Girls Aloud are back on the road for the first time in 11 years, with their Girls Aloud Show tour, a lively, edgy, pop-tastic collage of foot tapping hits, creatively directed by Beth Honan and lit by Peter Barnes. Lighting, video, automation and rigging equipment – including some new innovations – and crew are all supplied by PRG UK to Production North, whose unfazable Iain Whitehead is overseeing all related technical production elements for the first leg of the tour that plays UK and Irish arenas including five sold out nights at London’s O2.
PRG UK’s Account Manager Yvonne Donnelly Smith is coordinating everything, and one of the many advantages of working with a full visual production specialist like PRG is the simplicity of dealing with one company covering all visual departments, with all associated communication, logistical and economic benefits. Added to that, PRG offers proper and comprehensive worldwide support and continuity for any production.
Donnelly Smith stated, “It’s been an absolute pleasure collaborating with Iain and the creative team again on this groundbreaking tour for PRG, showcasing our newly developed RollCat tracking system alongside some of our tried and tested proprietary Icon range, and with GroundControl® running our newly developed VL3600 followspots. A team effort, beautifully realized, to create a show greater than the sum of its parts.”
Lighting & Design
Lighting Designer Peter Barnes has plenty of experience in lighting slick, glossy, hi-energy pop shows and helping capture all the nuance, drama, and dynamics unique to this performance genre and getting it radiating around the venue. He first worked with Girls Aloud in 2005, also lit the last Ten: The Hits tour in 2013 and has worked with Creative Director Honan on a variety of other projects over several years. Honan, also responsible for the tight and highly effective choreography, already had some clear ideas about how the stage should look, explained Barnes. She wanted a clean, modern space with an epic widescreen presence and a nod to fashion show aesthetics in the form of a thrust and a B-stage to get the Girls physically out amongst their fans.
Honan envisioned the two large video screens with a bold strip of light striking through the runway area, the latter translating into two spine trusses flown above the thrust. Barnes used the two 10.8-meter-wide by 7.2-meter-high onstage screens and the 30-meter-long thrust as the starting points for the production lighting design. The challenge, with this scenography in place, was in getting more overhead lighting positions.
The 25 meters of RollCat tracking truss – a PRG proprietary product manufactured by Moveket – rigged centrally, running the length of the thrust, and utilized for a hi-impact motorbike flying stunt at the start of the show’s second section meant that nothing apart from the two exiting spine trusses could be added here.
Upstage center, in the gap between the two onstage screens, are four trussing towers that continue the line of lighting positions. At the offstage edges of these two onstage screens are two more trussing towers, and these 6 architectural elements offer some excellent lighting positions for creating effects and looks as well as for the practical purpose of lighting the stage and artists.
The towers are also newly purchased by PRG, coming in 1 and 2 meter sections, and pack down into dollies for travel, which is expedient on truck space in Lighting’s three fully packed trucks. Above and upstage of the main screens each side Barnes persuaded Honan that a double array of standard trussing runs should be added to assist in lighting the 60ft wide stage as doing this just from a 10’ wide central spine would have been extremely challenging.
Both front and back rails on these trusses are used for over and under-slung lighting fixtures which accentuates the depth, adding some optical magic and giving the impression that there are many more lights up there. All these trusses are rigged with PRG’s proprietary Icon Edge multi-functional moving light fixtures, which are the workhorses of this design.
Mirroring the thrust ‘spine’ trusses in far offstage stage positions are two (left and right) trusses, also rigged with Icon Edges together with some Robe Spiider LED wash fixtures to assist in key lighting along the runway positions and for blasting out into the audience for the interactive moments.
A short advance truss in front of the end of the runway is rigged with five Vari-Lite VL3600s all running on four PRG GroundControl remote followspot systems. The VL3600 is the latest fixture now supported by the GroundControl platform. The GroundControl base stations are located stage right and operated by four of the tour’s 12 truck drivers.
GroundControl is also Lighting Director / Operator Chris Scott’s first choice for remote followspot control for several reasons including the physicality of the control ‘paddles’ which offer similar arm positions to operating a classical followspot.
All the metalwork is black or masked in keeping with the streamlined aesthetic. The floor is left relatively clear of lights apart from a row of VL3600s and an array of Solaris strobe / floods right along the back. The Icon Edges are dotted all over the trusses, up the center double towers and the outside screen framing towers, on the back array trusses, on the spine trusses above the runway and the side trusses, a total of 68 luminaires. They are the backbone of all the big production looks and are used judiciously and smartly, enabling Barnes and programmer Jake Humphries to construct a diverse range of scenes and effects that keep the pace pumping throughout the 90-minute set.
The fixture choice also included 20 Robe Spiiders for the side trusses, 22 GLP X4 LED battens on the back trusses and 16 VL3600s including the five followspots. Seventy 3-meter ACME Pixel Line LED battens are used highly effectively to create pixel-mappable vertical lines of light shooting up the back towers and along the length of the runway trusses, with a double row framing the top of the main screens and a single row running down their outer edges. These are programmed to bring another layer of fluid and dramatic kinetic movement to the action, while 18 ROXX 4-lite blinders grace the side trusses for additional audience and runway highlighting. While not a vast number of lights for a show of this stature and scale, used intelligently and judiciously, they go a long way as the lighting eye-popping moments keep coming until the final chords of the set.
Barnes and his team spent five days of concentrated pre-viz at Zeal Live in Basingstoke followed by five days of full production rehearsals on the George Lucas Stage at Elstree, where they were joined by Scott and together finessed the initial building blocks, developed the show and programmed the grandMA3 full-size console which is running in full MA3 mode.
The show is a balance of perfect key lighting, lots of dramatic effects and big sumptuous looks rich with color and movement that blends effortlessly with the video content, show narrative and impeccable choreography. In addition to lighting the Girls and their 10 dancers, there is constantly something interesting happening back of shot for the I-Mag mix.
When it comes to challenges, Barnes and Scott both echo an often-heard comment for lighting popular artists in the 2020s – as well as lighting for enthusiastic fans in a big venue, it also has to be lit so images snapped on mobile phones and posted on SoMe can also look amazing, which is a constant pressure. It also reinforces the importance of good key lighting.
It is Scott’s first time working with Barnes after being recommended for the job by Donnelly Smith at PRG where he worked full time for many years in the events department. Scott has been running in all grandMA3 mode for a couple of years now and loves the flexibility and power of features like Recipes, which are used extensively on this show. They are very straightforward to edit, change and update. The lighting control network is made up of PRG SuperNodes and Lumicore LumiNodes.
Scott is enjoying the calm and friendly tour vibes and working with “a brilliant team” including PRG Lighting Crew Chief Alex Peters, Colm Robinson who is looking after dimmers and lighting techs Dominic White and Stuart Wright. Like Scott, Lighting Crew Chief Peters is also now freelancing after working full time for PRG for 12 years, and for him the most galvanizing task is coordinating the daily logistics of getting the show in and ensuring the build runs smoothly and efficiently.
The length of the central spine means trusses must be constructed in a specific order which consumes all floorspace in an average sized arena, putting lighting ‘in front’ of the automation and video departments, requiring serious coordination so everyone can work simultaneously and without encroachment. A few shows into the tour, and the process was down to a fine art, allowing the stage to be rolled in at around midday. The central spine trusses also have to line up perfectly to be picked up and flown on the mother grid, which facilitates 112 hanging points across all departments for the largest shows on the itinerary. The Head Rigger is Zack Wade.
Automation
Automation is still on-trend for live shows and a key is not to over-use it as a vehicle for theatrical performance, and The Girls Aloud Show is a great example. Another recent PRG investment has been into substantial amounts of new Moveket automation equipment, some of which was out on this tour, including the RollCat tracking truss, all overseen on the road by Peter MacDonald.
PRG’s Mark Wade dealt with the tour’s original automation requirements and specified the system which is based around Moveket i-Motion winches – the VMS-S 125-3-30 – which is rated for up to 125kg, fits into standard 52cm trussing and is SIL3 certified for people flying. The main motorbike flying stunt happens as the Girls go into “Wake Me Up”, carefully masked by lighting and smoke, they suddenly pop up at the back of the stage on the bikes, each one picked up by 3 winches.
Positioned 5 meters apart, the four bikes are tracked 25 meters down to the end of the runway where they soft-land on the stage and the girls alight, with audiences going crazy for this WOW moment. The 12 Moveket winches are positioned in trussing in the roof with their drive units all upstage on the floor. As the travel distances allowed this to happen, it made sense to have the brains of the system fully accessible. The decision to go with winches as opposed to chain hoists was a creative one, driven by winch wires being a lot less visible. The winches are also used for flying four platforms on which the Girls start the show rising up from the floor, and again to fly the Hologauze curtain for the encore projections.
All the automation cues are run via a Moveket i-Motion Expert III console, with Barnes commenting that the front end is “very practical and user-friendly,” particularly regarding safety, where different levels of safety can be programmed into each cue stack as required, e.g. a cue for dropping in wires will not require the same levels of safety as a cue for people flying. To ensure that nothing is left to chance, as the Girls are getting into position on the bikes, two spotters onstage have eyes on everything, while others are involved with clipping them securely into their harnesses. Synchronous safety is also inbuilt into the winch drives so they all have to track as one object which keeps everything moving together. Some show cues are run manually, and others are timecode triggered from the audio track. The biggest challenge for Barnes and his team – comprising Will Gallegos and Thijs Verplaetse who came from PRG Belgium with the Moveket system – is making sure that everything is rigged and ready in the available time.
Video
The video department is headed up by Stevie Marr and includes Video Tech Izzie Everatt, who has been working full time at PRG for the last five years and in the video department – which she loves – for two and a half of those. The screens are all made up from new INFiLED products, part of another recent larger purchase of LED screen assets by PRG. The two center ones are made up from INFiLED‘s TITAN-X 8.3 mm product, and they are flanked by the two portrait I-Mag screens at 7 meters tall by 4 meters wide, built from INFiLED AR P4. The screens are crucial to both the physical scenography and the show narrative with a mix of playback content – stored on two new Pixera media servers – and I-Mag footage.
The eye-catching content brings a true 3D reality to the performance and helps maintain the pace and excitement. It was created by Neil Harris, Caspar Wain and Jos Taylor from motion design specialists, SHOP, working closely with Honan. Everatt programmed the servers during rehearsals together with PRG’s James Hancock, and now she is teching them on the road. All the playback content is timecode cued from the audio backing track. It includes extensive footage of fifth Girls Aloud member, the late Sarah Harding, who sadly passed away in 2021, leaving a lasting impact on the band and fans and triggering several emotional moments during the set.
A four-camera package of Sony HXC 300s were utilized for a fast cool-styled mix cut by Ivan Youlden using a Blackmagic Design ATEM Constellation 4 M/E switcher. Two of the cameras were positioned in the pit, fitted with wide angle lenses, and two at FOH for long shots. During the encore, a Hologauze drops in across the stage. Girls Aloud stand behind this with projections beamed onto the front from a Barco UDM 4K30 projector fitted with a UDX 9.38 90-degree (periscope) lens which nicely covers the 4 meter ultra-wide throw to the surface. The projector – teched by Mike Dorrie – pops up from a trap door to the side of one of the B stage walkways, helping to bring the spectacular show to a memorable theatrical close.
Further information from PRG: www.prg.com
Photos: By Louise Stickland
