Undertaking the lighting design for a rarely offered second year, lighting designer Steve Nolan and associate Tim Routledge took the opportunity to use the newly launched PixelSmart from PixelRange.
"When you have so many different acts to manage, you need as many tricks up your sleeve as possible - and the PixelSmart certainly helped with that. It can do so many different things. It can be a wash light, it can be an effect, anything, but we used it mainly as 'sparkle'"
The PixelSmart luminaires, 24 in number, were positioned facing straight out towards the audience -distributed across four lighting towers at the back of the stage. Controlled via a grandMA lighting console. "Instead of talking to the PixelSmart as one light, it became 25 lights because of the individual sections within. So I was able to control each individual element within the PixelSmart as an individual light," says Routledge.
"Being able to address each colour of each LED, I could make shapes - it is so flexible. So, for Kylie, we created little Pacman shapes that were dancing around! It gave us something different for each act.
"Taking advantage of the warm white LEDs we were able to create slow, 'tungsten-y' eye-candy in the back of shot for Jamie Cullum. Featuring both a warm and a cold white in the one fixture is very helpful, we could create a warm sense on stage as well as the modern stark white electronic pop look."
(Jim Evans)
