Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

Colour Sound supplies lighting equipment and crew to Hurts tour

West London based lighting and visuals rental company Colour Sound Experiment supplied lighting equipment and crew to the latest European tour by synthpop duo Hurts. Colour Sound invested in 100 x new Martin VDO Sceptron 10 LED battens for the tour for which lighting was directed and operated on the road by Matt Arthur.

Production designer Rob Sinclair and the band’s initial inspiration for the band-in-boxes set design came from several operatic references to capture the essence of the look they wanted. The addition of a set of 4-position - manually controlled - reflective louvres at the back of each cage enabled sheets and shafts of light from the various mid and up-stage fixtures to be filtered through, directed, reflected and bounced around.

From there, Sinclair started adding lighting fixtures. Starting with the set as that defines the stage space, the four cages were 8 ft high and built on 8 ft wide by 10 ft deep riser decks, 3 ft off the stage. In the roof of each band cage were four 2-metre runs of Sceptron (2 conjoined strips each) so 32 fixtures in total, with the other 54 Sceptrons aligned along the front of the cage riser in continuous lines, all fitted with the white, rounded diffusers to fill as much airspace as possible. These were set 150 mm apart, resembling a neon fence. The Sceptrons - running in 10 channel basic mode and utilising the internal effects as well as programmed sequences via the lighting console - were the main aesthetic feature.

In the air were three trusses - front, mid and rear. On the mid truss were 7 x Robe MMX Spots plus eight Source Four Profiles for band keys. The back truss featured another 8 x MMX Spots and the reversible backdrop, which could be hung one way for a brown look and reversed to give a silver effect and was sourced from EventServ Drapage in Dublin. On the front truss were another 7 x Source Four profiles and some 8-lite blinders for the audience.

On the floor were six Robe LEDWash 600s, two a side in the downstage positions for Hurts and one each side in the mid-downstage area, shooting across the band risers. Far upstage right at the back was a row of 6 x Robe BMFL Spots on the floor and some blinders for blasting through the set. The BMFLs were used to produce big blocks of expressionist-style light which could be further varied via the different louvre positions.

Also upstage were 4 x Source Fours without lens tubes which silhouetted the band in their riser cages for the first two numbers of the set, and later on fired past them and out into the audience. Thirteen atomic strobes were dotted around, with two either side of stage, five on the top deck of the risers facing forward and four under the risers firing through the Sceptron ‘fence’.

Everything was controlled by Matt Arthur using his own Jands Vista S1 with 2 x M1 playback wings and laptop control. Colour Sound’s crew on the tour were Hadyn Williams and Jon ‘JC’ Curtis plus crew chief Tom Bailey, who has worked with Sinclair and Arthur on the last three Hurts tours. Alex Ryan was the Colour Sound project manager and co-ordinator. The set was built by Get Set, and managing team Hurts on tour was production manager Craig Sherwood.

(Photos: Keith Scott)

www.coloursound.co.uk

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories