Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

Painting with Light designs lighting and video for ‘Rubens the Musical’

Painting with Light presented a lighting and video design together with bespoke video content for ‘Rubens the Musical’, staged by Historalia on a series of pontoons floating in the moat of the (old) Westerlo Castle in Belgium.

Painting with Light also supplied the lighting and video control package, including one of their new disguise servers to run the 50-metre-wide canvas that formed a backdrop to the stage. Painting with Light’s Luc Peumans created the lighting design in close collaboration with Paco Mispelters, who also worked as the lighting director on site, while Arthur Claesen worked with set designer Marnik Baert to create the video content.

A tensile roof was erected to protect the stage from rain, however this didn’t offer up any flying facilities, so all the lighting positions were rigged onto the upstage scaffolding structure supporting the set and video elements, resulting in a heavily backlit show.

The front lighting positions were facilitated by the tent structure covering the audience seating tribune and by a scaffolding tower with a trim of 13 metres. The principal characters were highlighted by follow spots.

The main moving lights used were Robe, with 16 x BMFL Blades for front lighting and to illuminate a pathway immediately in front of the stage, where some of the action also took place. The Blades were complimented with seven BMFL WashBeams, the core back- and sidelight fixtures.

The bulk of the stage and set washing was achieved with 30 Robe Spiider LED wash beam luminaires rigged from the set scaffolding, and these also lit across the stage and the band, who were positioned inside the set.

Twenty-four Robe LEDWash 600s were used to pick out the cast and to augment the band, leaving around 100 x strategically positioned LED PARs to illuminate the set and stage from the front and side footlights positions. Two follow spots were deployed out front and used to pick up the principals at various times.

As with all Painting with Light projects, the control system of choice was a GrandMA2 for lighting, programmed and operated for the run of shows by Painting with Light’s Ivar van Dijk. The console also triggered the video cues stored on the disguise 4x4 pro media server - programmed by Dries Mees - as well as varying the intensity of the LED screen.

All the lighting equipment - and the audio - was supplied by L&L Stage Services and Demon, and the LED screens were from Pixelscreen. Arthur Claesen, assisted by Wouter Verhulst, specified 250 square metres of 10 mm LED screen which made up a substantial element of the set. With the audience seated 30-40 metres away, 10 mm was chosen as super HD was not necessary.

With this digital canvas as an integral part of Marnik Baert’s set design, the screen layout featured 14 columns, each 7 metres high by 2 metres wide, with a 9-metre-wide by 3.5-metre-high landscape orientated centrepiece LED divided into two. The full pixel map to which all the content was worked totalled 3552 pixels wide by 672 high, and Arthur Claesen optimised all the images in HD to that exact size.

(Photos: Elke Briers)

www.paintingwithlight.be

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories