Routledge was lighting director for the Help for Heroes concert at Twickenham Stadium. Headlined by Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow. Also performing that night were Enrique Iglesias, Alexandra Burke, Alicia Dixon, The Wanted, Katherine Jenkins, Peter Kay. Creative director was Kim Gavin for Live Nation.
The rig was co-designed by Tim Routledge and Steve Nolan who was also production manager of the show and managed by PRG's Rich Gorrod. The comprehensive rig based around the 'H' stage designed by Misty Buckley was supplied by PRG and featured a large rig of VL3000 spots, VL3500 wash and FX units, GLP Impressions, Alpha Beam 300's, 2 lites, Color blocks and Infinity XL washes.
Routledge was responsible for the lighting on site and used grandMA programmers Alex Passmore and Jonathan Rouse to run the large system on four fullsize grandMA's. Miguel Ribiero came onboard to create the exciting bespoke video footage for the show that run on the 14 onstage LED screens as well as the 600+ Mistrips running around the proscenium 'H'.
The entire show was pre-programmed using wysiwyg . Routledge commented, "The five-hour show was extremely busy with a constantly changing setlist and so we based ourselves in a box at the stadium from the Monday before with two of my own wysiwyg systems and Miguel programming content on a virtuoso triggering an Mbox extreme. Without this amount of preparation and ability to visualise the show we would have been pushed to get the show done.
"This was my first BBC1 primetime show as lighting director and to go live from Twickenham stadium was the most exciting moment of my career to date, and probably the scariest. With three operators and 12 followspots it was a nonstop day but the results were simply fantastic."
A fortnight later Routledge and Passmore headed for Cardiff to light the Welcome to Wales - The Ryder Cup Concert. This was an opening ceremony style concert produced by Push4 for the Welsh Assembly Government and shown on Sky 1 HD- the host broadcasters for the Ryder Cup.
The stadium was split in two for the show with a large scale dinner for 1500 guests on half of the pitch and then on the other side of a stadium wide drape a concert for 10,000 was held shortly after. The show attended by HRH Prince Charles was presented by Catherine Zeta Jones and Steve Jones and featured a variety of welsh talent including Katherine Jenkins, Lost Prophets and Dame Shirley Bassey. For this show Routledge used HSL who provided all lighting for both halves of the stadium and was project managed by HSL's own Mike Oates.
The lighting was again programmed using grandMA consoles with Alex Passmore running the main stage again and Matthew Button running the audience lighting and the two Hippotizeer video servers from XL Video. Routledge worked closely with XL Video's Chris Saunders and All Access Staging to help create the total look of the show with an extremely tight budget to make both of the elements as creative as possible.
"We used a circular golf ball as our theme and made everything as curvy as possible, the presentation B stage was backed by XL Videos X-Sphere system to make a backdrop of video driven "golf balls" and used Jarag light boxes on the main stage with circular frames to help the theme," said Routledge. "We were tight on time, budget but we managed to deliver something pretty exciting to welcome the biggest sporting event to ever hit Wales."
(Jim Evans)
