Bandit brings light to Death From Above
- Details
Death From Above were looking to take the lighting in a new direction and contacted Dara Guiney. Following a discussion with tour manager/production manager Markus Gilgan, Guiney crafted a floor package that would provide the ‘something different’ while staying on budget: a simple rectangle of tilting, zoomable LED bars around the band.
“I had got the idea when I saw a band called Explosions in the Sky play,” said Guiney. “They had a row upstage and downstage of LED bars, designed by Tobias Rylander and operated by Corey Mattonen. Corey explained a lot to me about the LED bars and how positive he was about them, selling me on the LED bar idea. I proposed this idea to the band, drafted it and did a couple of visualisations for them to properly demonstrate the capabilities.
“I proposed the LED bars running through a media server giving us complicated effects and shapes that would otherwise be unobtainable. We could go from having no additional lighting to cloning and morphing the floor into overhead house fixtures, giving us a mirrored effect. It is also a departure from the usual couple of moving lights on truss behind the band kind of vibe. The band was on board.”
At Bandit vice president Mike Golden’s suggestion, Guiney tried the Robe Cyc FX 8, a choice that garnered praise for their speed from other LD’s who came to see the shows.
“The Robe Cyc FX 8 are a fantastic fixture have great colour macros and are also one of the fastest tilt-able LED bars on the market,” said Guiney. “The response time when running media through them is great. I also used an eight node artnet box which was a great addition, and I could take full advantage of all the channels the Cyc FX can bring. I used two df50’s because they are a workhorse hazer that emit a haze that is thick and unobtrusive.
“Bandit went above and beyond in all aspects of dealing with a client, from dealing with the rental request to the logistics of getting it to the first show all was well monitored with care by Bandit,” finished Guiney. “Project manager Gene Brian was fantastic in getting the package together and communicating on how it was all going to work out.”
(Jim Evans)
