ChamSys gives Evanoff new look
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So impressed were the band members with the infinite pans and tilts that fed off the energy of Jones’ musical performances, that they talked to their lighting designer Matt ‘Jonezy’ Jones about moving away from the video -heavy look of their last tour and going with a beefier moving beam design. Jones was only too happy to oblige. Drawing on his ChamSys MagicQ MQ80 with wings, he created a deep, saturated other-worldly show with EDM-style visuals that wraps the band in immersive blankets of light from 36 moving fixtures.
“It was a great new look for the band,” said Jones of the lightshow, which appeared for the first time at Evanoff’s 23 February concert at Denver’s Bluebird Theatre. “We brought in 36 movers for our floor package, all patched into the ChamSys, then out via Art-Net to my 4-port ChamSys Node.”
Jones positioned many of his movers in ways he rarely has before. “I don’t usually do this when I design rigs, but I yoked many of my movers straight out,” he said. “I am usually not a fan of this type of hang, as it can take considerably longer to get perfect angles and beams to cross just right. But in my experience, when using infinite pan/tilt, this is one of the most valuable ways to hang.”
A ChamSys user for over 10 years, Jones relied on the pan/tilt offset features of this MagicQ MQ80 to help him align his beam angles. “The offsets allow me to get fixtures lined up via my patch window quickly and easily, so all things move symmetrically when fanning,” he said. “This saved an immense amount of time when we had to deal with wonky hangs. Another thing I valued in this job were the ChamSys’ cloning and morphing. This made it easy to create consistency from our existing programming into this new rig.”
Designing his show in Vectorworks, Jones exported it to Lightconverse, and patched the ChamSys console and PreVis. This allowed him to see his beguiling beam patterns in a myriad of positions and from a range of perspectives.
(Jim Evans)
