Providence welcomes Billy Gilman with Chauvet
- Details
Gilman’s most recent homecoming took place on 14 December, when he performed a sentimental holiday show at Providence’s 14,000-seat Dunkin’ Donuts Centre. A Cody James-designed lightshow transformed the stage into a winter wonderland with a combination of big gobo looks and richly saturated colours created with Chauvet Professional fixtures supplied by JDI Productions.
At the heart of James’ rig were 12 Maverick MK1 Hybrid fixtures positioned evenly on a upstage truss that spanned the width of the stage. The 440-watt spot/beam fixtures were used to project a variety of differently-shaped snowflake gobo patterns across the stage’s backdrop. Appearing at different heights, the crisp white gobos created an image of falling snow. Enhancing this image was the slow prism spin of colours between the gobos that James created with his Maverick units and 12 Legend 230SR Beam fixtures.
“I used the Maverick MK1’s CMY capability to create a softer version of a colour to lay over the colours produced by the Legends,” said James. “At other times, I used the gobo effect on the Mavericks to soften the colour contrast on stage. The colours from the Mavericks are impressive, and they gave me the subtlety I wanted for this production.”
The effect of the gobos from the Maverick fixtures stood out more dramatically, thanks to the vivid colour washes James created with the 50 COLORdash Par-Quad 7 RGBA fixtures in his rig. “I positioned the COLORdashes as uplights on the backdrop and the set pieces, like the Christmas trees located throughout the stage,” he said. “They added a great amount of depth to the entire visual presentation.”
Another key contributor to James’ lightshow was the collection of 16 Rogue R3 Wash fixtures that he flew on downstage truss. He used the RGBW moving fixtures as down washes on the performers. Drawing on the Rogue units’ built-in macros, he also relied on them to create eye candy looks for the pre-show walk-in and during the intermission that separated the concert’s two sets.
“We had fun creating the intermission look and even more fun in the second set, which was devoted to holiday songs,” said James. “The first set of the show covered Billy’s catalogue, so I kept solid colours with no gobos or beams. In the second set, we went into holiday mode and brought out the fun parts of the design. For me, it was special designing for a hometown hero who was back in Providence, so we went all out and got creative. I saw Billy’s mom during the show and she gave me a big smile, which told me we did a good job on the lights. That was pretty special.”
(Jim Evans)
