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Avolites Goes The XTRA Mile

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Visual designer Nick Jevons of Electric Fly Productions used an Avolites Diamond 4 for controlling lighting for the first ever Radio 1XTRA Live event staged at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry.

 Show visuals were played back from a Maxedia media server triggered by a Pearl Expert console run by Jake Jevons.

 The show featured a star-studded line up including Akon, Chris Brown, Kelly Rowland, Craig David and many other hot black music acts, and was the first of its kind to be staged by the BBC’s popular digital urban music channel. It was  broadcast live on 1XTRA and recorded for a BBC 2 live special and BBC Digital’s Red Button channel.

 Jevons was brought onboard by producer Dave McColmont of Angel Music, following his many ground-breaking designs integrating video and lighting for the BBC’s One Big Weekend events. All lighting and rigging was supplied by award-winning Blackburn-based lighting rental company, HSL with visuals and control from Electric Fly, and screens from CT.

 Jevons drew inspiration from many sources for the design including the 1X ident featuring LED cubes and squares.

The spectacular-looking stage featured 6 cubes constructed from Litec trussing, 5 flown and one ground supported on a riser, arranged across 3 planes and in perspective to each other. These were clad with Barco MiTrix screen modules on the fascias, and outlined with Pulsar ChromaStrip LED fixtures. The upstage cords of the cubes were toned with ChromaQ Color Block db4 LED fixtures for additional depth and dynamics. Each cube had an 8-lite Molefey behind the screens that could be blasted through for high-impact moments..

 The Cubes were all rigged independently on 2 motors, and there was a front and back truss for lighting. The moving lights were 14 Robe ColorWash 700E ATs and 14 ColorSpot 700E ATs, together with 4 Robe ColorWash 2500s on the floor, the latter used for super-bright
aerial effects.

 He wanted to be able to build the show up and strip it back in visual layers, hence the background and foreground lighting onstage, sandwiching the screens, which could either have video ghosted onto them or be lit from front or rear, making for very subtle or very large effects, overall boosting the whole scale of the show.

 It was important to make it look more like an event than a gig, so Jevons went for some serious eye-candy in the arena over the audience. There were three 3 metre squared trussing cubes, picked up on a single point and hung in the diamond shape position for a real 3D appearance. These were all truss toned with more dB4s and each cube contained 4 Robe ColorWash 250E AT moving lights. The centre cube also had eight 24 inch diameter mirror balls suspended inside.

 Extra audience lighting was supplied by two 40ft trusses each containing 6 bars of 6 PARs.

 At FOH, Jevons designed a comprehensive ground-supported TV presenter and DJ platform, which also contained camera positions and technical areas for lighting and sound control. This was decorated with 26 Pulsar Chroma Strips and 12 JTE PixelLines.

 All the lighting was controlled by the D4, Jevons’ desk of choice.

 “I would not attempt to do a show like this on any desk other than Avo” he maintains, “With 9 acts in 4 hours, 6 of which I was lighting – there was a serious amount of improvisation required for visuals, and the support I have had from both Avo and HSL on this gig has been
absolutely brilliant”.

He added that the visiting LDs, including Steven Abbiss for Craig David and Daunte Kenner for Chris Brown, were also extremely happy using the console. Abbiss has a long history with Avolites and Kenner used a D4 for the Mary J Blige World Tour.

 
 

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Avolites Ltd
184 Park Avenue
Park Royal
London NW10 7XL
Tel: +44 (0)20 8965 8522
Fax: +44 (0)20 8965 0290

Date of issue : 1st April 2008

For more press info. on Avolites, please contact Louise Stickland on +44 (0)1865 202679/+44 (0)7831 329888 or Email ‘louise@loosplat.com’.
For more product and general info, or to contact Avolites direct, call +44 (0)208 965 8522