U.K. Designers Evoke the Past with Pastels
Pop culture’s love affair with nostalgia continues. Launched in 2009 at Henley-on-Thames, England, The Rewind Festival boasts what is perhaps the largest lineup of Reagan/Thatcher era artists this side of the US Festival.
Attendance for the outdoor event has swelled to well over 20,000 per day. The response has been so great, in fact, that Rewind has expanded its scope to include two new festival/campsite locations in Scotland, at Scone Palace at Perth, which occurred this past July, and BlueScope Field, Kembla Grange, Australia, scheduled for October 2011.
Hip to be Square
The family-friendly Rewind festival may pander to the Live-Aid generation’s peace-loving outdoors-types, but it doesn’t shove a political message down concertgoers’ throats. It simply beckons attendees to dabble in nostalgia, take the kids on a short vacation, don a fake mullet (or two), dust off their flashy 1980s apparel (if it still fits), and sleep under the stars.
Lighting designer Martin Nicholas, of M.j.N. Design, Ltd., and video content programmer/operator Miguel Ribeiro, who’ve headed up Rewind’s visual team for two years running, ensure that festival attendees party like it’s 1989 through the power of their imagery — and a small arsenal of vintage lighting equipment. Nicholas and Ribeiro create, and recreate anew, memories tethered to the decade that gave birth to MTV, big hair, loud fashion and charmingly dodgy taste.
True Colors
Rewind’s 1980s music icons, three-hit wonders and techno pop geniuses include Kim Wilde, Bananarama, Billy Ocean, ABC, UB40, Go West, Tony Hadley (of Spandau Ballet fame), Cutting Crew, Toyah, China Crisis and many others. “People like Rick Astley, Howard Jones, The Human League — we’ve all known each other for years,” says Tony Hadley, who headlined Rewind Scotland. “We have a rapport and, because of this, the show has a certain flow and familiarity built into it. It’s really a celebration of the music.”
Nicholas taps numerous spots and washes, secured to seven lighting trusses of various sizes, ranging from 25 feet to 55 feet in length, helping to flood the stage with bold colors and provide each performance with its own distinctive visual characteristics. Vari*Lite spots and washes provide the requisite 1980s pastel tones during nighttime performances.
“I try to camp it up a bit,” says Nicholas, who has 40 years of experience as a lighting and set designer for the theater and rock ‘n’ roll caravans alike. “I’ve got these ‘smarties:’ various skittles in the sky that do a brilliant job of adding color. The ‘80s were very glitzy, and the colors were lavender, turquoise and pink. I definitely play into that. I tend to run a lot of the lights off the front truss so they can be seen on the video screen. That gives the festival a disco, retro feel.”
For added impact, Nicholas relies on 67 well-placed two-cell Molefays spanning the imposing 70-foot Supernova stage arch. It’s a look Nicholas calls one of his lighting design “signatures.”
“The Moles twinkle over three separate trusses, giving you a very big look,” says Nicholas. “They’re lovely little units as well: you can bang them around, and you can hide them all over the scaffolding. The thing about Moles is, when they’re off you don’t notice them. But turn the on and you’ve got an incredible effect.”
Everybody’s Busking for the Weekend
Because Rewind hosts 12 acts per day, Nicholas chooses a user-friendly lighting console that controls mix, fade and color change, as well as other aspects of his moving lights rig. “At the moment, I’m running an Avolites Expert Touch,” says Nicholas. “For Rewind, you have a desk that has flexibility and allows you to break out of a kind of uniformity among the performances.”
For his part, Ribeiro, a former PRG product specialist, uses Mbox EXtreme, driven by a Virtuoso DX desk. (Ribeiro intended use the PRG V676 control console for Rewind England, due to its quick response and fast processing. However, a compatibility issue that couldn’t be immediately resolved prevented him from successfully transferring files from Mbox to it.)
The Virtuoso’s capabilities allow Ribeiro to interact — even collaborate — with Nicholas’ lighting design in the moment. “It’s very easy to jump cues and re-organize things with the setup I’m using: it’s great for busking,” adds Ribeiro. “If Martin goes pink with the lighting, I might use turquoise on my videos to complement it.”
Ribeiro converts a DMX signal to Art-Net protocol and delivers the signal from FOH to the stage. A high-speed Ethernet cable, an RJ-45, links Ribeiro’s laptop to Mbox. “There are two cables: one from the desk to the media center controlling it, which is pretty much a one-way signal,” Ribeiro says. “Then another is a remote control for Mbox, which is a two-way signal that allows me to switch Mbox on and off, restart an application and run diagnostics, all in the background while the program is running. Even the real hard-core stuff, like changing the type of signal Mbox is putting out, whether it is DVI, SDI, VDA, I can do remotely on the fly without compromising the integrity of the image.”
Mbox also helps Ribeiro smoothly transition between visuals of different resolutions, a common occurrence at Rewind. “The main screen is only about 250 x 125 pixels, which is really low resolution,” says Ribeiro. “Hi-def clips need to be scaled down, but I can adjust resolution as I crossfade.”
Who Can it Be Now?
Ribeiro says he feeds off the energy of the crowd to make quick decisions about complementing the musical goings-on. Spending days assembling files for the Rewind festival isn’t an option for the visual team: both Nicholas and Ribeiro are often tasked with operating on the fly. “I don’t see the setlist until the night before the event,” says Ribeiro. “If you were to plan for each act, you’d have to prepare hundreds of clips. I have to rely on my own instincts and personal library, which I have been adding to over the years.”
“I usually have some images pre-cued for certain songs, but in some cases I end up abandoning these,” Ribeiro continues. “If the audience is in a dance mood, I might go for something a bit more flashy. If the audience is feeling a bit more nostalgic, singing along to songs, then I might choose something more subdued. So, part of my job is to take in feedback from the audience. I have to be on my toes and really feel what’s happening in the moment at the event.”
Though Ribeiro utilizes standard Mbox visuals (often with distortion effects), 95 percent of his video content, he says, is original footage or files from an image library such as Glass Illusions, by Artbeats. Glass Illusions’ extensive, defused visuals proved a good fit with the rapid succession of diverse artists gracing the Rewind main stage.
“Last year, Tony Hadley was singing ‘True,’ from Spandau Ballet, and I was after something blue and dreamy,” says Ribeiro. “The clip I chose features glimmering lights with a bluish hue. That’s a good example of how modern clips can fit perfectly well with a song that’s 25 or 30 years old. Similarly, when Heaven 17 played ‘Temptation,’ the band had turned the song into a dance track with a strong bass beat. I have a collection of shapes in red, orange and black that flash quickly on the screen. So, you have an old song that is being updated, and I was hoping to create an almost modern dance club feel with strobe-like effects.”
Just the Two of Us
Despite often having to think on their feet, Nicholas and Ribeiro never step on the other’s toes. Most of their interaction and communication during the performances is unspoken. “Martin keeps a series of GLP Impressions behind the video screen,” says Ribeiro. “Video and lighting blend so well that sometimes you can’t tell what you’re seeing. I remember when Tony Hadley was performing Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold,’ I was flashing glittering shapes on the screens — yellow- and gold-colored shapes, hovering and spinning. At one point, Martin decided to use yellow lighting with the GLPs. My gold shapes were shining and the GLPs were throwing beams. It was like a piece of 3-D imagery, and I think it helped to complement the song.”
“I’m a lighting designer, and as far as I’m concerned, screens take things away from the lighting,” says Nicholas. “However, Miguel is a lighting designer in its truest sense: he’s very good at incorporating visuals with the lights. He doesn’t try to overpower you. A lot of guys want to pump the video screen so it’s bleeding your eyeballs out. He realizes that there’s a compromise that has to happen here and that there’s a bigger picture, literally and figuratively.”
Enjoy the Silence
Far from the main stage, a 26-foot-high circus tent engulfs a Karaoke stage and an on-site silent disco — one of the main attractions of the Rewind fest. Dancing queens (and kings), wearing wireless headphones, sashay into the early hours of the morning with their choice of one of two audio channels being pumped out by live DJs. The silent disco does away with the traditional speaker system and provides a private party experience for concertgoers, long after Rewind’s main stage antics are done for the day.
While the look of the entire festival attempts to capture a 1980s vibe, it’s in the “oasis”-like design of the silent disco that Nicholas really lets his tech-geek flag fly. Two box trusses, positioned on either end of the tent and featuring tree-shaped truss towers of varying heights (from 13 feet to 23 feet) add to the tropical nightclub environment and support a dozen 25-year-old Golden Scans, a dozen High End Dataflashes, four programmable Nova-Flowers and eight Nova-Flower strobes, which are all running to a Jands Event console.
“I can’t use every light I want to on the main stage, so that’s why the silent disco is so important to this event,” says Nicholas. “To use 50-odd Golden Scans, which are pretty delicate, on the main stage would be intense. I don’t want my techs running ‘round tearing new orifices for themselves, trying to make sure that the Scans are working properly. But for the disco it’s a different thing. I think it’s appropriate to use retro stuff there. It adds to the atmosphere and authenticity.”
With attractions like classic 1980s music and a trendy silent disco, it’s no wonder that Rewind is transforming itself into a global phenomenon. Slowly but surely it appears the promoters are phasing out the proper name in favor of the franchise-friendly title, “Rewind.”
“That gives the promoters the opportunity to stage Rewinds for the ‘60s, ‘70s, and even ‘90s,” says Nicolas. “With more and more countries being added to the festival list, who knows? There may, yet, be a Rewind festival on every continent on Earth — and for every decade of the 20th Century.”
Crew
Main Stage
Lighting Designer: Martin Nicholas
Video Content Programmer/operator: Miguel Ribeiro
Crew Boss: Paul Makin
Dimmers/Power/FOH Tech: Simon Swift
Head Moving Light Tech: Becky Hughes
Lighting Tech: Mark (Cluffy) Clough
Video Screen Tech: Ben Hornshaw
Silent Disco/Karaoke Stage
Crew Boss: Nigel (Skippey) Monk
Board Opp: Dave (Lights) Beazley
Lighting Tech/Vintage Lighting Supplier: Twan Tan
Gear
Main Stage:
1 Vari*Lite Virtuoso DX console
1 Avolites Pearl Expert Touch
1 PRG Mbox EXtreme Media Server
8 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots
20 Vari*Lite VL2000 Wash fixtures
22 Vari*Lite VL2500 Spots
16 Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash fixtures
18 Vari*Lite VL3500FX Wash fixtures
67 1300W Molequartz two-light Molefays
72 GLP Impression Spot One
4 Novalight Nova-Flowers
1 Martin LC LED screen (50sq.m.)
Avolites dimmers
Silent Disco:
1 Jands Event 60/120 lighting console
12 Clay Paky Golden Scans
8 Novalight Nova-Flower Strobes
12 High End Systems Dataflash fixtures
4 Novalight Nova-Flowers
12 James Thomas PixelPar 90s
8 4-Lamp AC BARs
4 Design Ltd. Star Cloth Panels
