Electric Fly has supplied innovative and exciting visuals for all the One Big Weekend events, of which this was the sixth. "I always use Bandit" Jevons states, "I would not go anywhere else. The kit and the service is excellent". General manager of Bandit Mark Powell handled the show.
Jevons traditionally uses the One Big Weekend occasion to introduce new and exciting visual tools and ideas - particularly video orientated ones - into the lighting design mix, and the Sunderland event was no exception. He clearly sees the creative potential of integrating video effects as lighting features, and many of the LED fixtures now on the market are proving a great source of low-resolution inspiration. "Using video elements as light-sources is another extension to the LD's palette" he says, "Video is so much more than just an image, I'm discovering a whole new layer of colours and textures for the stage."
This time, he utilized 240 of the new Chroma-Q Colour Block DB4 LED fixtures. These were broken down into their individual units (they come in four-light modules) and were hung individually to create clusters.
They were run using James Thomas's PixelDrive software, via a Radical Lighting NG1 digital media server, triggered by an Avolites Pearl operated by Joey Jevons. Bandit also supplied this.
Instead of running video images through the LED fixtures as they had done last time to create the effects, in Sunderland, the flowing movements and colour changes across the Color Blocks were evolved through pure programming power, and the utilization of PixelDrive's inbuilt effects.
Jevons created some really fluid 'bacterial' creeping and moving effects with the Color Blocks - emulating the movement of magnified mutating cells creeping across the back truss. At other times, they resembled a twinkling starfield, or provided a saturated blanket of colour from a myriad of snow crystals.
Other lights included Martin MAC 2K Profiles, Mac 2K Washes, Atomic Strobes, PAR64s and Source Four profiles. At front of house in the tent were yet more Atomic strobes, rigged to each king pole of the tent to blasting into the audience.
Bandit bought a brand new Martin Maxxys console for the event and for its hire stock, and this controlled all the lighting fixtures apart from the Color Blocks. Jevons loves the desk. Using the Martin Show Designer visualization programme, he was able to spend a fair amount of time programming the basic building blocks of the show in advance. This made his time on site much less stressed and gave all the visiting LD's a really good choice of palettes from which to shape their shows.
The One Big Weekend format changed slightly this year, with bands appearing across the two days instead of the first one being strictly dance orientated and the second just for bands. The impressive line up included Kasabian, The Kaiser Chiefs, Athlete, Lemar, The Chemical Brothers, Gwen Stefani, Basement Jaxx, The Foo Fighters Jamiroquai, Interpol, The Futureheads and many more.
Bandit's Mark Powell commented: "Nick continues to push the boundaries in the imaginative use of lighting and video. I have worked with him for many years and he still surprises me every time!"
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
