It’s not hard to imagine
American pop rock band R5 topping the charts sometime soon. With a style of
feel good music that has struck a chord with fans across the U.S., R5 is out on
their “Sometime
Last Night” tour using an Elation Professional rig of Cuepix Panels, Rayzor Q7
LED moving heads and Platinum Beam Extremes. Made up of four siblings and a
best friend, R5 hit the road in Florida in early July and are making their way
across the country on a 7-week summer leg in support of their new “Sometime
Last Night” release.
Lighting and video vendor for the tour is Toucan
Productions (toucanproductions.net) of Oklahoma City, their second tour with the band after
supplying a smaller tour last year. “On this
tour, the
band chose to forego LED panels for the big pixel look that the Cuepix Panels
give,” stated Brad Meyers, Director of Show
Operations at Toucan, who handles lighting programming and lighting direction
duties while band family member Ryland Lynch conceived the lighting design and serves
as board op. “We have two horizontal walls of Cuepix Panels on stage, a front
wall plus a rear wall on the band riser behind the drum kit. It’s a total of 73
panels, which is enough to make out the graphics across them and looks great.”
Part of Elation’s Cuepix
Series of LED blinders and strip lights, the Cuepix Panel is a high-power
matrix panel with individual pixel control and a full spectrum of colors from
25x 30-watt RGB COB LEDs. Brad uses the Panels for various purposes including
visual effects with solid or variable colors, as well as graphics, and also
pixelmaps effects across them. One Cuepix wall fronts the drum riser and is 2 Cuepix tiles
tall by 17 wide while the Cuepix wall in back of the drum kit is 3 Cuepix tiles
tall by 13 tiles wide. The walls make for an ideal visual effects background
for band members and also provide a layered look that gives the stage depth.
Brad, who has had experience using the
Cuepix Panels on other Toucan projects, outputs
pixel-mapped video content across the panels and calls it a “great look.” He runs the panels
at a maximum of 80% and that only when he uses them as blinders. Even with some
127 moving lights in the rig, the Panels have no problem
shining through. “We had to be careful about what lights we used on the show,” he
said. “The brightness
of the Cuepix Panels would have washed some fixtures out they are so bright.”
The R5 rig consists of three horizontal trusses – down-, mid- and
upstage – with six vertical upstage finger trusses behind the back Cuepix wall.
Each vertical truss contains Elation’s industry-staple Platinum Beam Extreme
fixtures for powerful narrow beam looks alternating with Rayzor Q7s, Elation’s
super compact LED wash/beam light. Brad calls the Q7s “incredible” and uses
them for chases and movement effects. At only 12.5 inches high and 11 lbs in
weight, it not only provides up-tempo movement but is also surprisingly
powerful with enough muscle to work with visual effects from larger fixtures. Over 10,000 channels of control all outputs through 5
Elation Enode 8 Pro Art-Net to DMX routers.
“I have been really impressed
by Elation’s recent equipment,” Brad concludes, who is out on the road with the
band. “We had a minor issue with the Panels at the start but that was taken
care of and they have been reliable ever since.”
Elation Equipment:
73 x Cuepix Panel
24 x Rayzor Q7
34 x Platinum Beam Extreme
5 x Enode
8 Pro
Photos: Will von Bolton
http://www.elationlighting.com
