In addition, a second Sapphire Touch was used a backup. All front-end Avolites control equipment was supplied by global lighting and show design company Mirrad.
"The brief for this show was: 'make this look like the biggest show we've done, with loads of light, visuals and energy'," says Thompson. "This was, of course, music to my ears."
With venues including Liverpool's Echo Arena, the Phones 4U Arena Manchester, and London's O2 Arena, Thompson was challenged with creating a huge show to fill large spaces. To achieve this, he specified a rig which included the powerful Clay Paky Mythos and A.leda B-EYE K20 and K10 fixtures.
"For control, I'm using two Sapphire Touch consoles running Titan V8.1 and it's great," Thompson continues. "I collaborated with my business partner David Cohen to programme and set-up Avolites' Multiuser feature, which is brilliant and working really well. Titan is such a strong platform.
"I love the Sapphire Touch because it's simple to use and I find it a designers' desk rather than a programmers' desk. It can do loads and it's a very powerful console. And with the new operating system, Titan V9, coming out the future looks even more rosy."
Thompson also specified Avolites' compact-yet-powerful Quartz console to work as a dimmer/tech desk on the show. In addition to the Sapphire Touch and Quartz consoles, Thompson and the team also specified two Avolites Ai S8 servers to power the visual content, some created by Immersive and elements by Tom Wall from Blinking Lamp.
"A mix of timecode and manually operated visuals are fed to the Ai S8 servers, including four live camera feed, which is then mixed by Jeff Brown. There are some breath-taking moments of content, especially a section where there's this huge stellar starscape with a huge exploding sun - it looks amazing."
The Avolites consoles and Ai servers were connected via x4 Avolites Titan Net Processors, running 28 universes.
(Jim Evans)
