The transformative power of lighting design springs forth from many wells: color, movement, brightness, shadows… the list goes on. For Mike Castle one of the deepest and most mysterious sources of lighting’s sway over audiences begins with angles. “I love experimenting with unusual angles of light,” he says when describing his work. “I find a lot of magic in that.” Castle has been working this magic with considerable wizardry for red hot indie hit makers Hippo Campus on the band’s current 40-date North American FLOOD tour, which kicked off this month in Nashville, and concludes May 14 in Vancouver.
Embracing the five-piece band with multi-levels of light from myriad directions, he is creating a deeply textured labyrinth that provides a fertile space to support their evocative performance. Shifting light angles, he changes the entire mood on stage, adding new dimensions, and then seamlessly taking them away with ease.
Given the nature of Castle’s space shaping design, it comes as no surprise that when looking at his rig before the show starts, one can see that it is dominated by vertically oriented battens — or more specifically in this case by 24 CHAUVET Professional COLORado PXL Curve 12 units, supplied by Tom Gorman and the Legacy Production Group.
“The PXL Bars are the show,” said Castle. “When we first started discussions on production for this tour, we worked with Tom Gorman to try to get something that could play on the tour theme and title: FLOOD. The wave-like effect from the PXL Bars are the perfect element to emphasize and coordinate with what the band members are doing on stage. There are many calm moments in the set where a handful of bars are just gently waving. As a designer, being able to do that with individual pixel cells is unreal.”
Describing himself as “a big fan of side lighting,” Castle often placed horizontal battens across the stage in the past. With this show, however, he wanted to try something different, so he oriented his COLORado PXL Curves vertically.
“The layout of the bars coupled with the band’s physical setup on stage offers a lot of different focusing options, where I can generally take any tower of PXL bars and point it at any member of the band. A horizontal orientation just wouldn’t offer that kind of freedom,” he explained. “The vertical bars also offer a more practical aspect, where people can walk between the towers without having to really step over anything. It is essential to the rest of our production team and artists that we can get things on and off stage without having fixtures in the way.”
Running his PXL fixtures in 179 channel mode, Castle is creating a wide array of different scenes, often using only a few pixels from each bar with a wide zoom, while stilling filling out a lot of space. “One of my favorite things about these fixtures is that they provide the viewer with something that, at first glance, looks like a standard batten, but then, as the show progresses, the audience is surprised in the best possible way,” he said. “After shows, I get a lot of questions from people, even those outside our industry, asking me all about the battens’ effects.”
Emblematic of the looks Castle is creating are the ones that support the song “Boys,” where the PXL bars go back and forth between a wide zoom static backlit scene, to narrow beams tilting in unison and strobing. “It’s definitely one of the more jaw-dropping moments in the set,” said Castle “Another really special one is for the song ‘Where To Now,’ where I use a short range tilt on each pixel to create a cool wiggle effect, and some color sweeps that just seem to fit the music and performance. There’s also ‘Brand New,’ where I’m doing syncopated dimming effects on narrow beams with a pretty wide tilt effect. It ends up looking like a mirror ball effect, but absolutely huge.”
The list of memorable, special looks in this show extends far beyond these three moments. Indeed, they seem endless at times, which is precisely what happens when you work the magic of angled lighting.
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