Colour Sound Experiment, a London-based lighting and visuals rental company, is supplying lighting equipment and crew to Hurts’ current European tour with production designed by Rob Sinclair.
Colour Sound invested in 100 x new Martin VDO Sceptron 10 LED battens for the tour. Show on Hurts' current European tour with lighting supplied by Colour Sound Equipment.
Sinclair and the band’s initial inspiration for the band-in-boxes set design came from several operatic references to capture the essence of the unique ‘classic but dynamic’ look they wanted.
The addition of a set of 4-position – manually controlled - reflective louvers at the back of each cage enables sheets and shafts of light from the various mid and up-stage fixtures to be filtered through, directed, reflected and bounced around.
From there, Sinclair started adding lighting fixtures.
Starting with the set that defines the stage space, the four cages are 8 feet high and built on 8-by-10-foot deep riser decks, 3 feet off the stage.
In the roof of each band cage are four 2-meter runs of Sceptron (2 conjoined strips each) so 32 fixtures in total, with the other 54 Sceptrons aligned along the front of the cage riser in continuous lines. They are all fitted with the large, white, rounded diffusers to fill as much airspace as possible. These are set 150 mm apart, resembling a neon fence.
The Sceptrons – using the internal effects and programmed sequences via the lighting console – are the main aesthetic feature of the show.
In the air are three trusses – front, mid and rear. On the mid truss are 7 x Robe MMX Spots plus eight Source Four Profiles for band keys. The back truss features another 8 x MMX Spots and the reversible backdrop, which can be hung one way for a brown look and reversed to give a silver effect.
The backdrop was sourced from EventServ Drapage in Dublin. Light from these MMXs do a lot of work above the set cages interacting with the louvers. On the front truss are another 7 x Source Four profiles and some 8-lite blinders for the audience.
On the floor are six Robe LEDWash 600s, two on each side in the downstage positions for Hurts and one on each side in the mid-downstage area, shooting across the band risers.
Far upstage right is a row of 6 x Robe BMFL Spots on the floor and blinders for blasting through the set. The BMFLs are used to produce big, mega-bright blocks of expressionist-style light, which can be further varied via the different louver positions.
Upstage 4 x Source Fours tubes without lenses are used to silhouette the band in their riser cages for the first two numbers of the set, and later on past them into the audience.
Thirteen atomic strobes are scattered around, with two either side of stage, five on the top deck of the risers facing forward and four under the risers firing through the Sceptron ‘fence.'
