AUCKLAND, New Zealand – Green Day is currently on their 21st Century Breakdown world tour, which started earlier this year and is scheduled to continue towards the end of 2010. The band recently finished the Australian leg of the tour, with a lighting rig that included 37 Martin MAC III Profiles. "The MAC IIIs do a really good job for the throw distances that we have as some of them are very long," commented Kevin Cauley, lighting director for the tour. "Our upstage truss is trimmed at 42 feet off the ground so there are some very long throws required.
"This is the first show that I've used the MAC IIIs on and I think they're great," Cauley added. "The effects wheel is awesome. It's just a really good, heavy-duty light and the crew has had no real problems with them. We've found that the lamps in the MAC IIIs are lasting a good 500 hours longer than Martin suggested. We were quite impressed by that.
"The colors are great and I even like the stock gobos," Cauley said. "How often do you like the stock gobo set? The lamp strobe function is very neat and a new tool to play with."
The rig has five fingers of truss as well as wing trusses to increase the breadth performance area, and all contain MAC III Profiles. The lighting designer for the show is Justin Collie of Artfag.
The lighting intent for the show was to try to retain the old-school punk feel, but to bring it into the current times with LED elements and other concepts. As Artfag has done in the past, some fixtures are joined together to create a whole new lighting fixture concept, such as the LED Fag Pod – two LED fixtures that sandwich a Martin Atomic 3000 strobe with Atomic Colors scroller. A total of 39 of these are distributed throughout the rig.
"They're more of a visual element than casting actual illumination on the artists," said Cauley.
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