Brit Floyd under the musical and creative direction of Damian Darlington boasts a Floydesque style lightshow which is equally as original in its own right, has been co-designed by Dave Hill and Neil Trenell, with Trenell going out on the road operating.
The project is managed for HSL by Mike Oates who says, "Supplying a Pink Floyd show of any description is a lighting company's dream, considering they were such great technical innovators and responsible for evolving the whole concept of integrated visuals into a powerful, emotive, experience. In the process, they put the whole idea of touring and show 'production values' on the map."
He adds that the real challenge - as with any tribute show, but particularly this one - is to "Ensure it's every bit as enjoyable and good looking as the real thing would have been for the audience - but with a fraction of the kit that they would have used".
The structural appearance of the stage is based around a 15m wide arch made from A-type trussing, with 2.5mof spreaders in the middle, and a projection screen upstage masked to fit the shape of the arch.
Also upstage (and fitted inside) of the arch is a 6m diameter circular truss with a stretched projection screen. Both the circle and the arch trussing provide the main lighting positions, together with a front truss, with the remainder of the fixtures deployed on the deck.
All the moving lights are Robe Robins. Curving around the arch are 22 Robe Robin 300 Beams plus nine 2-cell Moles and five Martin Professional Atomic strobes. The trussing is toned with 12 i-Pix Satellite LED 'bricks'.
Around the perimeter of the circle are another 16 Robin 300 Beams, together with eight 2-cell Moles and eight Satellites, again to highlight the metalwork.
On the front truss are four Robin 600 Spots and five Robin 600 Washes to cover the stage, with 10 ETC Source Four profiles for key lighting the band, which usually features a line up of nine or 10 people. The three Sanyo XF47 projectors (one for the circle and two for the arch) are also hung on the front truss.
The rest of the lights are on the floor - eight Robin 600 Spots arcing around the upstage edge look great for aerial and gobo effects, in the process giving many higher powered fixtures a good run for their money! Ten Jarags are positioned in between the backline and used for a variety of effects throughout the set, and there are also four Atomic strobes and 22 short nosed PARS on the deck, including a run of PARs across the front of the stage.
Trenell runs the show from an MA Lighting grandMA2 full size console, which also fires two Hippotizer media servers playing out all the video content to both screens, which is present through 85% of the performance.
(Jim Evans)
