Celine Dion in the frame with Ayrton
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Dion’s lighting designer of 28 years, Yves Aucoin, put together a lighting design that featured 24 Ayrton MagicPanel-R fixtures.
He says: “Celine takes her craft – and her audiences – seriously, and we spent a long time carefully listening to every song in her repertoire before choosing which she would perform and how they should look. Her collaboration with the design team comes in the early stages of a tour, after which point she concentrates on her performance and leaves us to our work on the visuals. She performs 26 songs in the show but selected 48 in total, switching between French and English from city to city.
“On a tour of this scale, with venues this large, I like to frame Celine so the audience can instantly see, in one look, exactly where she is on stage at all times,” says Aucoin. “Sometimes I do this with followspots or top light, but key to the LIVE 2017 tour was a series of MagicPanel-R fixtures, 8 of which I arranged in a V configuration on the floor upstage to form a frame around her. At times these appeared like a pyramid effect above her head, so it was clear from all angles of the auditorium that she was in the middle of them.”
Aucoin placed another eight MagicPanel-R fixtures on the front truss facing the audience to project effects and colours out into the auditorium, and rigged further eight MagicPanel-R units under two LED side screens, to help blend the lighting with the video and open up the side lighting for the cameras.
“My intention was to make use of the MagicPanel-Rs’ rich colours and powerful beams so I mostly used them as full shafts of light and worked with the colour. However, they also proved to be nice effects machines and I used the onboard effects to create graphics and sparkle effects to add background interest.
“This was especially effective in the first couple of songs where I used them to increase the sense of excitement in the audience: even when using one pixel at a time, the beams are very bright, so you can create a nice sparkling, glittering effect which became the signature look for I Drove All Night, the second song to open the English show.
“This effect was reflected in the video content as well. I am always looking to blend the lighting and video together so they work as one, and work closely with the video team to achieve this. For this number we created a cityscape in which we matched the colours and the ‘excitement’ of the beams of light - some of the MagicPanel-R dot effects are unique - to maximise the effect.”
(Jim Evans)
