The A Flash Flood of Colour tour started in Europe where it played slightly smaller venues, so the lighting rig was designed to be flexible enough to expand and contract to cover these, plus both an A and a B configuration for the UK, again based on the size of venue, the largest of which was Hammersmith Apollo. Mike Oates project managed for HSL.
The European leg featured a floor package from HSL, all based around five LED edged triangles. The fixtures chosen to make these were Chroma-Q Color Forces - three Color Force 72s for the large central triangle in Europe and 4 sets of three Chroma-Q 48s for the four smaller ones. These were all fitted into custom flying frames fabricated by HSL from special pre-rigged trussing, and flown off the house trusses. With five of these, there was plenty of diversity.
Hung off the bottom of the two of the smaller triangles were eight Martin Professional MAC 101 LED wash lights, providing dramatic fast-moving, low-level back/side lighting.
In addition to this, there were six 3m sections of pre-rigged truss which became upstage towers, each containing three Clay Paky Sharpies, 14 Chroma-Q Color Block DB4s, one Atomic strobe with colour scroller and a single Lowell Omni flood. HSL made special feet for the towers, so they could be easily wheeled onto stage and flipped up in position, providing an instant and impressive 'wall-of-death'.
Six Robe Robin 300 Spots sat behind the trussing sections on flightcases for another layer of illuminative assault.
All of this was controlled by Bewley using a grandMA2 light console. He used a Green Hippo v3 Stage media server to pixel map all the Colour Forces and DB4s which was also triggered via the grandMA. Some heavily adulterated library clips in the Hippo proved ideal for driving the LED sources in Enter Shikari style, all adding to the chaos and mayhem!
As the tour hit the UK, the rig changed again, and they collected a front and back truss from HSL together with all associated flying kit, plus six Robe Robin 600 Spots for the back truss, and another six Robin 600s and four 4-lite blinders for the front truss. This together with the European rig and triangles was the UK B rig.
Three 6 Watt RGB Lasers and ten 1 Watt blue beam lasers from BPM were also added for the full UK rig, and for Hammersmith, the effects department was boosted with eight bubble machines and two confetti cannons.
(Jim Evans)
