NEW YORK — Production designer Butch Allen opted for fixtures much newer than the decades-old hits being performed with NKOTBSB, this year’s reunion with 1990s boy bands New Kids on the Block and Backstreet Boys. Allen is using 79 GLP Volkslicht Zoom LED Spots to line the 155-foot-long staging elements designed by Tait Towers, which include a 91-foot-long catwalk.
Allen chose the fixtures for their compact size, low weight, bright output, and he’s using them as “footlights, to carve the space out around the audience.” He also credited the fixtures for variable beam size — from 10 to 26 degrees; fast pan and tilt movement; ease of trucking and setup/tear down. “They are incredibly fast, and the zoom is everything you could want,” Allen said. “There is a white mode which is particularly useful.”
The reunion tour also reunited Allen with Jesse Blevins (associate designer) and Ray Woodbury (creative director), all of whom had collaborated No Doubt’s 2009 tour, with Blevins serving as lighting board operator and programmer this time around.
“The Volkslichts offer a lot of light in a very small package…the pan/tilt is not only extremely fast but also very accurate, the color mixing of the LED is as good as any I have seen and the dimmer curve is great — giving a very even fade from zero to full,” added Blevins. “The white LED also has as much punch as the RGB.”
Epic Production Technologies, which now has 110 Volkslicht Zooms in its inventory, provided the gear.
For more information, please visit www.glp.de.
Photo by Todd Kaplan
