Avolites Goes The XTRA Mile

Visual designer Nick Jevons of Electric Fly Productions used an Avolites Diamond 4 for controlling lighting for the first time ever at the Radio 1XTRA Live event staged at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry.
Show visuals were played back from a Maxedia media server triggered by a Pearl Expert console run by Jake Jevons.
The show featured a star-studded line-up including Akon, Chris Brown, Kelly Rowland, Craig David and many other hot black music acts and was the first of its kind to be staged by the BBC's popular digital urban music channel.
It was broadcast live on 1XTRA and recorded for a BBC 2 live special and BBC Digital's Red Button channel.
Jevons was brought onboard by Producer Dave McColmont of Angel Music, following his many groundbreaking designs and integrating video and lighting for the BBC's One Big Weekend events.
All lighting and rigging was supplied by award-winning Blackburn-based lighting rental company, HSL, with visuals and control from Electric Fly and screens from CT.
Jevons drew inspiration from many sources for the design, including the 1X ident, featuring LED cubes and squares.
The spectacular-looking stage featured 6 cubes constructed from Litec trussing, five flown and one ground supported on a riser, arranged across three planes and in perspective to each other.
These were clad with Barco MiTrix screen modules on the fascias, and outlined with Pulsar ChromaStrip LED fixtures. The upstage cords of the cubes were toned with ChromaQ Color Block db4 LED fixtures for additional depth and dynamics. Each cube had an 8-lite Molefey behind the screens that could be blasted through for high-impact moments.
The cubes were all rigged independently on two motors and there was a front and back truss for lighting. The moving lights were 14 Robe ColorWash 700E ATs and 14 ColorSpot 700E ATs, together with four Robe ColorWash 2500s on the floor, the latter used for super-bright aerial effects.
Jevons wanted to be able to build the show up and strip it back in visual layers, hence the background and foreground lighting onstage, sandwiching the screens, which could either have video ghosted onto them or be lit from front or rear, making for very subtle or very large effects, overall boosting the whole scale of the show.
It was important to make it look more like an event then a gig, so Jevons went for some serious eye-candy in the arena over the audience. There were three, 3-metre diamond shape position for a real 3D appearance.
These were all truss toned with more db4s and each cube contained 4 Robe ColorWash 250E AT moving lights. The centre cube also had eight 24-inch diameter mirror balls suspended inside.
Extra audience lighting was supplied by two 40ft trusses each containing 6 bars of 6 PARs.
At FOH, Jevons designed a comprehensive ground-supported TV presenter and DJ platform, which also contained camera positions and technical areas for lighting and sound control. This was decorated with 26 Pulsar Chroma Strips and 12 JTE PixelLines.
All the lighting was controlled by the D4, Jevons' desk of choice.
He said: "I would not attempt to do a show like this on any desk other than Avo. With nine acts in four hours, six of which I was lighting, there was a serious amount of improvisation required for visuals and the support I have had from both Avo and HSL on this gig has been absolutely brilliant."
Further information is available at: www.avolites.com.
(KMcA)