The lighting is designed by Francesco Calvi and supplied by Chameleon Touring Systems with Paul Collison producing and replaying the screen content for the show. Collison also acts as lighting director when Francesco is unavailable.
Integral to the look of the show is a large panorama of LED which allows the creative team to create the show's environment on a 360 degree surface. Sometimes the LED surface is treated as one single surface but this is not always possible as the LED screens are used similar to legs in the theatre to mask entrances and this leads to overlaps with the images.
"This means that often the LED screens are treated as individual surfaces rather than part of the panorama," said Collison. "It's a fairly organic thing to be working with, evolving and changing according to the song.
"It's a monstrous video project. Our LED map is 11,500 pixels from end to end and 800 pixels high. It's a massive surface area to treat and although some songs only use maybe a third of that, you still have to build your content to fill that map as you never know when the camera will pan out. We're building all of the content in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, and then rendering all the different images to create the panorama made up of the four different LED screen types that have been supplied by TDC."
Controlling all of the above mentioned media are 13 coolux Pandora's Box Media Player Pro's all being run from a Pandora's Box Media Manager Pro and a MA Lighting MA2 console.
Once the content has been created in the 11,500 pixel wide map it is broken up into different cells of information so each Pandora's Box Media Player Pro only receives the images that it is required to display rather than each machine receiving the entire image and only outputting a little bit of it.
The rig includes Martin MAC TW1 fixtures for key lighting and stage washes, Martin MAC2000 Profiles, Pro Shop Honeycombs, Unique Hazer, Studio Due NanoLEDs, Pro Shop truss warmers and heaps of Martin MAC101 LED fixtures.
"The MAC101's have been fantastic," added Collison. "They're so punchy and they're in every nook and cranny we can find to put them in! They really are awesome."
(Jim Evans)
