Following the North American leg of A Bigger Bang World Tour, which kicked off on 21 August in Boston, the band will then tour Mexico, South America, the Far East and finally Europe in the summer of 2006.
The Rolling Stones will once again showcase their diversity as musicians and performers by playing different venues from the grand scale excitement of a stadium to the thrill of an arena. This year's tour takes the concert experience to the next level by bringing together the advantages of an up-close club experience with their electric stadium show.
Setting a new standard for concert effects, The Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang World Tour is the first major rock concert to include the audience as part of the set design. Fans purchasing on-stage tickets will have an intimate and extraordinary view of the Rolling Stones and their view of the audience while becoming part of the backdrop and set.
To deliver the ground-breaking set, dramatic effects and state-of-the-art technology fans have come to expect from previous Rolling Stones tours, the band have again worked with the design team responsible for previous world tours - including stage set designer Mark Fisher, lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe and stage supplier Brilliant Stages.
When technical director Jeremy Lloyd needed to find a solution to up-light a series of 90 flat and radius fascia panels concealing the five levels of in-stage seating, he approached A.C. Lighting. The challenge was to source a small but very bright LED fitting which could be mounted along the bottom edge of each panel to provide a colour wash straight up the projection surface, regardless of what angle the panel was suspended at.
Following lighting trials at the offices of tour equipment suppliers PRG, where a number of LED fittings were tested to prove their suitability to light the panels, Patrick Woodroffe chose the Chroma-Q Color Block DB4 LED fixture.
The fixture was ideal for the application due to its compact size, which allowed units to be concealed inside the 100mm/3.9" deep by 100mm/3.9" high trough at the base of each panel. The design team were also impressed by the Color Block's brightness level, which is comparable to some fixtures twice the length. By fitting each unit with a special 30 x 5 degree lens film kit and incorporating a shallow reflector at the top of each of the panels, it was possible to achieve an even wash over a 2.5m wide by 2m high area with just five fittings each containing four separate RGB cells.
A.C.'s Special Projects division worked with Brilliant Stages to provide the correct mounting of the units into the panels, including an enclosure to protect the Color Blocks from rain whilst still retaining ventilation to allow airflow. The units were mounted on adjustable brackets to allow the fittings to be level inside the angled troughs, whilst not protruding.
In all, 434 Color Blocks fitted with special 30 x 5 degree lens film kits were supplied; along with 18 of the new 30-way power supplies and all required cabling.
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
