South Wales students light The Haus Band
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The students got to use a variety of consoles, including a ChamSys PC Wing to run a David Howard- and Dominic Boston-designed rig that featured over 50 moving lights, including Chauvet Professional Maverick and Rogue fixtures. Aside from getting the chance to operate this impressive gear, the students garnered valuable insights into the lighting design process.
“It was really nice to lead a project with students from conception, though programming and production, to completion,” said Howard. “It’s something I had not yet done on a university project of this scale. It was also nice to see pre-visualised programming come to life on a real rig, something ChamSys Magic Vis allowed very easily. The process took students through the whole design process, providing insights into real world practices.
“The process emphasized the importance of helping clients achieve their vision. “The Haus Band wanted a big festival look for the video shoot. Yet budget limited what could be included in the rig,” said Howard. “What's more, this look had to be created without the benefit of a video wall – and it had to be done in a set space.”
Howard and Boston addressed this challenge by breaking from tradition and eschewing standard horizontal truss looks. Instead, the designers went with a more angular truss configuration that featured angled bars and fingers extending from the compact center stage structure.
Angled outward at 30°, the truss structures created an on-camera impression of space and depth. The sticks reached upward and outward in an arc, allowing fixtures on them to make three concentric half rings in the air. Hanging fixtures on the rings also created the impression that the lights were floating against the dark backdrop. This arrangement enlarged the look of the rig, without sacrificing its sense of intimacy.
Howard and Boston positioned eight Maverick MK2 Wash fixtures on the overhead raked truss fingers. From this position, the washes were used to provide back lighting as well as pixel eye candy and tightly shaped animated beam looks.
On the back arch was a collection of eight Maverick MK1 Hybrid fixtures that were used mainly as spots to fill the blank canvas behind the band. “Our design was such that all visuals relied on light elements; no set or video was used in the shoot,” said Howard. “
A mix of four Rogue R1 Spot and four Rogue R2X Spots, supplied by Enlightened Lighting, was also used in the overhead rig.
(Jim Evans)
