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David Hasselhoff tours Germany and Austria with Elation lighting

David Hasselhoff recently toured Germany and Austria on his “30 Years Looking For Freedom” tour with a lighting rig that included effects from Elation Professional Chorus Line 8 and Lumina Matrix fixtures.

Audio, video and lighting for the tour, which ran April 11th to May 4th, was by Austrian-based rental and production company MartinKames.com with lighting design by company owner Martin Kames, who developed a special rapport with the television and music star.

Kames landed the job after sending Hasselhoff a 20-minute video in which he presented his company and his design ideas. “It took me half a year to finally reach him directly but after he saw the video he immediately called me and told me I’m on board so my perseverance paid off,” he explains. “It was a very unique experience to work with a movie star. He had a totally different approach and way of seeing things.”

Hasselhoff was very involved in the planning, according to Kames, and had some ambitious ideas for the tour. “He had constantly new ideas and it was my job to put them together into something realistic,” he says. One of those ideas was a set of on-stage steps that the designer lined with rows of Chorus Line 8 LED pixel bars.

“The staircase was the main and most essential part of the stage design and the Chorus Line 8s were essential for the light beneath all of the steps,” Kames states. “We made custom-built mounting frames underneath each riser so they could still rotate, which gave us the chance to use a variety of effects. The most popular look was the famous Knight Rider red Kitt Scanner effect that we simulated using the Chorus Line stairs.”

The show used two live cameras for IMAG and it was essential to have a TV studio-like look to the set with lots of light and no black holes. “We filmed the whole show on the very last day of the tour,” the designer says. “We had a closed zoom on the Chorus Lines and tilt them around as an effect. We used a pixelmapping grid on our light desk to generate more effects with the steps, for example a rainbow wave over the steps.”

Kames’ design supported a wealth of video, which was central to the show. Three LED screens – 50 sqm of 4 mm LED wall total - showed archival footage from Hasselhoff’s life and celebrity career, as well as the live shots. “They wanted one big LED screen behind the band but I convinced David and his musical director Marcus Barone that multiple screens with lighting placed between each screen would be more interesting and modern.”

Kames placed vertical columns of white-light Lumina Matrix LED 4 x 4 matrix panels each side of the stage and between the LED screens. “For one song I created three colored vertical stripes of lights and had the three LED walls in the same colors,” he says. All the video and live cuts were programmed into the light show from the light desk, which was controlled by Kames.

Upper photo: David Hasselhoff with LD Martin Kames.

www.elationlighting.com

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