Snow time for Robe
- Details
Creating the atmospheric lighting was LD Chris Yeomans, who for the three largest gigs on the tour - Dublin’s Olympia, The Roundhouse in London and La Trianon in Paris - he specified Robe moving lights as the main part of a striking design.
The core rig comprised 25 Pointes arranged upstage in a 5x5 grid; eight Spiiders were positioned between the columns of Pointes, and six LEDWash 600s on the floor at the sides for 'wing washes’. Lighting was supplied by London based Colour Sound Experiment.
The artist wanted to be silhouetted for much of the show so he could lurk in the shadows and play with the negative spaces, so Chris immediately thought of the grid effect as a neat way to achieve this, adding requisite degrees of drama and to fill the stages of all three ‘featured’ venues. He also wanted the overall aesthetic to be stark and minimal.
Once that wall of lights was established as a design focal point, Chris - whose background is in the frenetic and innovative world of club lighting - knew he needed a multi-functional fixture to ensure that different looks, scenes and textures flowed for the whole show without getting repetitive.
“The Pointes’ combination of prisms, the great gobo selection, frost and zoom were more than enough to create the multiple looks needed for each track.” Spiiders were chosen as a wash light with “a bit more” to offer, so the flower effect and the on-board macros ended up being key to some of the signature looks.
The grid of lights was rigged to a 10m metre wide five-metre high ground support structure. This added a little time to the build process for Chris and Colour Sound technician Alex Bratza plus three local crew, but once in place, the rig was positioned extremely speedily including an outline of pixel-mapped LED batten frame around the perimeter.
He operated the show using an Avolites Tiger Touch II. Most of the Pointe effects were programmed in the Key Frame Shape Engine which made programming straightforward and by adjusting the parameters, some interesting ‘accidental’ and unexpected results were evolved.
He was keen to mimic the tempo and vibe of the album in the lighting - a complex mix of dark down tempos, persistent hip hop beats and upbeat melodies.
(Jim Evans)
