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INTERNATIONALNEWS
P R O J E C T I O N L I G H T S & S TA G I N G N E W S
“Manchester Double” for HSL
MANCHESTER, UK — HSL, a UK lighting
rental company, completed a “Manchester
Double” Friday, December 15, with two of
their current tours — Beautiful South and
Snow Patrol — both playing Manchester
area arena-sized shows the same night.
HSL’s Simon Stuart comments, “It’s
been the first time in at least 10 years that
both Manchester’s arena gigs have been
in service, and for us to be able to provide
lighting in both arenas on their opening
nights was such a achievement. It’s been a
long, hard year for us, and this was just the
icing on the cake. What a fantastic end to
a great year.”
Beautiful South played the 19,000-capacity
Manchester Evening News Arena,
with a lighting design by Dave Byars, and
Snow Patrol took the stage in the refurbished
GMEX Centre with LD Davy Sherwin,
Catalyst programmer and operator Robin
Haddow and live video director Blue Leach.
The Beautiful South rig is centered
around Robe moving lights. Byars’ design
features red and grey drapes, borders
and legs and a theatrical feel. He’s operating
the lights on an Avolites Diamond
4 console, and HSL has supplied all of the
UK and European legs of the tour since
it started back in May. HSL has just purchased
six new RADlite NG1 digital media
servers, and Byars has one of these on the
tour running a SoftLED backdrop.
For Snow Patrol, HSL invested in a large
stock of Liftket Motors and Kinesys motion
control. These are used for suspending
three moving upstage trusses and five
moving hi res video screens supplied by
XL Video. [For more on Snow Patrol’s video
check out the story on XL Video in Projection
Connection –ed.] Sherwin’s design utilizes
more than 100 Robe moving lights, including
33 of the new new Robe ColorSpot
2500s, plus Robe ColorSpot and Wash
1200ATs. HSL is also supplying 5KW Syncrolite
B52s and a ColorWeb low resolution
Dave Byars and the Beautiful South stage
LED screen, also just acquired by HSL for
the tour. Sherwin operates the show using
a Wholehog 3 console, and Haddow runs
two Catalyst digital media servers from a
Wholehog 2.
Claws Cover Basement
Basement Jaxx with their Kinesys rig
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LONDON — Lighting designer Leggy
(Jonathan Armstrong) used a Kinesys motion
control system for the recent Basement
Jaxx tour. It was the first time he’s
used Kinesys.
He designed four upstage/downstage
“claw” trusses as the key architectural
elements of the lighting rig, and these
moved constantly during the show into
different positions.
Each claw truss, two at 40 feet long
and two at 38 feet, was suspended by five
motors, two static Lodestar hoists downstage
and three Kinesys vari-speed Liftkets
on the upstage hinges, which moved
the trussing in and out via a Kinesys Vector
control system.
Hung on the claws was the majority
of Legg’s lighting rig — including five
High End Systems Studio Command 1200
fixtures, four X-Spot Xtremes, four Studio
Beam PCs, one Zap Technology 4.5K
BigLite xenon (used for key lighting the
band), a 9-lite with scroller and three Martin
Atomic strobes.
Kinesys was originally recommended
to Leggy by the tour’s lighting contractors
Neg Earth.
Basement Jaxx is a dance-y show,
and moving the lighting rig into different
positions throughout the set was
a vital element of Leggy’s creative vision.
He “needed different parts of the
rig to be moving different distances
and speeds, but all arriving at the same
point at the same time to make the
different stage and lighting looks,” he
says, adding that this was well beyond
the brief of a rigger switching motors
on and off.
The system was operated by Craig
Lewis, who had used the system once
previously on a one-off. He visited Kinesys
in south London for one of their
standard training sessions, and picked
it up very quickly.
14 PLSN FEBRUARY 2007
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