The Manic Street Preachers, one of the UK's top bands completed their sold-out
autumn '98 arena tour with a visual flourish. Never short of optical sensations,
lighting designer is Bryan Leitch who has lit the Manics since their inception
in the early nineties.
For this tour he utilised a massive moving light rig controlled through an
Avolites Diamond III console. This gave the band a show appropriate to their
position at the top of the music industry together with their highly intelligent
rock-with-attitude-and-message.
The automated fixture count consisted of twenty-eight VL7s, thirty-two VL5
Arcs, thirty two VL6s, thirty eight VL5s and eight MAC 500s. An impressive total
of 138! In addition to these, Bryan was also running sixteen Molefey units,
twelve ETC Source Four profiles and eighteen Megastar strobes with the Diamond
III.
Brian chose the Diamond III because of its fast programming capabilities and
the fact that he was already familiar with the console. For the first time he
utilised his newly purchased Avolites Stage Visualiser simulation
software/hardware package (launched at PLASA 98) and spent 5 days
pre-programming the show.
Using the Visualiser, Bryan was able to set up the basic creative
infrastructure of his highly complex show in less than an hour. The Visualiser's
reporting functions output directly to MS Excel, and these made checking,
patching and ensuring fixtures were assigned to the correct smart repeater very
simple Without the Avolites Visualiser increased rehearsal time would have been
required, and this alone paid for the software.
The pre-programmed information was then imported into the Diamond III
allowing Bryan the luxury of commencing three days of intense production
rehearsals with a large proportion of the show already completed.
"This helped enormously" he commented "All the basic building
blocks such as fixture groups, colour palettes, preset focuses, indexed gobos
and timing. It all worked perfectly! Fantastic!".
Date of issue : 24th December 98
For more information on Avolites, please contact Steve Warren on 0181 965 8522 or Louise Stickland on 0181 840 6111/0831 329888.
