“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations,” the great filmmaker Orson Welles once observed. He had a point. You don’t win an Academy Award and three Grammy Awards for nothing. Our creative juices do seem to flow more powerfully when confronted with the challenge of overcoming limitations. The team at Onedot proved this point in bold and beautiful fashion earlier this summer, when designing the lighting rig for Fuego Fuego, Canada’s largest Latin Music festival.
Held at Montreal’s Parc Olympique, the two-day event featured an impressive list of stars, including Maluma and Rauw Alejandro. The Onedot team’s goal was to put together a rig that was versatile enough to express the style of each artist. To do so, they had to summon their creative powers to overcome the limitations posed by their stage. “The stage brought a good deal of challenges regarding limited rigging loads, rigging trims and wind bracing,” said Jean-Sebastien Guilmette of Onedot. “With a total trim height of 28′, we had to be very conscious of every inch of the stage, and needed to ensure that small details were taken into account.”
Original thinking helped Guilmette and his team (Creative Director Jean-Sébastien Guilmette, and Lighting Director Louis Xavier Bonneau) come up with innovations that defied the limitations of their stage. A good example could be seen in their 42′ wide upstage video wall, which they arranged in three horizontal strips. “Regarding the video wall — in festival conditions, the challenge is to always accommodate the needs of a maximum number of different artists,” said Guilmette. “Almost every festival inevitably ends up with a full backwall. What we aimed to offer with this design was a versatile surface for content that would not limit the touring acts, but that also provided a creative touch.”
The Onedot team also devised a way to use side lighting to mask the stage’s hydraulics. “The hydraulics always show up in festival photos, and they are not very appealing visually,” said Guilmette. “The ladders with the side lighting obstructed the view of the hydraulics.” With space on the rig at a premium, the design team wanted to include powerful features that had a good output to size ratio, as well as those that could perform many functions. This led the to the CHAUVET Professional Color STRIKE M.
“The Color-Strike M is one of our go-to multi-use fixtures for festivals,” said Guilmette. “We use it as color wash and a powerful strobe, in addition to relying on it for creating eye-candy pixel effects. Of course, being an IP fixture, makes it well-suited for outdoor use.” Taking advantage of the Color STRIKE M’s versatility, the Onedot design team positioned the motorized strobe throughout their rig, using it to accent intense passionate points by covering the stage in bold white light one moment, then evoking a range of different moods with rich color washes the next. Additionally, a line of Color STRIKE M units lining the downstage rim played off against pyro effects to create memorable visuals throughout the show.
Some of the artists brought their own LDs to the festival, while others were lit by the Onedot team. “The whole team has a lot of experience on scaffold and mobile stages. Over the years we developed a good workflow and streamed lined specialty in designing large scale project effectively,” said Guilmette, who noted that this rig design proved to be so successful that it was used the following weekend for the L’Appel Montréal festival, which was headlined by the band Half-moon run.
A rig that brilliantly transfers from one festival to the next? Yes. Once creativity is unleashed to overcome limitations, there is no limit to how it can be used.
Further information from CHAUVET Professional: www.chauvetprofessional.com
