PITTSBURGH — “Rock ‘n’ Roll Train” is the first track on AC/DC’s Black Ice album, and the set for the band’s first world tour in eight years was designed with a locomotive theme in mind. “The five curved trusses represent the roof beams of a railway station,” said Dave Hill, co-lighting designer, of the 100-foot-wide arches custom made for the tour, used to form a curved array of gear including Coemar Infinity Wash XLs.
The rig, preprogrammed at lighting supplier Upstaging Inc., includes 59 sections of Upstaging’s Hud Truss, and the Infinitys, along with most of the other moving lights, are permanently mounted in the 10-foot sections of truss. Custom hinges maintain the exact curve at each locale.
“For this series of concerts,” Hill said, “I used the Coemar Infinity Wash XL lights for their power and ability to create energy without moving or strobing the lights.” He uses 16 Infinity Wash XLs on each of the first four trusses, with another 12 on the floor “for more beams and energy.”
The Coemar fixtures have an effects wheel for creating texture and aerial effects with wash light, a new CMY and RGB color mix system and a narrow to wide zoom ranges (5-84 degrees total) in one unit.
The fixtures also offer electronically adjustable lamp power from 700 watts to 1450 watts and a beam shaper rotating and indexing at 360 degrees, according to Coemar’s distributor, Inner Circle Distribution (ICD), and lens options (including a zoom kit 6-36 degrees for extra brightness, as well as PC pens for an ACL type beam) are available.
Hill said that very early on, he and fellow lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe had decided that this show “should be a little less hectic than the last one, and the effects wheel within the Infinity allows me to do that. The split rotating beam,” he added, “creates energy just with the beam movement.”
A grandMA console, operated by the band's lighting director, Cosmo Wilson, controls the Coemar fixtures and the rest of the rig, including nine 12-light Maxibrutes, 36 Vari*Lite VL3000 spots, 48 Clay Paky Alpha beam 300 washes, two Coemar, Lycian 1271 truss spots, 24 Elation Impression LEDs, 1 Zap Technology 4.5 Big Lites, 8 Zap Technology 3.0 Little Big Lites, 63 Martin Stage Bars, seven Solaris T Flash 85,000-watt strobes, 10 Atomic strobes, 24 six-lamp PAR 64 bars, 12 4-way Molefays and 45 Color Kinetics ColorBlasts.
This marks the first time that Wilson has toured with the grandMA. A main system and backup are on hand to control the large lighting package required for the set. “I’ve used a lot of different consoles, but I started using the grandMA on some one-off dates for other artists and have done a lot of corporate shows with it,” Wilson said. “This is my first chance to tour with it," Wilson added, noting that "that's when you really get to learn it."
"Generally, I take notes during the show and try to make it better the next day," he added. "But since I’m an on-the-fly guy, with the grandMA, it’s so easy to grab things and change them in the middle of the show. Everything is at your fingertips.” Ron Schilling served as crew chief.
For more information, please visit www.icd-usa.com and www.actlighting.com.
