NASHVILLE – For Thompson Square’s Just Feels Good tour, which features over 80 moving lights and a large configuration of HD video screens, LD Larry Foote has been using Jands’ Vista L5 console for control. Jeff Lavallee from Nashville-based lighting, rentals and production company 44 Designs also supported the tour looks. The setup includes a canopy of video screens and moving lights controlled by ArKaos MediaMaster Pro.
More From Jands (www.jands.com/vista/users):
Thompson Square consists of husband and wife, Keifer and Shawna Thompson. The group have received three fan-voted American Country Awards, a CMT Music Award, and were crowned the 2012 Academy of Country Music’s “Vocal Duo of the Year” – the first new duo to win the award in 20 years. They are now one of America’s biggest country acts, selling more than 2 million copies of their GRAMMY-nominated hit single, “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not”.
Jeff Lavallee from Nashville-based lighting, rentals and production company, 44 Designs – which holds a large fleet of Jands Vista consoles – supplied the Vista L5 to lighting designer Larry Foote for the tour.
“Jeff and I had a vision for something simple but powerful, with a different, big look – that would push the visual boundaries and be unique on the Country Music touring circuit,” says Larry. “Jeff and 44 Designs surprised me with a brand new L5 for this tour – I love the T2, which I used on last year’s Thompson Square shows, but now I’m obsessed with the L5, and especially its big screen!”
Dealing with the ever increasing use of both media and LEDs, the Vista L5’s sleek design is dominated by a stunning 21 inch High Definition Wacom display that provides a crisp, detailed image showing a huge amount of information in a flexible, clear and easy to understand way.
“One of my favorite features of the Vista system is the Timeline, as that’s where the bulk of my programming is done,” continues Larry. “Another great aspect is having multiple layouts. I have my main whole rig layout, a house rig layout, a fast programming layout (just all my fixtures in straight lines by groups), and a matrix layout. The L5’s big screen makes the job of programming using Vista even easier than before.”
Larry’s rig for this year’s enhanced Thompson Square tour is comprised of Platinum Beam 5r, Mac 301, Krypton Kr 25 and Atomic 3k fixtures. The video rig utilises PixelFlex 18mm panels on custom frames, and Ayrton Magic Panels.
“I also love the Vista’s fixture editor feature,” says Larry. “I like to go in and tweak the profiles, so that I can personalize the fixtures – for instance, giving names to macros that best suit them.”
Larry is also using the L5 to drive ArKaos Pro media servers running the new MediaMaster Pro 4 software, which output content to the HD video screens.
“We have all the Kr 25s and Magic Panels pixel-mapped through two ArKaos machines that I built specifically for this tour,” explains Larry. “We’re using a mixture of custom and found content, and the L5 is handling it all with ease.”
The L5 has an Intel Quad-Core i7-2600 (3.4GHz) processor and 8GB of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). This combination is ideal for even the biggest show, where using lots of fixtures, LEDs and media servers can place significant demands for power on the console.
The Vista range includes a choice of portable, flexible control surfaces and self-contained consoles all running the same Vista v2 software.
Jands’ award-winning Vista lighting & media control system has been embraced by leading designers, companies and venues all over the world on
a wide range of shows. Covering entertainment, education & drama, installations, corporate, events and worship, there’s a Vista system to suit all levels of user and almost any scale of show.
Recent shows featuring lighting or media control by Vista include international concert tours by Queen + Adam Lambert, Peter Gabriel, Dierks Bentley, Fall Out Boy, Bloc Party, Deftones and Little Big Town.
The Jands Vista console range and ArKaos Pro media servers hardware and software line-up will be showcased at LDI 2014, in November on the booth of exclusive North American reseller, A.C. Lighting Inc. (booth 2358).
More From ArKaos PRO: (www.arkaospro.com):
Popular husband-and-wife Country duo and reigning ACM Vocal Duo of the Year, Thompson Square, has spent this summer taking their Just Feels Good Tour across North America under a canopy of video screens and moving lights controlled by ArKaos MediaMaster Pro. The spectacular stage and lighting design was the brainchild of Jeff Lava of 44 Designs and lighting designer, Larry Foote.
44 Designs was introduced to MediaMaster Pro by A.C. Lighting, Inc. during a demo at 44 Design’s Nashville office earlier this year. 44 Designs promptly selected MediaMaster Pro to control the intricate video system on their next project.
“For Thompson Square I wanted to create something that would introduce a modern architectural design into a conventional concert venue space and present the audience with something that would look good lit or unlit,” says Jeff Lava, founder of 44 Designs. Lava instituted eighteen video panels composed of PixelFLEX Screens in metal frames which were rigged in four rows above the band and offset in depth and alignment. Massive visuals were played across these throughout the show to form the mainstay of the design.
Key to the imposing visual aspect was the treatment of the video content which Lava and Foote agreed should be treated as a ‘separate piece of art’ for each song.
“We worked closely with Keifer and Shawna Thompson to come up with a different look for each song. But with a 15-song set list and only three weeks to get it together, we were on a real time crunch,” explains Lava. “We therefore chose to collaborate with a team of video directors, editors, designers and graphic artists who, working under the 44 Designs banner, did a brilliant job in coming up with individual looks for every number, bound together by my over-all vision.”
The separate video clips were then uploaded onto two servers, built by Larry Foote himself, which were installed with ArKaos MediaMaster Pro. “We used one server as a main and one as a back up (running the same content as the main) to switch to in case of emergency,” says Foote. “The output management feature made it easy to select which group of fixtures I wanted to display the current content.”
Behind the screens Foote installed a series of Krypton KR25 incandescent matrix fixtures, each of which uses 25 individually controllable PAR30 lamps, which he was able to pixel map with MediaMaster. “These were a really cool feature which I enjoyed playing with and really added to the show’s aptitude,” he says.
Fourteen universes of DMX were in operation over all and, as all fixtures and video screens were running ArtNet, it was easy to hook everything up to the Jands Vista L5 console which controls the MediaMaster Pro.
Foote was able to run video content and effects through the PixelFLEX Screens and the Krypton KR25 fixtures to create almost kaleidoscopic effects. “Once we had the basics in place it was fun to be able to play with the different layers and content on MediaMaster’s attributes and then to split up the images and direct them to different outputs. I changed the profiles in Vista to display separate outputs as groups so I could direct particular content to different KR25 units or video screens. My KR25s were on one group, my PixelFLEX had both separate outputs for each screen and another Master Output to control all the screens at the same time. Doing it this way, I was able to use each screen as its own fixture and was able to use it for more than just video.
“In one number we used this set up and utilized YouTube footage of fans playing or singing “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not”. Different YouTube clips were direct to each screen, one by one, until all 18 were filled to resemble a bank of individual television monitors. The audio on those video clips was also run by Arkaos, so we came out of the motherboard of the servers and gave the lines to the audio guys to work their magic. The audio output was extremely easy to control and sounded really good. It was really cool seeing one of those YouTube Fans at an actual show!”
MediaMaster was not only instrumental in the creation and control of content in pre-production, but also proved invaluable on the road. “We knew we would be changing the rig a lot throughout the tour so didn’t want to have to reprogram the rig at every venue,” explains Lava. “We therefore took the ‘alpha’ file of the designers’ work and have been able to fine tune it for each show, adapting different features to suit different setups. It adds a useful – and exciting – element of live mixing to the show.
“MediaMaster made this easy to do, taking the raw material, tweaking and programming it during rehearsal and still allowing us the flexibility to introduce live mixing during the shows.”
“It even left me enough time to dance to the music during the show,” adds Foote. “Let’s face it, if I’m not enjoying the experience, then chances are the audience isn’t either. It’s all about birthing the environment of the songs to connect to the audience with, and tools like MediaMaster make this a pleasure to accomplish.”
For more information on ArKaos PRO’s range of professional level software and media servers visit www.arkaospro.com
Further information about A.C. Lighting Inc. can be found at www.aclighting.com
To arrange a demo or discuss your requirements, contact:
A.C. Lighting Inc.
001 (416) 255 9494
Or for more information and a list of international Vista users, visit
Photo Credit:
Photo taken by Stephanie Brunner, Copyright 44 Designs, Inc. 2014.
