Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

The Weeknd with more than 650 lighting fixtures from Ayrton

The ‘Madness Fall Tour’ by Canadian singer, songwriter and record producer, The Weeknd, in support of his third studio album, ‘Beauty Behind The Madness’, was a production with set and lighting design by LeRoy Bennett of Seven Design Works. Ayrton fixtures featured heavily in the set, with a grid of 270 MagicPanel 602 fixtures forming a back wall that hid two rows of washlights, and which itself was concealed behind a transparent V-Thru screen.

The band was elevated on a high band riser fronted by 140 MagicDot-R units, with the band members individually lit by Ayrton MADesign architectural fixtures. Above the stage hung an arrangement of 264 IntelliPix-R panels, rigged in five pods that broke apart to shape, texture and illuminate the stage.

Bennett placed the MagicPanel-602 units in a 30-wide x 9-high matrix far upstage and ran video content and abstract images through them to act as a backdrop to the band: “The wall made a big rectangular rig with the 6x6 configuration of each MagicPanel delivering a total of 9,270 LED emitters,” says programmer, Jason Baeri.

The stand-alone MADesign has five independently controlled, RGBW LED emitters on a long ‘boom’ arm which LeRoy Bennett used to create an isolated lighting system around each band member. Two fixtures were used to light the drummer and one each for the guitarist and base player.

The Ayrton MagicDot-R fixtures were wrapped around the front of the band riser in a 28 wide x 5 high grid. Bennett also created five overhead pods that form irregular, three-dimensional ‘chevrons’ with IntelliPix-R panels on all horizontal and vertical surfaces. The central structure, made of three interlocking clusters, spanned the upstage and downstage areas and could break apart into sections to constantly change the shape of the performance space. Two outer pods situated over the VIP areas left and right could be raised and lowered independently and orientated in all directions, using a Tait Navigator control system.

With a total of 16,480 points of light emanating from the Ayrton fixtures, which made up almost 90% of the lighting rig, Bennett and Baeri had a lot of potential to play with: “We used 140 DMX universes and maxed out the GrandMA2 console so ran the show off two desks - one controlling the video content and MagicPanel 602 fixtures, and the other controlling the IntelliPix-R units and the rest of the lighting rig,” says Baeri.

(Photos: Todd Kaplan)

www.ayrton.eu

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories