For Arcadia's audio-visual feast Metamorphosis, LI worked alongside costume designer Joanna Peacock to create six custom performance wearables, integrated with LED, and six zorbs.
The costumes transformed Arcadia's dancers into fantastic alien/jellyfish hybrids, or 'Jellyfish Light Queens', who appeared from the zorbs as if hatching from an alien egg.
"The moment we saw Jo Peacock's sketch of a performer being released from a zorb we knew the LED solution must be above and beyond anything ever delivered before, and pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved is what really excites us," says Light Initiative's MD Bryn Williams.
LI's immediate task was to develop a fully diffused ultra-high definition LED product in both semi-rigid and flexible versions that would stand out in the performance environment.
"With an Arcadia show, there is always so much going on that for an effect to be noticed it has to pack a huge punch," says Arcadia performer and costume creation project manager Claire O'Neill. "The Jellyfish Light Queens certainly surpassed that expectation and have become one of the show's big new reveals. The roar of the crowd when the creatures bungeed from the eggs and the lights burst to life was incredible."
The costumes also had to meet a rigorous creative brief, with a durability, flexibility, weight and safety proviso.
"As the costumes were worn by aerialist performers, a full range of movement was essential," continues O'Neill. "The wiring was so well stitched into the costumes that we didn't notice it at all. It also withstood being squeezed through a small trapdoor and zorb hole, sat on, shaken about, bungeed and span at high speed, all in proximity to pyrotechnics and flames."
Arcadia's lighting team was able to fully bring the costumes and zorbs to life with Light Initiative's control system.
The Electron-V system, an embedded micro media server with integrated LED drivers, was chosen following its faultless performance on the UK's Eurovision entry in Vienna.
Tom Wall of blinkinLAB created the pixel-mapped content that the Electron-V system pulsed through the LED in time with the show.
"We wanted to visualise Metamorphosis' underlying musical score and sound track by creating various animations," explains Wall. "LI's timecode system was very robust so we could be as precise as we wanted to be, creating animation that highlighted individual beats, melodies and sounds from the 30 minute score.
"LI took care of all the technical aspects of mapping the eggs and costumes, providing us with a template that we used to create the content. We were then able to visit LI's office once the costumes were complete and test out some initial ideas."
Light Initiative was also on hand during the festival to deliver full technical support.
On the other side of the festival, band of the moment Years and Years took to the John Peel stage with their intricate Light Initiative screen in tow. Built from LED branches, the structure is an extrapolated version of the band's album artwork for their debut Communion.
"Light Initiative took every requirement of my brief to deliver a unique tourable end product," says Years and Years' lighting designer Squib Swain, who approached LI with his concept at the beginning of the album campaign tour. "As well as looking amazing, Light Initiative made the screen ground supported and free standing with short festival turnarounds like Glastonbury in mind."
An Avolites Ai Infinity EX8 server powered vibrant content, devised by Adam Young, through the structure. "As LI provided me with a perfect visual representation of the structure in After Effects, designing the content was made far easier. The LED refresh rate of the screen wa
