The group, currently touring Europe to promote their tenth anniversary 'Best Of' compilation, recently returned to the UK to play high-profile headline slots at the Wireless Festival 2006 in London and Leeds. For this, the third successive tour collaboration between the band and lighting designer Vince Foster, UVA wanted to create an entirely new, more organic and audio-responsive show for their onstage visuals, whilst still retaining the essence of the last two tours.
UVA had discussed the idea of surrounding the group with LEDs capable of displaying images and text, but which also doubled as a full lighting rig. After getting the go ahead from singer Robert Del Naja to develop the concept, the team then went through many different designs before settling on a the curving screen. During the early stages of design, UVA were very excited when A.C. Lighting's Lee House visited them to demo the Chroma-Q Color Block LED fixture.
UVA's Chris Bird commented: "The Color Blocks were a perfect product to achieve the screen design as their short batten length was ideal for creating the hemispherical shaped curve and their brightness was incredible for their size. On top of this, we were pleased to see a nice tight beam from the unit, but still retaining a useful viewing angle."
As a result, UVA specified 240 Color Blocks for the LED screen. UVA then commissioned LiteStructures to create a bespoke stand support for the fixtures, taking into consideration all possible viewing angles and beam directions before they were satisfied with the curved screen. LiteStructures' rehearsal facility, Northern Studios, were then used to construct the support and test the screen, which consists of 24 evenly spaced supports each containing 10 Color Blocks.
The show is run from UVA's bespoke software, Dragonfly 3, on custom built PCs in a dual rack-mount system. The Color Blocks are DMX controlled via a USB trigger and six channels of live audio from the band, inputted via a firewire sound card.
Songs are sequenced visually to the music, with all cues triggered live as the band play by Joel Gethin Lewis, UVA's interactive designer, using a combination of their click track and his own judgement. UVA have also created many audio responsive layers which, coupled with come creative audio routing, allows the band to 'play' the visuals live.
All visual content was chosen in collaboration process between singer Robert Del Naja and UVA, and was created specifically for the show. Most of the songs feature a blend of both UVA's video effects and Vince Foster's lighting, but for certain songs one of the two elements comes to the fore, for example, Unfinished Sympathy uses only conventional lighting, whereas False Flags is dominated by video content.
The lighting rig, which was supplied by HSL, consists of 14 Robe ColorWash 1200E ATs, two ColorSpot 1200E ATs with a conventional rig of 24 James Thomas Floorcans fitted with Chroma-Q colour changers. The lighting rig is looked after on the tour by Rohan Harrison and Jonathan Williams.
(Lee Baldock)
