Recently, Bock found a challenge that was tailor-made for the Nexus. The red-hot Australian band 5 Seconds of Summer, whose debut album charted at number one in 11 countries, was appearing on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, where Bock is the LD. The band presented him with a concept sketch that called for a wall of quartz tungsten halogen panels, but Bock had a better idea.
"I felt that the Nexus panels would be much more versatile, easier to set up, and much less power hungry," he said. "I was trying to achieve the look presented in the rendering, which was a checker board arrangement of light panels. My feeling was that the Nexus panels would provide a more versatile look at a fraction of the power; plus they would be fairly easy to set up in our very tight performance area - it was a perfect fit."
Bock placed 43 Nexus panels vertically in alternating columns of two and three units on 17 sticks of 12" box truss. The columns were positioned stage left, upstage, and stage right, forming an intense light box type of structure on three sides of the band. A dedicated grandMA2 console with a dedicated programmer was used to control the panels, which were run mostly at 5-10 percent brightness, although sometimes they were bumped up to 20 percent to match some of the more intense moments in the band's performance.
"The Nexus panels provided a dynamic background for 5 Seconds of Summer that set them apart from most music performances on The Tonight Show," said Bock. "They created a very good image on camera with very vivid colours. We were originally going to go with a very warm tungsten feel per the band's request, but they changed their mind upon arriving in the studio, and we went with a cooler colour palette."
(Jim Evans)
