The RADlite was specified by lighting designer Peter Barnes - a great advocate and experimentalist with the RADlite system since first using it last year. Always a pioneer of utilizing video in new and imaginative ways onstage, Barnes has integrated RADlite on the Blue, Will & Gareth, S-Club and Blazin’ Squad tours. This time he went further, evolving its use as a visual effect working with a solo artist. The stage and video design for this final leg of the tour - which started back in 2002 - was a collaboration between Barnes and production manager Iain Whitehead of Production North. It consisted of five vertical upstage panels of Westerhagen low resolution LED screen, used as to architecturally frame the performance area. It also allowed for another layer of visuals behind the screens - in the form of a starcloth.
Barnes and tour lighting director Graham Feast used RADlite as a lighting effect. With the application of many different RADlite looks, the LED panels were utilized in a myriad of ways - as dramatic blocks of colour, as scene setters, for movement, as abstract wallpaper and as light sources in their own right, complemented by the regular lighting fixtures on the rig.
Barnes also created new playback footage for this leg, stored on the RADlite hard drive, and then treated and manipulated by the system to produce a range of abstract and literal images. Feast triggered the RADlite cues from the Icon Show Controller lighting desk via a DMX to the RADlite computer itself, sitting in XL Video’s rack backstage, along with the rest of their digital PPU gear. XL also supplied a four-camera live shoot, directed by Ruary MacPhie, which was beamed onto two side-stage screens.
Tour audio suppliers were Wigwam, the stage set was built by Litestructures and the flying grid was designed, sourced and rigged by Mark Waite of Over The Top Rigging.
(Lee Baldock)
