Pixelrange News
PixelRange rocks Glastonbury
This year’s Glastonbury festival showcased a mass of PixelRange products – including Blur’s dazzling headlining show on the main stage.
Across the immense festival site the more eclectic stages also featured the full range of Pixel fixtures - creating an exhibition of the latest LED technology.
The Dirty Boots stage was designed as a ‘plug and play’ stage, where artists come in and use the house drum kit, amps and keyboards – and literally bring their own guitars! The stage featured 6 PixelLine 1044s, 4 PixelPars as front lighting and 4 PixelLine Micros to light the banners.
Lighting designer Neil Scrivener explains: “With a small stage 6mx4m and over 60 bands to light – many in the daylight – I needed a lighting rig that would continue to be innovative and different. Whilst moving lights would have been most people’s obvious choice, they wouldn’t have done anything in the daylight. Power was also an issue, so LED was the most logical and perfect solution.
He continues: “The Pixel fixtures did a fantastic job squaring up to the daylight and working alongside the other fixtures on the rig. In fact, even during the day I had to run the PixelLines at 50% - which soon became nearer to 10% during the evening – and they were still extremely bright!”
The John Peel stage was designed by Cate Carter and DPL Production Lighting’s Pete Watts. Pete explains: “I specified a large amount of LED for this stage, as I wanted to show that you can use LED as a lighting product to light artists, also as an effect - and as a video product mixed in with other video products.”
He continues: “For artist lighting I specified PixelPar 90s to provide all of the side light at high level which is very important for televised shows - as a large number of camera shots come side on from below the artist – and without light from the right direction it can look flat. The great thing about PixelPars is that the quality of the beam is the same as a Parcan - so you can get big punches of colour through even across a 20m stage.”
PixelLine 110s provided additional backlight and sidelight effects – and 5 new PixelMax Washes made their festival debut. Used for colour washing, blinders and high powered strobing, Watts enthuses: “I really like the PixelMax Washes ability to spread the beams - so you can effectively light the top, middle and bottom of a wall with different colours.”
Behind 12 video panels hung at different heights, a mixture of PixelLine 110s and PixelLine Micro Effects were installed on vertical scaff poles. This created another video medium for the content, expanding the effective area as and when required. It also allowed the PixelLine to act as a second video product playing different content to the video panels – producing 3D effects – alongside standard lighting effects including walls of colour and additional strobes.
Pete Watts was also the lighting designer for Jazz World. IP65 outdoor rated PixelArcs were used to light side banners in area 1 – whilst area 2 featured more PixelLine 1044s for cyc washes and utilising the inbuilt effects – many different looks were created quickly saving hours of programming time.