latest news headlines

Fall Out Boy European Tour with MagicQ

Since their inception in 2001 in suburban Wilmett, Chicago, Fall Out Boy's rise to fame has been nothing short of meteoric. Five albums and many miles later, they find themselves completing a sold-out European tour of arena size venues ending in the UK this month. And to cap it all their recent album ‘Infinity on High’ has just reached no 1 on the American Billboard Charts.

The production team were looking for something new for the European tour - previously they had just toured basic lighting, but the newfound status of the band meant that this time they were looking for a special look. So, Southampton based hire company GLS Lighting came to the rescue with a much-increased lighting rig, a large number of LED VersaTUBEs, a Hippotizer media server, live cameras on stage and to control it all - a ChamSys MagicQ MQ200 console.

The rig itself comprised 20 Robe ColourSpot 1200ATs, 20 MAC600s, 14 Atomic strobes with scrollers, 20 ChromaQ Colourblock DB4s, 20 LED Par64s, 260 VersaTUBES driven from a Hippotizer plus a variety of moles, generics and dimmers over four universes of ArtNet. All this provided the power to create an impressive show.

Lighting designer Esteban Caracciolo found the transition to the MagicQ extremely easy, and he was particularly impressed with the powerful media and LED control, and with the speed with which live changes could be made. MagicQ's advanced Cue Stacking system enabled complex Cue Stacks comprising mixtures of chases and timed cues together with fanned FX over the entire lighting rig, great for generating those power looks whilst retaining the flexibility to follow the action on stage.

The flexibility and user-friendliness of the MagicQ MQ200 allowed Esteban to utilize fanned palettes, chases within the cue stack and default playbacks, which could all be transmitted to the real-time performance at the touch of a button.

Esteban spent two days at ChamSys' demo room in Southampton, familiarising himself with the console and pre-programming the lighting and media servers. ChamSys’ demo room has full Capture/WYSIWYG facilities along with both Hippotizer and ArKaos media servers, enabling lighting designers to sample the full benefits of MagicQ without the pressure of a show situation. ChamSys was able to set up visualisation so that Esteban could see exactly how the Hippotizer images would be mapped to the five separate sections of versaTUBE LED array spread around the stage.

Crew chief Dave Dickinson put the technical part of the show together. "I'd worked with MagicQ for several high profile tours and was confident that it was the right console for this job - the combination of flexibility, power and reliability is awesome," he said. Dave also assisted Esteban with inputting the show design into Capture visualisation software and transferred the patch directly to the MagicQ. Using MagicQ PC software and Capture both he and Esteban could plan the whole rig whilst on the road and then when the actual rig became available during pre-production they could try it out for real. "MagicQ PC is easy to program and with the addition of an ArtNet to DMX interface I can control the whole rig from my laptop," said Dave.

ChamSys has worked very closely with Green Hippo (manufacturers of Hippotizer) to ensure that control of media servers from MagicQ is straightforward. MagicQ supports a special Media Window solely for controlling media servers, which makes it much easier to control several different media servers. You can select media server, media layer, attributes and media content all from the same window. In addition, you can view and select directly on screen the media thumbnails for up to 50 different media servers each with different media content. MagicQ downloads and stores thumbnail previews of the media content from each media server independently and even supports a live preview of the media server output and layers.

Esteban used the media window to feed the camera output and Hippotizer media to playback the show direct to the versaTUBEs on stage, giving the audience a close up view of the action. Esteban commented: “It is so easy to use (MagicQ) to program the media, the thumbnails and live previews make the task much quicker.”

In picture: Esteban Caracciolo with MagicQ.

News Type:

latest news headlines

Fall Out Boy European Tour with MagicQ

11th April 2007

HEADLINES

news archive

search stories