The Heineken Jammin Festival takes place each year at the Parco San Giuliani just outside Venice and features top acts from around the world playing to crowds of up to 100,000 people. This year the headliners were English band Coldplay, and top Italian rock bands Negramaro and Vasco Rossi. The supporting acts included Elbow, Beady Eye, We Are Scientists and The Pretty Reckless.
Lighting for the event was provided by Limelite from Rome. Lighting included over 160 moving lights together with a large number of strobes, ACLs and molefays – a traditional rock rig! Limelite chose to use a ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 + Execute Wing to control the lights for the festival. The rig required 12 universes of DMX so Ethernet network was used between FOH and stage to carry the DMX. The MagicQ consoles output Art-Net protocol directly on to the network (up to 32 universes directly without extra processing racks). Under the stage in Dimmer World, four ChamSys 4 Port Ethernet Interfaces were used to convert the Art-Net to DMX (3 live, one spare). Art-Net was fed directly to the Catalyst media servers to control the video from the console.
At FOH a pair of MagicQ MQ100s and Execute Wings were set up. One system was used as the live console whilst the second system was used for pre-visualisation for incoming lighting designers. Shows were transferred between the consoles over the network using the “Grab Show” function.
The Execute Wing enables access to 48 different Playbacks split into 4 banks – 12 with faders and 36 with buttons. The Playback faders were used for intensity and speed controls whilst the Playback buttons were used for flashing the ACLs, moles and strobes.
Along the top of the lighting rig and the side LED screens there was a line of 30 four-light molefay. A grid was created in the Plan View on MagicQ with a size of 30 by 1. The molefay fixture numbers were placed in this grid as they appeared on the rig left to right, and a Pixelmapper patched over the grid. This enabled pixelmapping FX to be used on the molefay making it very easy to select complex FX – for example, twin lines moving from out to in of varying sizes. These sort of FX are hard to create on traditional consoles.
The FOH lighting position was far left of centre which made programming position palettes from the console almost impossible. A wireless network was set up by connecting one of the four network outputs of the console directly to a Linksys wireless router. The iPad remote control application was then used to program the palette positions from out in the centre of the auditorium and also from the front centre of stage.
A custom 10 by 8 Execute Window was set up on the MagicQ console by simply copying the groups, colours and positions from the appropriate windows. In addition special buttons were assigned for lamp on, reset, locate and clear. This enabled “one touch” access to all the key functions for testing the lighting rig from on stage with the iPad.
The weather in Venice was very changeable – one moment it was warm and sunny, and the next it was torrential rain and thunder storms. The local authorities prohibit the use of a back or sides on the main stage which meant that most of the lighting rig was open to the rain. During the build up the rain got into many of the fixtures – performing a “Lamp On” became a pyrotechnic display as one after another the moving lights exploded on start. However the show had to go on, and fixtures were replaced one after one. Under the stage a repair workshop was set up where a constant stream of fixtures were being repaired from rain damage. The iPad remote control proved invaluable for lamping on, resetting and testing fixtures on stage – something very difficult to do from 100 metres away at FOH.
Lighting Designer Jvan Morandi brought in his own MagicQ MQ100 system and Playback Wing on Saturday for the headliner, top Italian rock act Negramaro. Jvan Morandi has used MagicQ on many bands including Placebo, Gianna Nannini, Ting Tings and Unkle. Before using MagicQ Jvan was a staunch Hog II user. He finds everything he needs from his Hog II days, but with the power of 32 universes, pixelmapping for large banks of LED and media server control for his Catalyst systems.
Jvan’s shows feature large amounts of video content and live feeds mixed together with the moving lights to create a complete collage on the stage. For each song Jvan creates a main lighting Cue Stack with the different lighting states and then uses Cue Stack macros to trigger a Cue Stack of video Cues running on the Catalyst. In this way the lighting and video cues are controlled synchronously.
Jvan uses the Playback wing to store an emergency busking page of pre-programmed Cues in case the band strays off track – as they did at the end of Saturdays set – reappearing to play an extra song several minutes after the end of the set - a classic moment of panic at FOH as spot operators rushed back up the towers and everyone jumped back on comms!
Limelite hold a rental stock of ChamSys MagicQ MQ100 and MagicQ Execute Wings together with ChamSys Art-Net to DMX racks. www.limelite.it
14th June 2011