K System tracks So Floyd through France
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Created by Fabrice Di Maggio, So Floyd's musical director, and Laurent Begnis, technical director of local hire company Pan Pot, the five-part show immerses audiences in the musical universe of the progressive rock band. Enhancing So Floyd’s music is a mesmerising AVL show.
For So Floyd’s most recent concert tour, comprising 17 dates in France, the band’s technical team used Naostage K System to automatically trigger the lighting cues key to recreating the authentic Pink Floyd live experience.
“K System was ideal for automatic head-on tracking,” comments Begnis, who also served as the tour’s lighting designer and operator, accompanied by lighting, network and tracking manager Sébastien Huan. “We used six Robe Esprite spotlights rigged above the stage to light up to four people at the same time; depending on the scene, we were also able to ask a specific spotlight to follow an individual performer. Using a single system, we were able to map the entire stage and truck all five musicians, as well as the three-person choir.”
For the tour - which began in February and concluded at the Zénith arena in Orléans in May, attracting well over 100,000 Pink Floyd fans - Naostage supplied Pan Pot with one Kapta sensor and one Kore server. Kapta, the ‘eyes’ of K System, is a plug-and-play sensor which delivers a stereoscopic, 3D view of the performance area (up to 20m × 12m with a single device). Kore, a 4RU server that uses AI to detect and track performers, is complemented by Naostage’s Kratos software, which handles the patching to external devices such as consoles (a grandMA2 in Begnis’s case) and media servers.
Training on K System was provided by Paul Cales, Naostage's founder and CEO. “Paul came to one date to train us on K System,” Begnis confirms. “The training takes about two hours in total, which shows how user friendly the system is. On show dates, it takes only about half an hour to set it up and get it running - calibrating the software and then on the console - which means we can quickly focus on other things.”
Cales explains why the beaconless K System was chosen for the So Floyd tour: “The band and choir change their outfit regularly, and the guitarist even comes back on stage with the lightbulb suit at some point, so a beacon was out of the question for this show.”
“Another advantage is that the artists don't have to carry anything with them,” adds Begnis, “which is great because you don’t have to be afraid of forgetting to give someone their case before they go on stage.”
In live show mode, K System is able to track up to 16 people on stage simultaneously with a single server - more than enough capacity for the average live event.
All events can benefit from the automatic triggering of AVL effects, suggests Cales: “Even though these are jobs that require real know-how, there is an urgent need to automate the methods in order to make substantial savings in budgets, and to enable technicians to unleash their creativity elsewhere.”
Following the success of their spring tour, So Floyd are heading back on the road on 16 November with another 17-date trek - this time also including a date in Belgium (at the Forest National arena in Brussels) in January 2024.
