Beam Brush #1 Strategy To Paint With Laser Light – By ArgonTV

Beam Brush #1 Strategy To Paint With Laser Light – By ArgonTV

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Beam Brush #1 Strategy To Paint With Laser Light

Tim – Every now and again somebody will walk into your life and they will change it in some way forever.

And so this is very true of my very first guest on ArgonTV.

He walked into my life in 1993 and at the time, neither of us knew each other, in fact, we’ve never ever met personally, we’ve been in contact online the whole time, but my life took a whole different direction because of my first guest and I’d like to introduce you today to my very good friend and let me just read out my intro to him…

So my guest today is William Benner, who is president and CTO of Pangolin Laser Systems.

Pangolin is the company that produces the hardware, software and even the lasers, used to produce special effects for theme parks like Disney and Universal.

Also major sports like NBA, NHL and Super Bowl half-time show… wow…that’s pretty cool.

Major concerts and tours like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake…

Corporate clients like Hilton Hotels, Marriott, BMW and even the Windows 10 background was done using Pangolin systems.

He has nearly 50 patents in the field of laser scanning optics and vibration control and I haven’t known him long enough to call him Bill…

…You have to call him William!

Now Bill’s also a musician, who got his start in lasers while creating a laser show for his rock band in the 1980’s… which was something I never about you bill…

William – Yeah…

Tim …and he was able to parlay that into a business, that had been helping people with lasers ever since and it gives me great pleasure to introduce and welcome Bill Benner from Pangolin Laser Systems to ArgonTV…

So welcome Bill…

Welcome William Benner – Pangolin Laser Systems

William – Well, thank you for that gracious introduction Tim.

Tim – Great… it’s great to have you here.

We’ve been sort of reminiscing about how we met in 93 and how I was introduced into Pangolin software, but I had just finished an event in Expo 92 in Sevilla, in Spain and I was working on a project in Abu Dhabi and one of the crew there was working on some software.

I had been used to software, the way he had to do coding and I you know, I’m a very visual person and I don’t like coding and they showed me the Pangolin timeline.

I was immediately attracted to it because of the drag and drop features and the imagery that it had, so I felt very comfortable with it.

But Wow ’93!

We’ve been working together and your software has literally changed the direction of my life.

It’s travelled with me ever since and I’ve lived in 4 or 5 countries and it’s powered the whole of my company, which is Argon Animation, I’ve never done a show without Pangolin…

So awesome!

I don’t know if you realise how you touch people’s lives.

William – Well thanks for that Tim and as you and I were talking about know kind of in the lead up to this, I’m very… I’m flattered, I’m honoured, that our system has helped you in that way.

What was interesting is, about two days ago, Etwin Ziltra, a guy from the Netherlands, wrote to me from DTL Lasers in the Netherlands and he said “hey our guy Harry, we just celebrated his 25th year working with lasers here and he’s used the Pangolin system the whole 25 years.”

I think that the great news is that, probably most people wouldn’t even really know, that this is a career path or even a life path, as it has been for you, that not only can you do these things, but each, another thing you and I were talking about Tim, is that each person’s, kind of take on laser shows is different.

You know, the style that Harry produces and the style that the industry greats like you produce and Cory Simpson, and Mike Dunn and J Heck and these old-timers like you and I are… and have been with us for a long time.

Each of these people have created lives for themselves in this and each person has their own different direction.

It just goes to show you, just like just like artistry as a whole, you know you got Rembrandt, Picasso and Patrick Nagel and different people like this, Andy Warhol, all of whom are different, all of whom have great great regard… Art Deco… and just these different things that you can do with art and different ways of applying art, is the same way you could do with lasers.

So many different styles and so much different things you can do and thanks for that very very gracious introduction and I’m glad that I touched your life for the better and for the positive and that it’s been a it’s been a good ride for you.

Tim – Yeah and you know it was never like, in the beginning was never conscious direction.

I didn’t say “I’m going to do this.” I kind of fell into lasers accidentally, you know ,if there are accidents in this world, and I was… I was just… I was… you know, as I said earlier, I was… I left school… I was struggling to find a career.

I didn’t know what I was gonna do and I was just doing anything and then one day someone opened the door for me and I stepped through it and it took me into the world of show production and I immediately realised that was in my home.

I went “this is the place I need to be” and then I saw laser and it just blew my mind.

I fell in love with laser immediately.

It was love at first sight.

I realised I had something very special, because in those days, in the 90s and late 80’s laser was still you know, kind of rare and I can remember going to events and people like “oh the laser boys are here” you know and we were kind of in a very special niche and it just happened.

I just followed my love of what I was doing and then slowly it started to evolve into a career and then I realised I have something special.

I know what we could talk about this forever and one of the things that we are going to talk about in a moment is a very new product that you have called “Beam Brush” which allows people to paint with laser.

Why Pangolin?

I can’t wait to talk about in a moment, but first of all I just wanted to ask you a couple of little things.

One thing that I’ve always wondered about why did you call Pangolin – Pangolin?

William – Well it’s a great question…

As you know being in Philippines, what a Pangolin is.

Most people have never even heard of a Pangolin, doesn’t know what it is and other than knowing that it’s the company that makes software right, so yeah, so for those of you don’t know, a Pangolin is a small East Asian ant eating animal, it’s kind of like a cross between an aardvark and armadillo.

It has very… like an armoured skill outer shell and it couldn’t can roll up as… there are videos on YouTube of tigers approaching a Pangolin and they roll up into this ball and then all that Tiger can do is roll the ball, it can’t get to the meat or anything.

So yes the tiger just goes away and find some other kind of prey, but you know Patrick Murphy, co-founded Pangolin and in 1986 and was watching a National Geographic special on the Pangolin and this is interesting ant eating animal that rolls up into a ball when threatened by predators.

Back then there was no internet and you know… to try to figure out what to name your company, was kind of a daunting task, you had to do this official government thing, called a name search and the thought was, well you know, we’ll just take the easy way out and we’ll choose a name for the company that other people wouldn’t possibly think of.

After all, who in their right mind would name their company after a small East Asian ant eating animal?

So that’s kind of the… that’s kind of the gist it was it was kind of to pay tribute to this animal, but also to try to skate this thing that seemed daunting, it seemed very official, sounded expensive, a name search, you know so we that was the motivation there.

Tim – Okay cool!

I’m sure you know that pangolins are an endangered spaces!

William – Of course… yes and I hope we’re not… you know we weathered many storms, we’ve been through economic up and down, through disruption, through lots of competitors, have who’ve come and gone and we kind of stuck around there.

We’re in it for the long haul so…

Tim – Excellent well now I know.

Now I know yeah and I’m guessing that you know over the years that you’ve been involved in lasers, that they’ve changed a lot since the early days.

What what kind of applications have you been working with, with lasers and and how they change since you started?

The First Real Laser Show

William – Oh sure, you know the 1st kind of the first real laser show that people would have become aware of is in 1973 at the Griffith Observatory with Ivan Dreyer, who just projected lasers and back then when it started it was just, you know, there were no laser scanners and what was done was anything like, when you first get a laser… the story I tell is…

I get a laser… I got it from Melles Griot… it was a 5mw, you just start shining it through things.

So I shined it through my mom’s diamond ring and shined it through shower door glass, anything you could shine it on, that’s what you’re doing with laser at 1st.

So what Ivor Dryer did is, you know… shining a laser off a crumpled-up tinfoil… off of various diffraction things, and off little bottles like this… there is a bearing in here.

I’m testing bearing lubrication and outgassing, but yet they just take a bottles like this and heat it up with a torch and curl the bottle to hell and then shine a laser through it and watch it do all this wacky stuff and so that’s really where they started… in planetariums.

Just through, just doing various things that looked really cool, and the planetarium, it’s a completely darkened environment, it just makes it look like, you’re out in the… and they put the stars up there to make it look like you’re out in the… under the Aurora Borealis.

They create animated ways of doing this Azzura thing, so that’s kind of where it started and then in 1975, Coco Montagu, the founder of General Scanning, his nickname was Coco and everyone calls him that, his name is really John Montagu, invented the the closed loop scanner that we know and used for really long time, the G100 and I’ll show you a picture…

I got some visual aids here… this is the very first laser graphic that was ever scanned.

It was scanned by John Montagu himself, and he worked on this and we have a picture of him actually working on this, but you see this IR and it was an Industrial Research magazine, projecting on the clouds.

This is a magazine cover from 1975 and so this was the very first laser graphic that was ever done and then and then John Montagu and a couple of other people up in Massachusetts got together did the show called “Love Light” which is the fantastic show and it involved multiple lasers.

Initially, the way to do a multi-colour laser show, is either have a multi-colour laser like a argon / krypton or just a broadband Krypton and to separate that multi wavelength laser into multiple beams, using a prism and then use multiple scanners on each one of those colours.

So we’re like one scanner for red, one scanner for green one scanner for blue type deal and so that’s how they did multi-colour.

In 1992 Noes Technology and a couple other companies figured out a crystal called PCAOM, which would take that single beam and be able to modulate it and have it and leave a single beam at exiting this small little box where you can control each wavelength separately, control the amplitude and at that point in time we had RGB.

We can send the RGB light directly to a single set of scanners and really have a single RGB projection and so that’s how it went, from about I think the PCAOM came out right right around 1992, so basically from 1992 until now, kind of laser shows in terms of what it is, the light that goes to a scanner, haven’t changed very much.

Of course what has changed is the software that controls it, that’s what mostly, what we’ve concentrated on and starting with the software that you that you were using, Lasershow Designer.

We called it, Lasershow Designer for Windows, back then and before that we worked on the Amiga platform, but then we have we kind of migrated it through to Windows 2000 and Windows XP and then the more modern platforms all the way up to Windows 10 and and we’ve changed our software.

1st it was Lasershow Designer, Lasershow Designer for Windows and then Lasershow Designer 2000, which is still the platform you use I think.

Most recently Quickshow and Beyond, which is our kind of our most recent software, each time adding trying to add further ease of use and also trying to expand the palette of effects that could be done with the later.

So this would be kind of a representation of a more modern show.

You see we got more letters, you’ve got kind of kind of multiple colours here… more complex geometry, plus the combination of both beams and graphics all in the same thing.

This could all be done… you know, what’s what’s interesting was in the early days, having one… having one projector or one set of scanners was like “wow this is cool.”

Then you have one says scanners with RGB, “wow this is really cool,” and so with Lasershow Designer 2000, we can control 30 projectors and with Beyond, people are doing literally record-setting shows with 300 projectors and we are trying to you know, what we’re working on are our next evolutionary step is to control, and I’m not kidding… a thousand projectors from one PC.

So that’s kind of what’s, what’s happened is things are just becoming increasing in scale, because back when you and I started Tim, you had to be a couple of guys… the laser tube was 6 feet long and he had to have three-phase power and water.

So to have one of them was great, but now there are lasers that are this big, you know and you just put it right on the truss, you plug it in, sometimes doesn’t even need a connection to it to a network.

So because the ease of use and a tremendous decrease in price and you can get lasers starting at somewhere around $1,000 now, well now, the trick is just to create shows of great scale.

That’s the thing… these rock concerts and things you go on, it’s really about kind of just creating something a great a tremendous spectacle.

Tim – And that’s awesome… you know… we are getting old I think…

…because I remember those days right, it’s funny what you’re talking about, you know, like takes two people… I remember working with the Coherent I400’s for example and the power supplies were so big it would take four people to pick them up.

William – I’m sure.

Tim – We would have like half a ton of equipment… we’d work for 12 to 16 hours installing them, getting the water to work on the chillers and we turn it on… and we have a green beam.

William – And we hope nobody flushes the toilet!

Tim – That’s right yeah… and I remember the Neos crystal in ’92.

We used to work with those in Spain as well.

So it’s mind-boggling to see how everything’s changed.

It used to get so big and so complex and you know, you kind of needed a degree to do lasers and then now you can literally you know, plug them in the wall and off you go.

William – Yeah!

Tim – Which is quite an amazing journey and and you know lasers aren’t… in the way that we’ve been using them… are actually not that old compared to other technologies.

They seem to be accelerating what we can do with them all of a sudden.

The last few years.

William – Yeah yeah definitely…

Tim – So awesome!

So anyway I’m presently talking to Bill Benner, from Pangolin Laser Systems and in a moment we’re gonna be talking about Beam Brush and I’ll be right back in just a moment.

Beam Brush Revealed

Tim – Welcome back!

This is Tim Bennett and this is ArgonTV and I am presently talking to Bill Benner from Pangolin Laser Systems and let’s get round to what we came to talk about which is Beam Brush – How to paint with laser!

Sounds very very interesting and it’s something that we have all been wanting to do for years.

So 1st of all, the question has to be… how did you come up with the concept of Beam Brush?

William – Well you know, it’s interesting…

So right around 1992, we had gone to the International Planetarium Society, which happens once a year and each year it’s in a different planetarium and the year that we went to in 1992 was in Salt Lake City…

I hope I’m remembering the dates and the places right, but in Salt Lake City one of the things that’s in Salt Lake City, is a company called Evans & Sutherland, they’re a very famous world-renowned graphics company and one of the things that this company had made, is something called Digistar.

We were at this International Planetarium Society at a planetarium, which is the home of Evans & Sutherland and they have the Evans &Sutherland graphics projector.

Imagine a star projector, if you’ve ever been in a planetarium, usually has these two balls on it and each ball has many little holes and lenses up there to project the stars onto a dome-shaped ceiling and so it’s neat it’s shows you the stars, and it does a really good job of showing you the stars.

Evans & Sutherland being a graphics company, what they did is they created a high power, high brightness CRT and a 180 degree fisheye lens and they then created a database where you can have the stars.

In addition to that, hey we got this generic vector projector, we can do anything… So they projected various graphics there, such as, the take off of various rockets and things like that.

One of the things that they can do in Digistar, was control the beam diameter.

Like they can make stars bigger and smaller, as they are in real life, they can and they had like the rockets taking off… they can make the plume behind the rocket and it was just like totally cool and I saw this…

I was really inspired and I said we should be able to do this and laser and so Patrick and I were working on the software at the time, is a brand new platform… Lasershow Designer for Windows…

That’s where we transition from Amiga to Windows and we said we just put this in there, so we put it in our software and we came up with a specification called the Bean Brush Specification and we thought, what many people, many business people think and this is a huge mistake, that all we have to do, is put it out there and somebody else will do it.

Surely somebody can figure this out… it must be easy…

So the thinking, that now is laughable, is that the idea is the hardest part… that’s the thinking right.

So nobody else would have ever thought of changing the beam diameter!

We’re the really smart guys for thinking to change the beam diameter.

So we did the hard work of thinking it…

So now somebody else can actually do the work right!

So obviously, this is a fallacious thinking and the easy part is come up with the idea.

The hard part is actually executing the idea.

So we sought out people to do this and we… actually Neos technologies was one of the people we sought out to do it and they built two different types of prototypes.

Another guy… California, we sought him out… he built a prototype based on deformable mirror and basically nothing really worked the way we wanted it to work.

Beam Brush Specification

The way the Beam Brush Specification said it had to work.

Because Beam Brush Specification says it’s got to be small, at the time in 1992… in dollars it had to be $1500, it couldn’t be any more.

All of these systems were physically large, very expensive in the $7,000 range, they had limited power handling capabilities and stuff like that and so nothing was really right…

So then we just kind of… and so much time had passed… you think about 1992 until now… so year 2000… so much time had passed and we just we just kind of got sick of waiting for somebody else to do it and we said well dammit we’re gonna try to do this thing ourselves.

So about 10 years ago, we made an approach and I should have brought one with me, I got something about the size of it… so we created something that’s about this size, about the size of a coffee cup and it worked.

If you search up on a YouTube and if you type Pangolin Beam Brush, you will find a video we posted from 10 years ago, where we actually demonstrated Beam Brush 10 years ago both in video and in graphics and so it worked, but the problem is that by then, ten years ago…

Let’s see 2010, even in 2010 projectors had gotten about this big and so you can’t fit something this big, into a projector there’s not much bigger than this right.

So it just became impractical plus, what we call moving coil approach, created acoustic noise, it was noisy while operated and there was some other undesirable things.

So even though we made it, we had actually accomplished the effects we wanted to, it just wasn’t practical, so we never really brought that to market.

We did demonstrate it we got the video up there on YouTube, but that’s about as far as it went.

Now most recently and I’ll give props to a person who’s joined our team recently named Lyra Letourneau.

Lyra saw sitting sitting on my desk, which was our fifth generation Beam Brush and we put it together in 2013, we got the parts and and just got distracted and kind of forgot about it. 

Lyra says “hey what’s that sitting on your desk?” I said “this is the Beam Brush thing just hadn’t put it together.”

Lyra said something basically like “we got to do this, you know, you make this the priority” and so it was good.

I very much appreciate the push because we did and we made it the priority and we demonstrated it at ILDA this past November and it’s a great fanfare basically so based on all of the interest in it and plus based on the success, like this fifth generation version, is the most successful one that we’ve ever done and and anything it had been up to that.

It accomplishes everything that we would want to accomplish.

It’s small, it could be made inexpensively, it’s super fast.

We can make every single, every other point, in a point oriented image, a different beam diameter.

This is incredibly fast.

It works with all colours.

As far as we know, there is no power handling limitation to it, so it’s just like pie in the skies, it’s like, of course you would want to do this.

So that’s what we’ve done.

So I’ve got a couple of graphics to show you.

Tim – I was gonna say, what what can we actually do with it what applications does it have?

William – So I’ll show you…

So once again I want to start here… so this is where we started in 1975… right… and this is where we are basically last year right… and there’s really not all that much difference between this and this right?

It’s the same sharpie…

It’s a sharpie right?

And so, in other words this is the throw-up… this is the instrument you have to work with… the laser beam it’s real small…

Imagine if every artist, no matter who they were, whether they’re Rembrandt or Andy Warhol or the guy painting your house… this is the tool he’s got to work with yeah… right, so it’s gonna take a real long time to paint the house with a sharpie right?

So it’s a really neat tool to do a lot of things with, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to actually paint your house with a paint roller for God’s sake right?

You need something bigger and so this was some of the early stuff that we did with it and you could see the Lasershow Designer 2000, kind of the screenshots in the drawing editor and the result down here…

I’ll show you some of the other things that Lyra and I have both done.

The first few will be from Lyra…so this is some of the abstracts.

She can control the variable beam diameter and and the reason why I’m doing this in this low-tech way, it’s because I thought, well it’s just projecting on the back, but then we’ve got competing camera flicker and all that crap.

So this way it’s a low-tech way to work, plus they can go to YouTube and see it, but here’s another thing, you can just see that the variable beam diameter and what that does, it’s just a completely different dimension.

Here’s another abstract here…

Tim – Yeah it really changes the dimension of the laser from just thin line.

William – Yeah and so here’s another one like… it just a pretty neat image without Beam Brush, but with Beam Brush… you can’t even believe it.

So here’s another one… is actually screen capture from the video, that’s why you see this text down there.

When you go to YouTube and type Pangolin Beam Brush they’ll find videos that have this one in there.

So this one here is very interesting, because it’s an abstract image and all of the lines originally in the abstract are thin as this white line and just to show how fast this device is, I picked out just the first few white lines and then I immediately go to full beam diameter and when you do that, everything else becomes completely filled in.

So you can finally fill things in.

You know we’ve always been wanting to basically fill things and you know, imagine how you could use this on on a person’s face.

You’ve got the eyebrows, which in many cases, start big and get smaller.

You know, you would want blushy cheeks, red lips that are kind of fatter and it just the degree of artistic expression that this allows is really unlimited.

You think… you know would you what you and I just talked about is there’s you… there’s Cory Simpson, there’s J Heck, there’s all these old timers… Doug McCullough… and each one of us had done these different artistic expressions.

Well as many different people as they are and had these different artistic ways of using laser, now you have this tool, they have you it’s like all of these people and all these ideas multiplied by this tremendously flexible beam diameter thing and it is infinitely variable… there’s no steps in between, so you see you could have any beam diameter next to any other beam diameter.

It really kicks ass!

Tim – Awesome! I mean those images look really cool.

My mind is now full of all these images going off.

I guess it brings a whole different dimension to things like company logos, even beam works and how about audience scanning?

I’m sure audience scanning… the safety aspect of scanning with something like Beam Brush would be good yes?

William – It’s really cool!

For us for a few reasons.

One is… it’s very interesting so Lyra was working in her studio and had a video projector and the central video projector had Beam Brush on it and the outer two projectors were just regular ordinary laser projectors right and what was interesting was this…

Lyra was scanning concentric circles right, but like this right, so now what was interesting was and I never really consciously noticed this before, but the concentric circles viewed edge on, viewed like this right, just looks like a bunch of lines.

It just looks like you… because somehow you know you’re just viewing it like this, and it’s illuminating the fog, but it’s kind of so-what, you can’t really see the dimensionality to it.

But then when Lyra put Beam Brush on the central one and made each of the concentric circles a different beam diameter… all of a sudden you can see that it’s not just lines, but it’s circles in the air.

Right… and so it’s easy for people to understand how, if you have a tool like this, you can make graphics that have variable things.

That’s easy to understand.

It’s harder to understand and what it’s gonna do in the air and until you see it, you can’t really kind of visualise.

It’s hard for me to talk about.

You see it a little bit in the YouTube videos, especially the one from 10 years ago, where we did all kinds of stuff in the air, it’s really cool.

With respect to laser safety, what’s neat about it is, that you know we got these safety scan lenses, where we can make the beams that go down into the audience a bigger beam diameter, but again, we’re kind of back to the land of sharpies right… where you got… okay now you got two tools… here one above the audience and one in the audience right.

The great thing about Beam Brush is you can you can make this continually variable.

Just as we have this thing called beam attenuation map for laser safety controls the beam power, we now have a beam attenuation map for the Beam Brush, we call it a BAM Brush, so we have this brush where you can say in the audience, I want it to be this diameter and and no matter what you put there, it does it.

It will enforce that beam diameter on whatever you put.

So it’s just so easy to just apply this.

You just put the projector there, put the audience… figure out what the beam diameters got to be… paint it into the BAM brush and it’s done.

It’s just so easy.

So yeah for laser safety it really makes a big difference and makes it easier to accomplish laser safety.

Tim – Yeah and that’s really nice you know and being from a generation where we stood in lasers, before we really understood, you know, some of the… I wouldn’t say “danger,” but you know, it’s not the safest thing to stand in a laser beam.

The fact that we can actually do that now, without having to worry, is really amazing!

William – Yeah well I try to avoid the word “Danger” Tim…

…and use a more, you know, it’s a potential ocular hazard right…

I mean as proof, you and I have been doing this and we’ve been accidentally hit in the face with lasers, plenty of times.

You’re setting something up and all of a sudden something comes on and we’re living.

So it can’t be all that dangerous if old timers have been working around this thing every day are still around to talk about it.

But yeah!

Tim – Yeah awesome!

So it sounds like I want one.

How do I get one and can I bring my laser to you and you install Beam Brush into my laser?

How does it work?

William – Well I’ll tell you what…

One of the things that we’ve learned, since we brought this out… like I said, we demonstrated it last November and then, since then, we’ve done a lot of experiments with it, to try to find out how easy it is going to be to retrofit this into existing projectors and this is what we found.

So these days most laser projectors are diode based and most diode based projectors don’t just have three diodes, not just a red, a green, and the blue.

It’s multiple reds you know, multiple greens, multiple blues, right and so they combine these things in a matrix like array.

Now what’s interesting is, when you put this thing through something that increases that beam divergence, whether it’s our safety scan lenses or Beam Brush, what happens is, you start to see the structure right.

Like when it’s a nice small beam and you’re drawing things with it, you really can’t see the structure, but we if you expand it, all of a sudden things start looking not so great, you know, it’s like “maybe I’m not so interested in this after all.”

So we work with Kvant in Slovakia, who produces these lasers and what what they have done, is they they have basically adjusted these arrays in their lasers, so that when that when they expand it, it stays pleasing.

Let me put it that way it and all of a sudden things don’t start happening, that you wish wouldn’t have happened right.

They do what you would want it to do and so I think basically our initial approach is to work with Kvant, they have created lasers that work with Beam Brush real well, they build Beam Brush right into their projectors and so for people who want a kind of… if they want to get into this right now the easiest and best way is to just buy a new Kvant projector, that has Beam Brush in it.

The cost increment to include Beam Brush really isn’t all that high.

Justin is the the money guy.

So he’s the one who figures out what the prices are and anytime I talk about prices, I’m wrong.

So I’m not gonna talk about price, but it’s not super expensive right.

Basically what Beam Brush is… I wish I had one at hand to show you, it’s a scanner and some optics and it’s in a special mirror arrangement and so it doesn’t cost us that much money to build it and so therefore, you know, we can make it for a company for not all that much money.

So at first, the way to do it is to just buy a Kvant projector with it and and we’ll kind of go that route for awhile and see kind of how that works and consider retrofits in the future, you know, kind of based on how that goes and our results and how we’re observing the beams are staying together and looking good.

Tim – So if I want one the best way to do it, or if a customer wants one, or someone watching this video wants one… the best way to get one is the contact either you or me directly?

William – Yes! Yes that would be great!

Tim – Cool and then how do I control it?

William – With our software.

Beyond software and it’s really cool.

So we have built a number of tools right into the Beyond software control this thing and so… like you… so obviously from you know, from when we started in 1986 until now Bean Brush hadn’t existed.

So there’s no pre-existing content that’s ready for this thing right.

And so as a result, it’s not like, “okay I get this new HDTV and I get all this stuff now don’t worry very much” …so in Beyond we have built a number of what we call effects in of how you can apply Beam Brush on top of the existing content.

So you talked about corporate logos, I one of the things I’ve demonstrated, just through my own kind of hacking around, is the McDonald’s logo.

How it used to say McDonald’s and have just the outlines and now we can just increase the things and make the golden arches like really thick.

I did this with the subway logo, where you know, you got the word subway here and then the outside it was just a line, again we’re back in the world of sharpies now right.

With it with Beam Brush, I could just create this really wide thing and it was really easy just using Beyond effects to apply Beam Brush only in the area of the logo where I wanted and we also have it built into the drawing editor to, where I could just open up this thing and just kind of paint roll.

Just like we have a paint roller, you can now paint roll Beam Brush right into these logos and stuff like that.

So there’s a number of effects that are built in to Beyond where you just instantly put it on top of scanning beam effects, overhead beam effects, audience scanning and graphics.

It’s just a matter of clicking a few mouse clicks and it just goes right on there it’s really cool.

Tim – Well this is Tim Bennett from ArgonTV I’m here talking to Bill Benner from Pangolin Laser Systems about the very amazing Beam Brush and how you can paint with laser and in a moment we’ll be right back.

Tim – Hey welcome back this is Tim Bennett from ArgonTV and I’m very excited, because I’m talking to Bill Benner from Pangolin Laser Systems and we have been talking about the very very incredible Beam Brush, which allows us to paint with laser.

So Bill I think I want one of these Beam Brushes.

I’ve got to get one.

This has been a long time coming and I’m very excited and I had no idea that it was really such a long time in development.

I thought it was fairly new, but one of the other things I did want to touch base with you and we mentioned it very quickly.

In the last two or three weeks, I’ve been really connecting a lot, with people around the world, who are in the laser world and there’s so many new players coming in, both at the hobby level and the level of, “I want to do my first, you know, corporate show,”

And in my discussions, one of the things that I’ve discovered, to my horror, is that they literally know nothing about laser safety.

It’s quite shocking, that they really have no idea that there are things that you need to consider.

And I just wondered, you know, while we have this opportunity to talk together, if you could just say something about laser safety in general.

William – Well the thing that… the first thing is… it is a serious thing.

If the wrong set of circumstances come together, which are very rare, but if they do…

So the classes of lasers right, you’ve got class 1, which is completely safe.

You got class 2, which is safe under my most circumstances and then they break class 3a into 2 things… the class 3a is potentially hazardous for your eye and class 3b is potentially hazardous for your skin right and then you got class 4.

Class 4 means it can start a fire right!

And so and that’s those are the classes and so if the wrong set of circumstances comes together, like you’ve got a static beam, means non-moving, on a black curtain that isn’t fireproofed, at the very least burn a hole through the curtain and possibly you know if it’s flammable really really catch the curtain on fire.

So yes there are hazards.

Now like I say, the these things happen rarely.

Fortunately, the laser projectors do have a lot of safety things built into them.

Even our FB4 has safety things built into it and all audience scanning is done using our Pass System, which has… it’s monitoring everything about the projector, the power supply, the light coming out of the projector, it’s scanning and so it’s really monitoring everything and so to help with the awareness actually.

I’m so much chagrin, to say that it’s taken us all these years, but just last week we published on YouTube a video that is a real introduction to laser show safety and how to do this and how not to do that.

At the end of it, you can go to pangotest.com and actually take a test to make sure that you understand what was presented in the video and and then use those test results to help you to get your variance, as proof that you know what you’re doing.

I mean it’s kind of a dumb thing, that was taken all is all these years and and I’m not aware that anybody has created an online test thing or a video that puts this thing and it’s just available it’s out truly free.

It’s out there on YouTube right now, so I’m hoping that that and we’re gonna include that with every laser like a like a little USB thing in the lasers, plug this in your computer, watch it now, take the test, you know, learn this stuff, because it is important.

I’m glad you brought that up Tim.

Tim – That’s really brilliant and and can you give me a link to that and then I’ll include it in the description beneath this video so that people can find that?

William – Yeah… you know, I’ll definitely give you the link, so that you can put it in the description.

Now that I’m thinking about it, it would be a very good idea, as soon as we get off here, at pangotest.com instead of assuming that you got there by watching the video, we should just put a link to the video right at the top of the pango test, because that way, people won’t have to, you know, poke around and search for the video.

They can just go to one place and do everything.

Tim – I’m just writing that down…

Okay great so for any of these guys that are thinking about going into laser as a career and taking laser into consideration, what would you recommend that they do first?

William – Oh gosh… there’s so many YouTube videos, both on our channel and just available.

I guess the first thing might be to survey, in other words to educate yourself on just the number of effects that you can do with the laser.

As you and I know it could be what we call overhead beam effects, it could be audience scanning, it could be projected graphics and even in projected graphics, it could be for a corporate show, it could be in a movie theatre.

There are so many different things, so go out there and and see the different things that you can do with the laser and then maybe figure out what you want to do first you know.

Then figure out how big the laser or how many lasers you’re going to need to do this thing and there’s a another website I’m going to throw out there called getalaser.com where people can kind of find out… there’s different things on there, different lasers and everything’s on there.

I think maybe laser scanners are on there, as well, but try to get a background on the the price is gonna cost, because lasers like I say they can start for a $1,000 or even less for something very small and it goes on up.

It’s like, just like cars, how much do you want to spend on the car?

So you know, it’s figuring out the what you want to do first, figuring out the budgetary element to that next, and then just getting it and and having fun with it I guess.

Step 3 would be that so.

Tim – Yeah… I think the fun element was something that always influenced me a lot.

I like having fun and you know going to work and having fun and getting paid for it.

We have talked fairly extensively offline about making a career out of the laser industry… and you mentioned a few people who’ve been in it for quite a while.

For me it’s… is it 28 years I think I’ve been in the industry now?

It is possible to make a career out of lasers.

William – That’s right.

Yeah and I’ll tell you what… I do want to give a shout out to the younger folks too there’s a guy named Peterjan Ruysch in the Netherlands and he’s, you know he started kind of with us as an intern, poking around with it before then.

He has really just taken off and again completely different angle of where he’s going, when he does a lot of anime and 3D Studio Max stuff and he’s gotten into the motion capture and that sort of thing.

Like probably more than anyone.

Another guy named Andy Garcia another guy.

You know these guys are probably doing it five years by now, but when they first started, they got to get into it just mostly as a hobby.

Andy Garcia, you could probably find his stuff up on YouTube, he’s morphed his thing into something called Laserface, which is just like kind of like what it sounds, lasers in your face, right!

He creates very large-scale shows and and I think he’s had a video tour with a Laser face tour, stuff like that, so you can get into this as a young guy, I say young guy these guys are probably in their 20s now, but we’d start eighteen and then just kind of really get into it and pick a path.

I think Andy Garcia and Peter, both been in it about the same amount of time, vastly different directions in terms of what they’re doing with lasers.

There’s just so many things you could do.

So many places you can go.

Tim – And I seem to remember your journey… I mean, I can’t remember exactly how you got into lasers, but you come from a family who had been involved in technology for quite a while, if I remember.

William – Yeah well my dad, actually he was… he worked on the very first commercial computer.

It’s called UNIVAC.

The very first real computer was called ENIAC.

The first one that actually people bought and did business with and ran government’s with, was called UNIVAC as the Universal (UNIVAC) is a universal automatic computer, that’s what that stands for and so he worked there for a while and then he went on to NASA and helped out man get on the moon with the Apollo space program.

So I was always kind of poking around with him and hanging around him and just watching what he was doing.

That’s really what inspired me to get involved with with electronics and then you know, I got into a high school electronics program and just kind of went on from there.

In the university I went to, it’s called University of Central Florida, they have a program called CREOL, it’s the Center for Research and Electro Optics and Lasers and so it has a lot of laser things in it, so obviously, there’s a university programs that people can go to, to learn lasers, mostly scientific and that sort of thing in CREOL, but, yeah it’s and anyone could do this.

Tim – But what I love about the industry, is that we have these two diverse opposite people, there’s you who’ve got this family that have been involved in, you know, going to the moon and then there’s me… I left school at 16.

I was a window cleaner.

When I first started working with lasers, you know, they would say “can you get us a 25-way?”

“What’s one of those?” you know, “what’s a 25-way?” and I knew zero about anything and I literally had to learn everything and you know, I did it on the ground.

I was working with a professional company in the UK in London, and they were very good to me, because they took the time to teach me, but I wanted to be taught.

I found, you know, laser just the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life and I still do.

I think… I still think there’s no light form quite like laser and it’s been this nearly 30-year love story, but I was just able to slot in, learn what I needed to learn and all the technical stuff that I didn’t know, I could drag in someone like you…

William – Sure…

Tim – …and we complement each other

I was, you know, my brain is in a very visual and very artistic… sometimes autistic (LOL)… and I bring in the people that I need to, if we need, you know, very technical stuff and that’s what I love about this world, is that literally anyone can step into it.

If they have the passion and the desire and they can turn it into a lifelong career and you know and for someone like me.

I started this off by saying it changed my life.

It literally has changed my life, because I went from a guy who had really no future.

I literally had no idea what I was gonna do and for the last… well since 1996, I’ve been living in Asia.

William – Yeah.

Tim – I built my own company, I travel all over the place non-stop.

I’ve worked with celebrities, kings, queens, governments, different countries and it’s really been an incredible journey.

I met Jane, the love of my life who’s… because of laser.

William – Yeah.

Tim – In fact, it was one of my opening lines.. my opening lines, when I met, her you know I didn’t say “you want to come up and see my etchings?” I said “do you want to come and see a laser show?”

William – Well of course and the guitar thing doesn’t work trust me… the guitar thing doesn’t work.

Tim – So you know it’s completely changed my life and and I would say, you know, to anyone thinking about coming into it.

Come into it, but do it seriously, you know, as you said, you know, study what you need to study, find out the things that you need to find out, but you can have an amazing career and again one of the things that I really like about this industry was that everyone seems so willing to help everyone else.

You know, you mentioned lots of names of people, that I I know and I’ve been around for a long time, the new guys, the two, you know, I think was Andy and was it Peter you said?

William – Yeah and Peterjan.

Tim – Yeah, I’ve spoken to both of them recently and everyone’s just so willing to help and put themselves out and share information and if you had one gold nugget that you could say this is Bill’s secret to success in the laser world, what would it be?

William – “Okay, well this is completely, you know we did not prepare this, but you just kind of set it up for me and so much as saying hey everybody’s been so helpful and the key to helpfulness is something called abundance right?

It’s what’s called an abundance mindset as opposed to something called the scarcity mindset and now who the person who set forth these two mindsets, is Stephen Covey, who wrote the “7 Habits of Highly Successful People” so if I have one piece of advice to give anybody and it’s to read the “7 Habits of Highly Successful People,” the book.

It’s available in audio too and it has been… it will change your life.

If you’re a religious person, it will be the 2nd most important book in your life, if not a religious person it will be the 1st important book in your life…

…because what it does, is it realigns your thinking – thinking of abundance and yes, it’s to be sharing, it’s to be helpful, it’s not having scarcity mindsets and so that’s it.

Tim – Awesome! That’s awesome! I didn’t expect that answer, but that’s really awesome.

But you know, I totally agree.

You know, one of the things I love about laser is being able to make people happy.

William – Yeah.

Tim – Just for a moment they can come to a show and they forget all their problems with it and they just sit there and go “WOW!” and it’s such a nice moment when you can transform people just take them out of their shit!.

William – And that’s what they are going to remember too… When they go to a concert, what they always talk about are the lasers.

Go to a birthday party with lasers, that’s what they’re gonna remember.

Tim – Yes indeed… indeed.

People unfortunately… and you know no disrespect to other industries, people don’t remember the microphone stand, when they go home you know, or the video projector, or the truss and although they’re essential… lasers are really a WOW factor!

William – Yeah! That’s right

Tim – I have one last question and it comes from a friend of mine called Patrick Chow.

I don’t know if you know Patrick is from DJ Starlights, I think they’re based in China and he said, he asked… he wanted me to ask you this question: how can we prepare for the market after Covid 19, and should we cut budgets or keep the same policy going?

William – I tell you what that’s a great question.

What I would say is, events are definitely coming back.

Now Pangolin as the company who sells the control systems and software to everybody, we have kind of the bird’s eye view.

In other words, when when people want to do a laser show, they’re gonna have to buy and oftentimes software, controllers and stuff like that to do these things right and so when you’re sitting at home, you’re thinking, what’s going to happen here or are laser shows completely going away what’s happening?

I can tell you J. Heck on Instagram, had a great way of putting this, he says “don’t think about this as the end, think about this as an intermission,” just like when you go to some theatre shows, there’s the intermission, the you know, this is kind of a break.

It’s to take a break and what we’re doing, during this this break and what we recommend other people to do is just hone your skills, take this time – there’s so many things that when you’re… when you’re super busy, you don’t have time to deal with this thing.

Now if you’re not busy take time to deal with whatever it was bothering you.

Learn new things and that’s where this is, because it is coming back, that’s what I would say and how we know is because, we’d be the we’d be the one to know because the orders are coming in.

So since China was the first people through Covid 19, they’re the first to kinda exit Covid 19 and they are the first where these events are coming back.

So we are seeing events happening in Shanghai again.

We also got wind of a huge show and I forget what it’s called.

Justin talked about this from time to time in Switzerland.

So events are coming back and you know, historically entertainment is, you know, whenever there’s a recession, entertainment is the thing that people use, entertainment tends to always do well in time of recession, for the reason why you just said Tim.

You know, people… it kind of takes people out… it transports you somewhere else… it gets you away from thinking about kind of some of the some of the other stuff going on you know so…

Budgets, that’s that’s kind of Justin’s end of the spectrum and I’m sure Justin would very much appreciate a telephone call to any kind of discussion like that.

But yeah, in terms of events themselves, they’re gonna come back.

J. Heck says that this is an intermission and I wholeheartedly agree with that.

Tim – I like that thought and I kind of feel, you know, when the green light is given and it’s like all clear, there’s gonna be one hell of a party!

William – Yeah that’s right yeah there’s gonna be a lot of pent-up demand that’s for sure.

Tim – But I do like what you said just now, “it’s an intermission” and it does take… it gives you… and in the beginning, I think we’ve been in 6 or 7 weeks of lockdown right now, in the first 2 weeks, it’s kind of nice.

You get to slow down, smell the roses, okay spend time with the people you love… you know week 3, it’s like “I’d like to go out now” and now we’re in 7 weeks or something, it’s like I’m going a little brain crazy… but it allowed me to launch for example, ArgonTV.

I’ve been talking about you know getting this going again for weeks and weeks, months and months and months and now it’s giving me the space to actually step back and say okay let’s get it going.

William – Yes that’s right.

Tim – And we got it going.

So this is episode 1 and I’m so grateful you’re our 1st guest…

…but I agree you know, it gives you the time to actually take stock of where we are in life and where we want to go and what we want to do and start putting some plans in place and then as soon as we can get it all back into action again.

I’m looking forward to it

So with that, I want to say thank you Bill for being our 1st guest it’s been awesome having you here.

It’s been an epic journey of nearly 30 years that we’ve been together, not quite a marriage, but yeah certainly going that way and you know, I’d like to express my gratitude to you for all the support and the help that you’ve given over the years.

Not just to me, but I know that you support the industry in a massive way, as a world leader in laser software and you know that’s just fantastic.

So thank you for being here.

William – Well thank you and it’s a tremendous honour to me to be your 1st guest on the inaugural show.

That’s fantastic and and to be able to chat with you, a long-term customer, client and friends so fantastic.

Tim – Yeah well I’m giving you a thumbs up with a great testimonial.

So I’m very happy with Pangolin Laser Systems and Bill Benner.

William – Great… well thank you!

Tim – Well thanks very much everybody.

It’s been an awesome program and we have been discussing “Beam Brush and How To Paint With Laser” with the one and only Bill Benner from Pangolin Laser Systems.

This is Tim Bennett from ArgonTV.

I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

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