The atmosphere combined with the range of dance music and live acts with top live acts and DJsperforming back to back throughout the day is unique. Running late into the night things switch over to a more chilled and laid back pace, but it is the blend of stages and areas that make the festival so enjoyable, notably the Overkill and Breaksday tents.
The Breaksday stage is a mix of break and psy trance. Live acts include Hybrid, Krafty Kuts, Meat Katie and many DJs from Canada, Australia and Italy. Breaksday featured an arch of AC Lighting Colour Block as a centre-piece over the stage with each of the 80 LED pixels individually controlled by the in-built MagicQ Media FX Engine. Thus enabling stunning effects to be created, from colour rainbows, strobes, to abstract effects, and the MagicQ Media FX Engine maps each LED pixel onto a grid and automatically creates groups. Groups such as 'centre to out', 'centre to in' and 'horizontal edges' for easy generation of effects and creating an effect is as simple as selecting the group and adding the required effect from the substantial in-built effects library.Once programmed, any effect can be modified live (e.g. changing the speed) simply by holding the select button and turning one of the eight encoder wheels. The lighting in Breaksday featured Robe 1200s, Martin MAC 250s and Martin MAC 300s together with LED Par cans, AC Lighting Color Block and dual Arkaos Media servers controlled by a MagicQ MQ200.
At front of house the MagicQ MQ100 and a MagicQ Playback Wing was used alongside a MagicQ MQ200 console on stage. Control was swapped between the two positions; front of house for live bands whilst the stage position was better for VJ / DJ centric sets where both lights and video were controlled simultaneously from the MQ200. Notable sets from VJ Bear and VJ LX. MagicQ enables multiple consoles to be used simultaneously via MagicQ Network and control can be switched between any of the consoles at the touch of a button. In addition it is possible to make the MagicQ consoles track each other during playback and shows are easily copied between consoles using the "Grab Show" function, which is ideal for use on multi console systems.
The MQ200 on Breaksday controlled dual Arkaos servers using the newly developed MSEX protocol for connecting lighting control consoles and lighting visualisation systems to media servers. The MQ200 incorporates a specially designed Media Window for controlling up to 50 different media servers all with different content. The MagicQ Media window shows thumbnails of the content on the selected server on its large in-built touch screen to enable quick and easy media selection. MSEX is an open protocol developed by industry professionals to stimulate the interconnectivity of lighting and media elements in live performance. MSEX enables lighting consoles and lighting visualisation systems to interrogate media servers to determine the configuration and content of media servers, to download media thumbnails of the content and to view live previews of the current media outputs. In addition, previews of individual layers prior to output is possible, enabling LDs and VJs to monitor the media content before it is made live on stage.
In the Overkill Stage, the LDs made maximum use of the MagicQ MQ100, using the MagicQ Playback Wing to program large numbers of different cues and sequences for playback direct from the touch screen. Lighting in Overkill featured Robe 1200s, Martin MAC 500s, moles and pars controlled by a MagicQ MQ100.
For more information, visit ChamSys and the MagicQ range at PLASA -stand K19.
(Chris Henry)
