"The system is simple enough - three screens of Barco LED, one a wide-screen centre stage, flanked by two in portrait orientation - very narrow, side screens. There's a three-camera system for live shots, one front-of-house, one in the pit and one on stage," says Drew Findley, who is responsible for the video content. Findley controls the four used M-Boxes from a grandMA. "The show is event driven: what I like about the grandMA is the flying faders - having the ability to move quickly and easily between pages, and copy out of existing pages," he says.
Logistics have proved challenging, Robin Wain, senior account production manager for PRG Europe says: "At one point I'm having to source 14 grandMAs, so we have enough to leapfrog from gig to gig, as one set after another inevitably gets held up in customs and transit."
PRG provided equipment in some unlikely destinations across Africa and the Far East. But only the desks and the M-Boxes have to travel, the lighting and video systems are sourced locally. That leads to curios incidents like the one in Athens, when Matthew Button was greeted by a rig with four finger trusses projecting out into the audience, filled with VL3000s. "Not quite what I wanted, but at least the grandMA can deal with those kind of instrument changes pretty easily," Button states.
"The grandMA is an ideal solution to a variety of automated lights I've encountered as the tour moved from territory to territory," Button says. He has an equally simple solution coping with the multiplicity of LED fixtures. "I programmed the LED fixtures as 550 separate LED hearts, it's a bit long-winded, but it should mean that I can make any LED fitting work to the pattern we've programmed."
(Chris Henry)
