Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

Monumental Tour 2021 Finale lit with Robe

The Monumental Tour - a visual and musical performance which was the brainchild of French DJ and music producer Michael Canitrot and visual activists AV-Extended - played the final location at the end of November 2021 at the Chateau de Pierrefonds in the Oise region of France, northeast of Paris.

Over 100 Robe moving lights supported the mapped projection show. It took references from the history of the Castle, originally constructed in the 12th century and extensively rebuilt in the mid-19th century, and wove these into an immersive electronic musical experience.

The Monumental Tour combined streamed music performances and collaborations with epic, iconic and outstanding monumental sites all around France. It started back in the summer at the Phare des Baleines (Lighthouse of the Whales) on the Ile de Ré. Since he was a small child, Michael Canitrot has loved visiting castles and museums and describes The Monumental Tour as “the meeting of my two passions - electronic music and heritage/history”.

For the final show in 2021, Paris-based freelance lighting designer Mikael “Mika” Trochu was asked onboard by the project’s technical managers Martin Javouret and Adrien Demengel and tasked with lighting the Castle’s front facade. The event was recorded for later broadcast and enjoyed live by a specially invited audience. Trochu’s collection of Robe moving lights included MegaPointes, Fortes, Esprites, MiniPointes, Spiiders and Tetra2s, all provided by Paris-based rental and production company MDL Event, the event’s technical partner.

The key role of the lighting was to complement and work alongside the detailed projections co-ordinated by AV-Extended’s Jérémie Bellot, which covered a 60-metre-wide span across the Castle’s front facade stretching fifty meters high up to the tops of the walls and turrets. Each Monumental show is composed of what Canitrot describes as the tour’s “artistic DNA” and is sculpted specifically for the location and includes abstract references and interpretations - both visual and musical - related to the history and relevance of the building.

The 42 MegaPointes were chosen by Canitrot himself who is involved in all aspects of the Monumental project as creative director as well as music maker. The MegaPointes were also the most noticeable out of all the fixtures, positioned individually around the various castle battlement crenellations at different heights, and poking through the windows of the three main towers on the front facade.

The visibility of the MegaPointes was vital for those “beams-in-the-sky” moments in the set. They were also picked for their small size. Rigging was a longwinded and laborious manual haul up to the various parts of the Castle by the MDL Event crew who placed each unit individually into position around the building. This was accomplished with a lot of collaboration with the team who maintain and run the Castle which is a dedicated monument historique.

Sixteen Robe Spiider wash beams were deployed in various places around the Castle up-lighting and highlighting elements of stone and walled areas. Eight Fortes were rigged on a circular truss on the floor inside the large castle bailey (courtyard) representing a new metaphorical tower of light beams. They provided feature lighting and camera candy effects for video director Anthony Ghnassia to blend into the mix which included drone footage from the Skydrone France team. These fixtures projected gobos, texturing and colours around the courtyard which was illuminated with LED floods. The eight MiniPointes and four more Spiiders were used to highlight the architecture and pick out artefacts and detail in the Castle chapel.

Michael Canitrot’s DJ booth was set up in front of the main gateway into the Castle, with the designated public area just the other side of this. Immediately behind the artist were four Esprites for back lighting and silhouetting and gobo animations. Immediately in front of his setup were two lines of Tetra2s forming a pathway up to the DJ booth.

The get in took place over two full days, plus the show day, with one night of programming on-site with the full rig in situ, preceded by three days pre-viz in the MDL Event studio using L8 3D visualisation software. Lighting was programmed onto a GrandMA2 light console positioned in the back of a truck parked in the public viewing area, and all of it - lighting and projection - was run to timecode from the music track for the 45-minute show. The full Monumental 2021 Finale show was broadcast on December 19th.

(Photos: Paul Clarke/Louise Stickland)

www.robe.cz

© 1999 - 2024 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories