VIENNA, Austria — An 85-square-meter screen is part of Baz Halpin’s signature look for the Queen + Paul Rodgers The Cosmos Rocks tour, but so is the way the screen and the set move about. That’s accomplished with a 48-way Kinesys automation system with Vector control, operated by Barry Branford. In all, the show has about 30 automation cues. The screen was designed by Mark Fisher at Stufish and fabricated by Brilliant Stages for the U.K. and European legs of tour, with lighting supplied by Bandit Lites. It is made from Barco O-Lite frames — a solid section in the center and asymmetrically populated frames radiating outwards — and 304 ACL bulbs.
The screen is 17 meters wide and five meters tall, weighs seven metric tons. On the road, it is suspended by 24 half-tonne Lodestar motors with Kinesys Elevation 1+ drive units. The top half of the screen gets lifted by 12 motors and 12 more are attached to steel stingers passing through the centers of the bottom panels, picking up from the bases of the frames.
Seven upstage/downstage fingers serve as the main lighting truss. These fingers all move and are rigged on a total of 18 1 tonne Lodestars with Kinesys drive units. The center three fingers are hinged at the downstage edges, and the finger at the center has two hinges and four motors. The two flanking it have one hinge and three motors and the other four fingers all have two motors each.
Upstage of the fingers is a “Syncrolite truss” rigged on four 1 tonne Liftket motors with Kinesys Elevation 1+ drives. These truss sections support seven 5K Syncrolite units, eight Martin Professional Atomic 3000 strobes and 10 Martin MAC 2000 Wash moving lights.
A large mirror ball is suspended over the B stage at the end of the main stage thrust, hung on two Prostar motors, also on the Kinesys system. The ball is attached to a solid bar with one motor and its centrally hung rotator on another, allowing the rotation to start on cue.
Branford has used Kinesys on several previous tours including Katie Melua, The Darkness, Led Zeppelin, the Foo Fighters and others, and said, “It’s a great system which is becoming ever more popular as people realize its full potential.”
For more information, please visit www.kinesys.co.uk.
