If others see that this is both beautiful and that it works, then they just might be willing to try it themselves. Such is the hope of the lighting and visuals designer Andi Watson and the planet-friendly band, Radiohead. Lead singer Thom Yorke is a member of the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth, and the other band members and crew join his interest in taking the steps necessary, however inconvenient, to tread as lightly as possible on a fragile planet. On tour, the band and crew use, and re-use, a motley assortment of non-disposable dishes, cups and utensils and go to the trouble of recycling as much of their trash as possible.
And in 2003, the band started assessing the “carbon footprint” of its tours. The band went to the trouble of meticulously analyzing its carbon footprint again in 2006. For their 2008 In Rainbows tour, they used those benchmarks to reduce their carbon footprint further.
Fans watching the spectacle of a touring show might imagine that the dramatic visuals account for a major portion of the energy consumed, and a whopping portion of the tour’s overall carbon footprint. But that’s because their attention is drawn to the stage, not to nightly stampede of tens of thousands of other fans drawn to each show, and the little things, like the cool-looking T-shirts that everybody was buying, that really add up.
Richard Young, Radiohead’s production manager and co-author of Ecological Footprint & Carbon Audit of Radiohead North American Tours, 2003 & 2006, found that it’s actually the fans who account for between 87 and 93 percent of the Radiohead tour’s environmental impact.
The solution, of course, isn’t to tell the fans to stay home. Without fans, there’s no show, and with no show, there’s no reason for 70,000 to 250,000 people to descend upon one location on a school night.
So Radiohead took a closer look at the 7 to 13 percent of the footprint they could control directly. Surely lighting would loom large for the total footprint contributed directly by the band’s performance. Wrong again. Lighting takes a back seat to fuels burned by vehicles to carry the band, crew and gear from venue to venue. Those fuels account for about 20 to 44 percent of the carbon footprint generated directly by the band.
So it seems Radiohead couldn’t dramatically diminish the overall size of its carbon footprint, even if the band played in the dark. Why, then, should the band make the effort to seek out alternatives to traditional lighting fixtures? What kind of real dent could it make?
A small one, admittedly, when compared with the bigger picture. But when you look at the energy requirements of the lighting rig itself, the energy savings of an entirely bulb-free show can indeed be significant, and the numbers speak for themselves.
The lighting design for Radiohead’s 2003 tour used conventional lamps, gels, discharge lamps and one LED display. It pulled 600 amps 3-phase for a total of 1800 amps. The lighting design for this year’s In Rainbows tour, using 100 percent LED lighting, is pulling 140 amps 3-phase for a total of 420 amps. They’re using two-thirds less power than they did before. Two-thirds less power. That’s huge.
To get there, Watson first considered everything from discharge lamps to candles. But each of these alternatives carried with them compromises that made their gains negligible. For example, compact fluorescents, though efficient, contain mercury and other harmful materials that can become a long-term hazard in landfills.
“After doing research, I decided that the only way to do that would be to use the most efficient light source available, which is LED and to use that exclusively and solely,” Watson said.
To design a show using 100 percent LED light fixtures, however, you need more than the fixtures themselves. You need to throw out all the preconceived templates and lighting designs that worked with conventional fixtures, and come up with some ideas that are radically new. “This is where Andi’s genius came in,” Young said.
To compare an LED lighting system to the traditional light rigs of the last 50 to 100 years is to compare apples to oranges. Yes, they both emit light, but their composition, structure and flavors are completely different. Stripped of the comforts of conventional lighting rig effects, in fact, Watson almost couldn’t have avoided coming up with a series of radically new looks.
Aesthetically speaking, however, this show, which could not have been achieved without the latest in LED lighting technology and the software used to control it, is delivering. Watson describes the tour’s look as a 3D video display with a very low resolution, with 12 pixels horizontally, 288 pixels vertically and six panels deep.
There are tubes and lights all mapped in 3D space onto which 3D objects can be sliced into 2D video and played back in the 3D space on the stage.
When an object is passed through the space, each observer will perceive that object differently, because they will view it from a different position and perspective. A person needs only to move two feet and the arrangement of the tubes will be different, thus projecting a new total image. “It’s a very subjective user experience,” Watson said.
If a new aesthetic is required for an all-LED lighting design, that design can, in turn, lead to new advances in LED gear. Young and Watson spent hours conversing with each other and with manufacturers about the new directions they were taking, and i-Pix, High End Systems/Catalyst, Element Labs, Pulsar, Architainment, Nocturne Productions, Scenographic, Specialz and Negearth were just some of the companies involved in the larger dialogue.
Watson presented his first design for the all-LED tour to Young in Nov. 2007, and the two worked with Catalyst software designer, Richard Bleasdale and i-Pix’s Chris Ewington to push both the software and LED hardware technologies to the next stage in their evolutionary process.
i-Pix’s BB 4s had just gone into production in January. In March, Ewington met with Young and Radiohead lighting crew chief Andy Beller to talk about the next fixture in development, the BB 7. The petal-shaped fixture is a seven-cell homogenized 10° RGB lightsource, which has since been used by tours for The Killers and other bands.
Watson said he thought the fixture would be what he wanted, and i-Pix priced the units for Young, which led to an order for 206 of the fixtures, enough for two rigs, to be built from scratch and completed in just over five weeks. The i-Pix team, which had sourced the BB 4 LEDs from Lamina Ceramics in New York, came up with the first batch of BB 7s with four days to spare.
“Andi put his trust in us before, when he integrated PixelLines into his groundbreaking show for Radiohead back in 2003,” Ewington said. “He relied on us in 2005, and in 2008 he really upped the ante.”
Although much has been made of the energy-efficient aspects of LED lighting, and of the brightness of the fixtures, their ability to shine with less heat output has advantages that go beyond a lower bill for air conditioning in the hot summer months. As with the BB 7s used with the Killers, they can be deployed in close proximity to the performers without causing discomfort to the band members.
In Watson’s view, that’s not the only advantage for making the LED switch, however. In terms of achieving just the right color, “they’re absolutely fantastic,” he said. “It’s very hard to get a moving light rig with over a hundred lights in it with lights that are all the same color. There’s a big color shift with incandescent color fixtures. But this is achievable with LEDs. They are the color you want them to be.”
When asked about the “steppiness” inherent in a lot of LED dimming technology, Watson said that, indeed, it was present, but minimal. It’s that first jump from “off” to “on” that still needs the attention of programmers. Beyond that, he said, the lights behave very well. Watson’s message to his fellow lighting designers is that if it makes sense to use LEDs in the design you have created, then he whole-heartedly recommends them because the technology has advanced enough to be very usable.
Radiohead’s In Rainbows tour may not have a single incandescent bulb. But it has more than 65,000 individual LED components lighting up the stage in an artistic array of melodic kinetic energy. It is pulling a third of the power of a conventional rig while emitting minimal heat on the performers. By stepping up with their own creative energies, the band and its designer have taken a big step toward a more energy-efficient future for the live event and production industry.
