MANCHESTER, UK – For Manchester band Elbow, show designer Cate Carter needed to design a short, six-date tour of UK arenas, with no production rehearsal. Carter chose this moment to migrate to a new operating system, a grandMA 2. She also tried out a new LED wash light, the Clay Paky A.Leda.
More details from Clay Paky: (http://www.claypaky.it):
MANCHESTER, UK – For Manchester band Elbow, show designer Cate Carter needed to design a short, six-date tour of UK arenas, with no production rehearsal.
She explained, “By definition I needed time to have an intricate show pre-programmed on a desk powerful enough to run a complex structure of cues and give me the time and space to be objective: More than anything I wanted time to look at what I was doing and how that affected the way I called the follow spots, the Kinesys movement cues, and how the lighting and video sat together in the show.” A taxing self-imposed brief, yet Carter chose this moment to migrate to a new operating system, a grandMA2.
“I’d started to see the grandMA2 more and more on the festival circuit and always had it in the back of my mind to get some training and try it out. Truth is I hadn’t been a big user of the original grandMA so I waited for the right opportunity.”
She had three days of training at Ambersphere, and then seven days of programming with support from Glen Johnson at Lite Alternative.
“When I’d first looked at the desk I thought, ‘Ooh that looks really complicated,’ but … it was much easier than expected. The training was spot on and I’m really glad I made the change.”
As if this wasn’t enough, Carter also adapted her lighting design. “Originally I had been looking at a more open, transparent rear LED screen, but we needed higher definition for the content; that in turn meant I wanted a brighter punchier wash instrument behind it to penetrate the density of LED screen structure.”
Phil Norfolk asked her to look at the new Clay Paky A.Leda. “The 19-cell K10 version proved ideal. I had two demands really: I wanted a wash light with good color and zoom; and I wanted to be able to run some unusual effects through the screen during the show. There is lots of variety available with the various makes of dish faced LED wash lights, but the A.Leda gave something I needed: the ability to control individual cells. Considering their position in my design I didn’t need the streaming video capability, but being able to address each cell directly from the grandMA 2 proved ideal.”
Seven days of preparation for seven days of tour proved intense, “but I had already learned enough to allow me to operate and program in the way to which I am accustomed by the time I left,” said Carter. “This desk does so many different things that I haven’t even begun to contend with yet, but I will take those up as a when the opportunity arises. You don’t have to learn every feature immediately; the fact it does what I am accustomed to and has potential for much more is intriguing.”
