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Dom Smith chose an Avolites Diamond 4 console to control the lightshow for Embrace’s recent arena tour. The show was designed by Bryan Leith, the tour’s artistic director, who worked closely with Smith as lighting programmer and on-the-road lighting director.
It was Smith’s first full production tour with Embrace following some live DVD work in the preceding months, and the equipment was supplied by leading UK rental company, Siyan.
Leitch completed the design after consulting with the band’s lead singer Danny McNamara. Specification of the control gear was left to Smith who chose his favourite console – the Avolites Diamond 4. Smith, one of the UK’s leading and most talented young LD’s was also one of the first to take Avo’s most powerful console on the road – initially with the Stone Temple Pilots in 2003. Since then, he’s not used another console.
The Embrace show kicked off with an element of high drama. The PA emitted a high pitched electrical squeal before apparently dying, followed by frantic backline techs scooting around the stage scratching their heads, simulating a major technical fault. Lighting wise, the stage started bare and dark …. and became busier and busier as the show progressed, ending with the rig finally ‘coming together’ in its entirety for the final third of the set.
Integral to this was a team of student lighting techs from Rose Bruford College’s lighting design degree course who were part of the performance. They ‘built’ the rig as the show progressed, appearing to ‘fix’ lights and bring more onstage as time went on.
This pseudo random structuring, apart from being a bit of fun, explains Smith, led to the show running to a slightly different pace each night, leaving room for plenty of improvisation – where the D4 excels.
The full rig was an interesting mix of fixtures positioned in a diverse range of positions.
Overhead was a box truss with two sub-hung moving trusses. The upstage moving one featured 8 SGM Giotto CMY400s and a series of 4-lamp Molefeys, and the downstage one came in and out with a scrim for video projections by Mark Video.
Off the front of the box truss were another four Giotto CYMs and some Studio Due CS4 moving battens. The front truss featured 6 bars of 6 PARS, 12 Martin MAC 600s, 4 truss mounted spotlights and a 1.5 metre diameter ball.
On the deck – by the end of the show - were several 10ft truss towers on wheels, each rigged with a strobe and one three PixelLine 1044 LED battens. CYM 400s were used for specials on top of 4 of these towers, and the back of each yielded the letters E-M-B-R-A-C-E spelled out in DWE bulbs, turned around at a strategic moment in the set.
Also on the deck were Atomic strobes, and eight PALCO Mobile LED moving lights – more common to the architectural world – located upstage right behind the backline, plus 6 standard PALCO (static) LED floods, moved onto the stage floor by the Rose Bruford crew during the set.
At the very back, slung off the rear truss was ‘Bryan’s Wall’, consisting of five 16ft scaff pipes rigged with Sky Pan fixtures – 2K movie lights with large reflectors and round bulbs, which looked really cool when on and when in ‘glow’ mode. The spaces in between the 5 scaff poles were adorned with festoons complete with super-sized globe light-sources. These stayed hidden for the start of the show, and were only revealed later by kabuki gauzes that fell away at the end.
While it wasn’t exactly a large for an arena rig, each light-source had a specific and important job. The appearance of onstage chaos onstage was actually a very complex and precise operation, scripted from start to finish, and difficult to achieve, explains Smith.
The Diamond 4 controlled all the light-sources mentioned above, totalling 115 dimmer channels plus moving lights and LEDs. “The power, flexibility and usability of the D4 was perfect for this show” says Smith who was also able to utilise all the console’s instant accessibility and hands-on operation.
He concludes “It’s an absolutely brilliant desk and it does everything I want it to do”.
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