Plenty of excitement surrounded the high profile
re-launch of Virgin Radio on the DAB digital radio platform, with an exceptionally strong
presentation team, a great music and entertainment policy and all the
ingredients to repeat the ratings success it enjoyed in the nineties and
noughties.
Event technical production specialist Maestra London
was asked by live event and TV producers TBI Media to provide creative lighting
for the inaugural broadcast which took place aboard a Virgin train running from
Manchester to London. It was hosted by Virgin Radio presenters Edith Bowman and
Matt Richardson complete with special live sets from a number of excellent bands
including The Feeling, Travis, Mystery Jets, Walking on Cars and Gavin James.
Maestra’s Jack Jury designed
the lighting and project managed this aspect for east London based company. They rose to the challenges of installing a
lighting rig on a train – a first for Maestra – which involved meticulous
pre-planning as well as considerations like choosing lights that both looked
good and were expedient on power consumption.
The lighting fit-up took place at the Virgin Trains
depot in Wolverhampton. The train then journeyed to Manchester, met the Virgin
Radio broadcast team, artists and performers, around 200 invited guests plus
amassed media who boarded. It then commenced its 200 mile run down to London,
stopping at Rugby and Birmingham on the way for special additional performances.
One of the carriages was adapted as a performance
space for the bands, for which Jack also sourced some battery powered LED
soft-lights that were perfect to light the space for cameras / recording, and
small and light enough to be rigged to the luggage racks.
Five EncapSulite florescent light-sticks were used to
provide camera-candy and atmospheric lighting for the performance area which
were powered from the train’s on-board mains.
Twelve CORE Lighting ColourPoint2 wireless LED
up-lighters were an obvious choice – due to their complete transportability –
for the main broadcast carriage to graze up and colour the sides of the space,
The tidy-sized system flight-cases were easily stowed in the train luggage
racks, and the lights didn’t pull any electrical resources from the train!
Supplied to Maestra London by Wireless Lighting, these
were controlled via a battery powered hand-held remote which was ideal as there
was no room for a lighting control position.
The biggest challenge was not in the actual lighting
design or installing the kit on the day, it was combining the practical
requirements of lighting the event with the administrative ones of working in
the context of a commercial railway environment. This entailed the presentation
of rigorous health and safety documentation and huge attention to detail in
advance.
Only once all this was approved did the task begin of finding
the best and most appropriate lighting solutions elegant, functional in a
confined space and that embraced the green technology which is high on the
agenda of all Virgin’s ventures.
Jack comments, “It was a fantastic event with which to
be involved and we really enjoyed the idiosyncratic location and the challenges
and learning curves. Above all it was a pleasure to work with Louise Segal and
the team from TBI on such an interesting project.”
