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XL Video’s New Soft-LED for Basement Jaxx
This was specified by the band’s lighting designer Jonathan Armstrong (AKA Leggy). Basement Jaxx have always had a strong and innovative video element to their shows he explains, and this time they wanted to try something new. Leggy decided Soft-LED was the way to go – which has yielded spectacular results.
XL Video was the first UK company to invest in this revolutionary product from Mainlight Industries in the US. XL has also supplied it to LD Vince Foster for Kylie’s ‘Showgirl’ tour and for numerous live business events.
Soft-LED is a flexible drape covered with a mesh of LED emitters. It enables the creation of dynamic artwork and effects and brings stages and presentation environments alive with real-time colour and movement. The technology uses a combination of custom-designed LED grids, cutting edge fibre optics, and specialised processing technology to display designs and graphics on plush, high-quality black drapery.
Apart from the obvious aesthetic advantages, the practical ones, particularly when several shows on the itinerary are festival headline slots, are also a great asset.
It’s not exactly practical most of the time to tour a heavy video screen system to festivals. The weight invariably means bringing in extra rigging or using ground support. However, using the Soft-LED has proved “highly cost-effective for the scale of the effects it produces” enthuses Leggy.
It takes about 15 minutes to de-rig and pack away at the end of the show and approximately an hour to rig and hook up in the afternoon, “It’s just like hanging a cloth,” he confirms.
The Soft-LED can be run via any DMX lighting desk, and Leggy used a Hippotiser digital media server as the source of his effects, triggered via his WholeHog II lighting console.
The Soft-LED proved highly reliable throughout the tour, “We’ve had no problems with the drapes at all,” says Leggy.
Content included many images and material created from manipulated clips in the Hippotiser’s onboard library, plus some custom made material. They also utilised some text and graffiti art on the screen, sourced by band member Felix.
It was the first time that Leggy has worked with XL who also supplied technician Stuart Merser. “He was excellent,” says Leggy. “XL generally gave me brilliant support throughout the tour. Everything worked all the time so I didn’t even have to even call them up!”
In addition to the Soft-LED, Leggy used PixelLine LED battens, Studio Beam PC moving lights, strobes and eight vertical truss towers onstage, covered in ‘socks’ made from back projection material.
The Soft-LED was the major visual effect. It was the centrepiece of a hugely dynamic, energy-driven show, used like a giant canvas to produce anything from massive coloured lightsource looks to oscillating patterns, text messages and an exciting, very bright, kaleidoscopic
16th September 2005
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