Lighting and video vendor for the tour is Toucan Productions of Oklahoma City, their second tour with the band after supplying a smaller tour last year. "On this tour, the band chose to forego LED panels for the big pixel look that the Cuepix Panels give," stated Brad Meyers, director of show operations at Toucan, who handles lighting programming and lighting direction duties while band family member Ryland Lynch conceived the lighting design and serves as board op. "We have two horizontal walls of Cuepix Panels on stage, a front wall plus a rear wall on the band riser behind the drum kit. It's a total of 73 panels, which is enough to make out the graphics across them and looks great."
Part of Elation's Cuepix Series of LED blinders and strip lights, the Cuepix Panel is a high-power matrix panel with individual pixel control and a full spectrum of colors from 25x 30-watt RGB COB LEDs. Brad uses the panels for various purposes including visual effects with solid or variable colours, as well as graphics, and also pixelmaps effects across them. One Cuepix wall fronts the drum riser and is two Cuepix tiles tall by 17 wide while the Cuepix wall in back of the drum kit is three Cuepix tiles tall by 13 tiles wide. The walls make for an ideal visual effects background for band members and also provide a layered look that gives the stage depth.
Brad, who has had experience using the Cuepix Panels on other Toucan projects, outputs pixel-mapped video content across the panels and calls it a "great look". He runs the panels at a maximum of 80% and that only when he uses them as blinders. Even with some 127 moving lights in the rig, the Panels have no problem shining through. "We had to be careful about what lights we used on the show," he said. "The brightness of the Cuepix Panels would have washed some fixtures out they are so bright."
(Jim Evans)
