Lighting designer Matt Doherty of production design company integratd has just finished lighting Australian electronica, indie pop band Glades’ national tour that finished with a sold-out show at The Oxford Arts Factory.
Matt’s brief was to create a production the fans can feel invested in so that they feel like they’re a part of the journey of the show.
“We created a design that starts to wrap around the band and gives the idea that it keeps wrapping around the audience, thus putting them all inside this hexagon together as one,” commented Matt. “Getting to work with artists that likes to be so involved in the production is great. After we went through about 35 revisions, we finally got to a design we were all happy with and we knew we could make work. A lot of the design references were coming from the artist like the 1975 and LANY.”
The artist was keen to go down the LED screen path but with the challenges of venue space and getting a really solid bunch of content made in time, and just not wanting to do the same thing as everyone else, it was decided that Martin Sceptrons and ShowPro DreamPix were the better option. These can wrap round the sides of the stage creating the bottom half of a hexagon which for a long time was a part of the artist’s logo.
“In the end the rig consisted of 30 x ShowPro DreamPix Strips supplied by ResX who helped me out super last minute after another supplier fell through so my hat goes off to them for that!” said Matt. “I also had eight ShowPro Quad Strips and four Claypaky Stormy strobes for some intense sidelight action, all supplied by Fusion Entertainment who were also super helpful with the last minute supplier change!”
Control for the tour was MA2 and all the DreamPix were mapped with PRG’s MBox Mini running on a Mac Mini.
“The biggest challenge for me was building a show that was completely to timecode but could be easily cloned and updated,” added Matt. “On so many support tours lately, I’ve been watching guys cloning and updating shows all the way up to doors so I was determined to find a way around that.”
Matt’s favourite lighting moment will always be the blackout at the start of the show, even when you pull your walk-in in fader out and the houselights shoot to full …. whoops!
Photos: Lachlan Tompsett
