Lighting designer is Al Gurdon (Brit Awards, MTV Europe Awards, Classical Brit Awards, Nobel Peace Prize Concert) who has been lighting top television programs and events for the past 18 years, as well as DVD shoots for some of the top performers in the industry like U2, Phil Collins, Sting, and many more. Yet this is Gurdon's first concert tour design.
"I was excited to have the opportunity to design the lighting for Robbie's tour," he says. "The brief has been evolving in a fairly organic way for over a year or so. The choice of fixtures was predicated on the shape of the set and the function of what I want to use them for. Also, being an outdoor show with no roof it's hard to keep smoke levels up so in choosing any of the lighting it had to be used in a practical way - we couldn't rely on fixture beams because we didn't know if we'd have any."
The show features an abundance of colour from 88 Mac 2000 Washes and a whopping 122 Atomic strobes with Atomic Colors. "There is a lot of colour in the show - a lot more than I would normally use," says Gurdon. "On that scale, great slabs of colour is what is needed because it has a lot more impact. The colour is also used to complement the video - it's very important to integrate the lighting with whatever is going on in the set. It's essential to get integration of colour and at its simplest the closer you get to matching colours, and the more unified and monolithic that look becomes, the more effective it becomes to an audience of 50-100,000 people. Occasionally you get a stronger look by contrasting a colour but I tend towards using the same colour. If you start mixing colours up then it weakens the whole look and impact. The impact really comes when you have this whole organism with the lighting acting with a sense of the same purpose."
The Close Encounters set is dominated by six large, curved architectural 'tusks' and two 26m high overhanging arms referred to as 'scorpion tails.' Embedded into the bellies of the tusks and scorpion tails are 6,500 Barco O-lite blocks which give the stage a 3D depth. The set is also dominated by three large Mitsubishi OD8 LED screens.
"It's a very designed architectural space and the purpose of many of the lights is to emphasize that shape and to work with it," Gurdon explains. "There are a series of grille panels under the scorpion tails with a Mac 2K Wash in the center of each which is a really good look for defining the shape of the set. They will often point out into the audience so you're always aware of the shape of the set because those fixtures define the shape."Their other function is to colour the audience in the same way as the set - to include them in the whole process. Robbie's shows are very much about the audience - they often sing the song and are a critical part of the show - he has a great relationship with them. The show is about being with 50,000 other people who love being there and love the performer."
12 Mac 2000 Washes hang on the underside of each 'tail.' On the top of each PA scrim are eight Mac 2000 Washes lighting down the scrim as well as out into the audience. On the floor on each side of the stage are 11 Mac 2000 Washes shining up the PA scrim while 14 more located in the 'bunker' at the back of the set project beams out into the crowd. There are also six Mac 2000 Washes hanging on the video frames used to light the band along with additional fixtures on the floor left and right for band cross washes. Control is from a Virtuoso.
Martin Atomic 3000 strobes make up an integral part of the visual design with each strobe outfitted with Atomic Color scrollers. The Atomics are s
