Mark Wynn-Edwards

Mark Wynn-Edwards: Lighting Designer, Simple Minds

Mark Wynn-Edwards began his lighting career while at school, subsequently finding work with Coni Lighting and as a freelancer. He was first introduced to the Hog II while at Coni. Mark comments, “The console made perfect sense to me; I just loved it. As a freelancer, I always went with the Hog, and now over 25 years later I’m still standing behind a Hog to do my work!”

Over the years, Mark has invested in numerous Hogs. “I always use the best desk for the job in hand, but in the warehouse its the flagship Hog 4. You can’t beat a bit of real estate to build a show file! The layout of the control surface is perfect, not cluttered, and nicely zoned … and it’s the same across all Hog desks, so it’s easy to move between consoles.”

Whether for film, tv or concert design, Wynn-Edwards employs several windows on the Hog’s right side as programming tools. The left side is reserved for his live window, and he uses the Command keys for his ‘bumps and fun stuff’. This set up remains for programming and operation unless he requires something special for a show.

“Over the years I’ve followed the many updates to the Hog OS; my current love is the ability to map shapes, colors and plots across the fixtures. It’s fair to say I'm not a massively technical programmer, although I do embrace it at times. I use macros to push faders, jump around programming, and have things going on in the background, but I still very much harp to an older style of running a desk. In 25+ years with the Hog, I’ve had very few crashes across all the versions of Hog. Not many consoles out there have this level of reliability, and this alone keeps me using Hog consoles.”