well as its intuitive layer organization, which automatically labels and color-codes design versions. These features are especially valuable on projects that pass through many hands and evolve rapidly.
Looking ahead, he sees even more potential for collaboration. The speed of Vectorworks-to-Depence workflows opens the door for more frequent 3D walkthroughs with technical directors during early design iterations.
Built by the Community, for the Community
Every element of the Battle of the Busk stage is made possible through sponsorship. From lighting fixtures to the stage itself (Apex Stages), truss, motors, and cabling (AG Productions), all equipment is donated. Nothing is prepped in a shop, everything is configured on site, often straight out of the box, including networking gear used to merge multiple lighting and video systems.
Behind the scenes, a large volunteer and professional team makes it all happen, including:
- House Lumina – Production Design: Luther Frank | Technical Design: Kent Sprague | Stage Management: Dara Swisher
- AG Productions – Technical Director: CJ Glowacki
- Double Trouble – Lead Tech: Matt Weber | Master Electrician: Nick Maki
- Questex / LDI – Project Manager: Kassidy Glowacki
Final Reflections
“I never assumed our little project would grow this large,” Frank reflects. “It’s incredibly thrilling to put new hands on such a top-notch stage and make such an interesting show happen so quickly.”
For him, integrating Depence wasn’t just a technical upgrade, it was an educational breakthrough. Tools of this caliber are usually reserved for the biggest festivals and tours. Giving young professionals access to them early is a rare and powerful gift.
Frank’s experience with Syncronorm has been equally positive, praising the team’s fast, responsive support and willingness to collaborate, even across time zones.
If he had to sum up Depence in three words?
Fast. Capable. Impressive.
And perhaps his most telling comment of all:
“Depence is just fun. Rarely does a software work so well that it enhances your understanding of your own work. Seeing ideas come to life in Depence has been more fun than I’ve had in a virtual environment in a long time.”
For Battle of the Busk, and for the next generation of lighting designers, that fun is lighting the way forward.
Sources:
LDI 2025 Battle of the Busk VJ Challenge,
VJ Challenge Winner: John Paiz
