Hayden James

ROADSKILLS

Hayden James

Photo Credits: Brayden Smith & Jordan Munns

With design and creatives by David Fairless, the staging for Hayden James’ latest tour is quite remarkable.

The June 2019 release of Hayden James’ debut album Between Us provided a platform for David to produce an entirely new show to tour around the world.

Since David’s last show design for the artist, he has capitalised on some of the latest in lighting technology, using ROE Strip Lighting and Green Hippo Media Servers in his design. “It’s an amazing platform to be able to create a design around one singular artist on stage,” he added.

The new show design uses simple depth perception that creates a sense of movement from the audience’s perspective. From any angle of the room, the audience is experiencing a unique version of the show.

The design doesn’t rely on the entirety of the square shape throughout the performance, but rather a rich programming of fluid video content that uses portions of the ROE Strip Lighting at a time.

The Hippo Portamus controls the strips over Art-Net from the MA Lighting grandMA2 lighting console and is the war horse in this set up. The Hippo is then responsible for delivering video and colour blocking content to each of the squares.

David is able to control each linear section, as well as the ROE Strip’s double pixel line in the squares, as an RGB fixture but with the colour grading of an LED screen. This allows him to manipulate the squares in different ways, outside of a traditional fade and strobe, which produces multiple mind-bending looks.

In addition to the layered squares, David has incorporated a simple 1.5m squared ROE LED screen in the centre of the rig that gives the squares an infinite appearance with certain content.

Having a ROE LED wall allows for blocks of bright coloured light unlike what any standard lighting fixture can provide. This effect is paired with the artist’s live performance to demonstrate a live relationship between audio and visual technologies.

“The show has been designed to be entirely scalable to fill the Main Stage at Splendour In The Grass one week, to more intimate club performances the next,” explained David.

“Regardless of the size of stage, no single effect or look is sacrificed when bumping into different venues around the world, delivering a consistent show at every date.”

David’s vision for the show was really looking for solid corners, something that a lot of video products on the market don’t provide.

Novatech supplied Colourblind with the ROE Strip for the massive Australian run of shows to kick off the tour, as well as providing a flyable rig to take this design worldwide. There is an A Rig, which consists of the largest square being 4400mm and smallest 1500mm as well as a B Rig which is also flyable and consists of a 300mm and 3300mm square.

David’s lighting rig complements the square design by framing them with lights as well as using four angled floor runs into Hayden thus leading the audience’s attention back to the squares and Hayden on stage.

The rig consisted of 12 Claypaky Sharpy, eight Martin MAC Viper, 12 GLP X4, 12 Sunstrips, and 15 GLP JDC-1 68 channel mode.

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