Ayrton magic casts spell on Slam Dunk tour
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The alternative music event was headlined by rock band Enter Shikari and held in Leeds, Birmingham and Hatfield, with warm up shows at The Dublin Academy and Belfast Limelight and a further headline date in Barrowlands.
LD Steve Bewley used Ayrton’s MagicBurst LED graphic strobe fixtures and MagicPanel-602 units to achieve the dramatic visual effects needed for the event.
Bewley said: “For this show we designed four rotating towers which we wrapped in haphazardly-arranged LED strips, and used these to flank the drummer by deploying two towers either side of him. We then rigged three MagicBurst units vertically inside each tower towards the rear which, concealed within the towers, we use to shoot huge blasts of light out between the LED strips – much to the surprise and delight of the audience.”
He added: “Enter Shikari are a wild band and the wilder the strobing is, the better they like it – so we have two or three different types of strobe for these shows which enable us to change it about for the audience. We chose MagicBurst as one of the main strobes effects because of the graphic capability, and the sheer power of the units. When the towers rotated we are able to show the audience the full force of what the MagicBurst is capable of.
“I can spin the units around to add interest, often pointing not directly at the audience, but at the roof or tilted at angles, and can introduce interesting chases to the music. Because the MagicBurst has such a strong beam angle, you still get the strobe effect out towards the audience, and by not running them at full power all the time, the effect is always different.”
Bewley used MagicBurst’s range of inbuild effects as well as the strobe to create fast-paced graphics, at times synching the MagicBurst with the effects on the MagicPanel-602 fixtures. 36 x MagicPanel-602 units are rigged behind the towers and the band to create Bewley’s favourite linear effect, and are positioned on mid and back trusses overhead, and evenly spaced along trusses that follow the line of the dome style proscenium.
The house rig for the Slam Dunk festival was supplied by ZigZag and the touring rig by LCR. Ayrton is distributed exclusively in the UK by Ambersphere Solutions.
(Jim Evans)
