Durham first got his hands on a lighting desk whilst still at school back in 1974 - all ten channels of it! Things have moved on a little since then; the range and diversity of his CV is second to none. From Roger Waters' performance of 'The Wall' that celebrated the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the closing ceremony of colonial rule in Hong Kong to a regular slot designing the New Year's Eve Light and Firework Show from the London Eye since 2004 and, of course not forgetting, Her Majesty The Queen's Golden Jubilee Light and Fireworks Extravaganza performed at Buckingham Palace in 2002. No surprise then that, in July of 2011, he received an invitation from Robbie Williams Productions to design the lighting for the 2012 Diamond Jubilee Concert.
From the outset, Durham makes it really clear that this was anything but a one-man show: "To begin with I collaborated very closely with Mark Fisher, architect of that fabulous roof. It was designed to be as transparent as possible so as not to obstruct the Palace behind our stage while lighting on the actual structure needed to be physically as inconspicuous as possible to retain the visual impact of the roof itself. So my next port of call was Chris Ewington at i-Pix, who is 'one of the men to go to' in terms of LED technology. His advice and input was invaluable as we decided what would be the optimum light fixtures to use within the beams of the roof."
The contract for lighting rental was won by Neg Earth whose crew worked minor miracles in some frankly, atrocious weather conditions. "A lighting design is only as good as the crew that realise it and that was never so true as on June 4th," admits Durham, "Through rehearsals to setting up on site and on to working floor lighting around all the different acts on what must be one of the most crowded stages ever, Julian Lavender, Fraggle and his team were consistently magnificent."
In 2002 Durham was responsible for the show on the façade of Buckingham Palace and that remained an unforgettable facet of the Golden Jubilee event but, as he points out, this year's challenges were far more complex: "Projection on the Palace was obviously complicated by the fact that the stage was right in front of it this year. Mark Fisher's innovative roof was a huge bonus here but special thanks must go to Steve Greetham and Andy Joyes of XL Video whose work enabled the vision of Sam Pattinson and his team of visual artists to be fully appreciated by a worldwide audience of millions."
Keeping all this away from the prying eyes of the media must have been a project in itself. How did the team manage to achieve this so successfully? "It is obviously in everyone's interest to keep a show under wraps, so from the very beginning we made good use of WYSIWYG ['What You See Is What You Get' from CAST for the uninitiated]. We rehearsed most of the performers at LH2 in Acton and used it to show the artists and their teams their section of the show." It had other benefits too, as Durham explains, "By importing stage and structural elements into WYSIWYG, I was able to show TV Director Geoff Posner all his sight lines and camera angles averting issues that would have only come to light when on site."
"The BBC were, like ourselves, very keen to prevent any pre-show leaks and we came up with a rather nifty solution by creating a mask which part covered the images from the projection show while still allowing the projection team to work all night and - at the request of the Palace - we also masked out the windows allowing Her Majesty's guests to sleep on through the night undisturbed by technical rehearsals!"
So, for events such as this, with a cast of thousands at the show and mill
