44 Designs used colour and effects from Elation Professional’s Artiste DaVinci LEDs
USA - Creative production design company 44 Designs has shaped Mutemath’s live visual look for most of the alt rock band’s 15-year career.
For their Play Dead US tour last autumn, the first leg of a larger worldwide tour in support of a September album release, 44 Designs complemented the band’s eclectic sounds using colour and effects from Elation Professional’s Artiste DaVinci LED moving spot luminaire.
44 Designs’ chief operations officer, Clayton Thornton, explains that earlier last year the company was looking for a quality LED spot luminaire and brought the Artiste DaVinci into their shop in Nashville, Tennessee, to see how it would perform up against other fixtures in a side by side comparison.
“We were blown away by it. The brightness was excellent and the beam out of it was really amazing,” he said. “The colour rendering and saturation of colour was also impressive. It has true CMY colour mixing, we love that, and it also has a nice gobo package.” Thornton praised the award-winning luminaire for its details as well, features like powerCON TRUE1 In/Out connections that make for easier and safer power connections without having to run separate cables.
“Mutemath is a creative group who open up for creativity in design,” says Jeff Lavallee, owner and lead designer at 44 Designs, who has been working with Mutemath for over a decade. “The design features in the DaVinci gave us a number of options to reflect the moods and complexities of the music, whether it was a solemn number or a more upbeat tempo song.”
Lavallee had at his disposal a full CMY colour mixing system (plus seven additional colours) plus a range of graphical effects from two gobo wheels and a 360° bi-directional animation effect wheel. The effects could then be multiplied using either of two rotating prisms.
Twelve of the zoomable DaVinci fixtures were used on the show, four placed on either side of the stage on custom brackets and used as side light with four located upstage for mid-air beam looks.
44 Designs has stocked the Artiste DaVinci fixtures since last summer and have kept them busy ever since. Prior to the Mutemath shows they were used on a Good Charlotte tour, as well as shows with American ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro.
(Jim Evans)

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