Painting with Light enjoys busy summer
- Details
The company is headed by Luc Peumans, who comments, “It was fantastic for our team and all our clients to be back doing live shows with real audiences after two years of pandemic restrictions. While this ‘dark’ period forced us to be imaginative and inventive in creating entertainment and engagement, there is nothing like feeling the buzz and excitement of shows packed with crowds, anticipation, and real human experience.”
Tien Om Te Zien, a popular Sunday night VTM music show ran from 1989 – 2008 and was then rebooted in 2014 and 2021. The 2021 was such a success that the broadcaster revived the concept once again to run in summer 2022, on the beach at Westende in Flanders, this time with a live audience again.
Luc designed lighting taking the original 1989 tensile stage structure – revamped for 2022 by PWL’s creative partner and set specialist, Deusjevoo – as a starting point, choosing lighting fixtures that would fit around this and work well in the context.
He collaborated closely with PWL’s programmer Werner Dries and lighting operators Sieben Vanuffelen and Jeroen Opsteyn, dealing with challenges that included lighting the whole site and audience for camera as well as ensuring all the artists looked awesome for all the music fans watching live.
The artist line-up was very diverse and the schedule of who was playing only became available on the morning of the show each week, so flexibility and high impact were two aesthetic key words!
Ten songs per week were recorded, with lighting WYG’d and programmed during daylight, which was the only solution for ensuring that everyone’s show looked slick and smooth. The record started in daylight, went into dusk then darkness, so stage illumination had to be adjusted to merge in with and work with natural light.
Luc utilised a quantity of Luxibel B Blast Pro LED battens as interesting eye-and-camera-candy fixtures with the power to look great in both daylight and darkness. It was also PWL’s first show using one of their new grandMA3 consoles.
One of Painting with Light’s recent international projects was King Saud University Stadium, a collaboration with Rayon Progressive Lighting, part of the Al-Babtain Power and Telecom Company.
PWL was approached for its extensive knowledge and expertise in DMX and networked show control and asked to create lighting designs and visuals utilizing Rayon’s product range which were then pre-programmed in a series of timecoded lighting sequences set to music.
Two hundred and fifty-six cool white LED fixtures and 52 x RGBW LED fixtures were supplied and installed by Rayon while PWL specified, supplied, installed, and commissioned the control system using a combination of Depence2 for visualization and grandMA3 for lighting programming.
The control system comprised a rack-mounted grandMA3 on PC unit (including command wing) for music synchronized playback during events and sporting fixtures; a Mac Mini with QLAB for audio playback and two Pharos TPCs as the main lighting control and for manual switching of lights. Audio, lighting, and video cues triggered via a master Daktronics media server system.
Luc Peumans underlines the fact that 2022 has been an “incredible” year that has offered some great opportunities for renewing existing connections and making new ones.
“We are all delighted that the public appetite for live performance, the arts and entertainment is as enthusiastic as ever, and look forward to 2023 with great zeal, having grown as a company and a team through some very tough times, we now look forward to another crazy busy year with lots of potential to be creative,” he concluded.
