PRG supports Arcade Fire summer tour 2017
- Details
PRG supported production manager Bob O’Brien and the show designers, Moment Factory, with a versatile package of lighting and video to facilitate a 32- date European tour, taking in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues, as well as headline festival performances.
Lighting designer Chris Bushell discussed the nature of the tour, and the processes between him and the other creatives on the design team: “I worked with the creative director, Tarik Makou from Moment Factory, as well as video director Icarus Wilson-Wright and the band themselves to design the look of the show. The concept we started off with was that of a contained environment, one which isn’t affected by outside influences - from which Tarik and his team at Moment Factory created the ‘smoke box’, an eleven-metre-wide, three-metre-tall transparent acrylic enclosure, filled with moving smoke and lighting and video effects.”
The grand, sweeping melodies of an experimental musical collective such as Arcade Fire, are well served by the experience design, which perpetually shifts the relationship between colour and space throughout the show.
Chris continued: “The box contained lots of smoke machines and fans to move the smoke around. There was a selection of lighting fixtures, including Martin Mac Quantum wash LED lights on the floor at the back of the box, which worked in tandem with a lot of GLP X4 Bar 20 LED battens to give an overall wash of colour.
“The X4 Bar 20s also created strong, defined lines of colour through the smoke. There were four overhead trusses and two side trusses, loaded with more MAC Quantums, Claypaky Sharpy Wash lights, Robe Robin BMFL Blade moving lights and SGM Q7 LED strobes. Additionally, there were three ten-foot truss towers on each side of the stage, rigged with Icon Beam lights and X4 Bar 20s, which scanned over the audience and were used to create a cage-like structure of light in front of the stage.”
The use of video technology for the Arcade Fire tour was far from conventional, video director Icarus Wilson-Wright described the set-up: “The smoke box sits in front of a video screen made up of ROE Visual MC-7H LED tiles, on motion control that moved the screen from behind to above the smoke box during the show. In addition, there was a projector either side of the stage which fired laterally into the smoke box to add another dimension to the video content, rather than relying solely on the LED screen.”
Icarus explained how he was given a brief from the band and then worked with the team at Moment Factory to bring everything together: “Arcade Fire are a really interesting band to work with, they’re arty, driven and demanding - but more than anything else they’re really, really nice people. The biggest challenge we had was the set list and song order, nothing is fixed and there would be lots of changes from night to night, with the sudden inclusion of old or new songs that require new looks.
“With so many people on stage swapping instruments and positions, it may look chaotic, but is well disciplined and planned out; that can’t be easy to do - so hats off to them for that!”
(Jim Evans)
