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Global Express with Jay-Z and grandMA
The tour is called ‘Global Express’ and a global experience it is. Jay-Z performs one gig after another, always on a stage, that you could describe as plain, open and empty. Everything is reduced to a minimum. To fill this visual void lighting designer Gary Westcott and his associate Matthew Button, who accompanies the tour, applied three Barco LED screens. Lighting control is by grandMAs.
“The system is simple enough – three screens of Barco LED, one a wide-screen centre stage, flanked by two in portrait orientation – very narrow, side screens. There’s a three-camera system for live shots, one front-of-house, one in the pit and one on stage,” explains Drew Findley, who is responsible for the video content. Findley controls the four used M-Boxes off a grandMA. “The show is event driven: what I like about the grandMA is the flying faders – having the ability to move quickly and easily between pages, and copy out of existing pages.”
Travelling from one country to another is a logistic masterstroke. “At one point I’m having to source 14 grandMAs,” reports Robin Wain, senior account production manager of PRG Europe, “so we have enough leapfrog from gig to gig as one set after another inevitably gets held up in customs and transit.” PRG provided equipment in some unlikely destinations across Africa and the Far East. But only the desks and the M-Boxes have to travel, the lighting and video systems are sourced locally. That leads to curious incidents like the one in Athens, when Matthew Button was greeted by a rig with four finger trusses projecting out into the audience, filled with VL3000s. “Not quite what I wanted, but at least the grandMA can deal with those kind of instrument changes pretty easily,” he says.
“The grandMA is an ideal solution to a variety of automated lights I’ve encountered as the tour moved from territory to territory,” said Button. He has an equally simple solution coping with the vagaries of a multiplicity of LED fixtures. “I programmed the LED fixtures as 550 separate LED hearts; it’s a bit long-winded, but it should mean that I can make any LED fitting work to the pattern we’ve programmed.”
6th November 2006
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