SYCAMORE, IL — There’s nothing unusual about Upstaging Lighting flying their touring light systems while prepping them. But Upstaging recently flew ACDC’s current touring structure in their warehouse. This required 71 motors to lift five 100-foot-wide arched trusses that formed a curved array of lights using custom hinges and 59 sections of Upstaging’s Hud Truss, each 10 feet long, where most of the moving lights are permanently mounted. Upstaging gave lighting designers Patrick Woodroffe and Dave Hill their facility to preprogram the touring show and ensure that the custom-manufactured hinges and all the lighting involved with the rig came together and worked without a hitch.
“Sometimes the best laid plans for a tour cannot foresee difficulties until the rig is actually set up and tweaked,” said Ron Shilling, crew chief. “With the amazing facility they have here, we were able to make sure that the first load in would go as fast as all the others on the road.”
Hill took advantage of the ESP visualizer system in Upstaging’s visualization suite to focus all of his lights ahead of time while a touring crew of eight electricians erected the rig. Within two days Hill was up and running at 100 percent on the real rig hanging right outside the control room studio.
“There’s no better place I’d rather be to program something of this size. I don’t have to battle house lights or other peoples work time to get my cues done,” Hill said.
The gear list for ACDC’s tour rig includes:
2 grandMA lighting consoles
26 Clay Paky Alpha Beam 300 Wash fixtures
120 Coemar Infinity Wash XLs
45 Color Kinetics color blasts
24 Elation Impression LED fixtures
4 Lycian 1271 truss spots
63 Martin Stage Bar 54s
36 Vari*Lite VL3000 Spots
11 Zap Technology Big Lite 4.5
12 Zap Technology Little Big Lite 3.0
24 Six lamp PAR 64 bars
9 12-Lite PAR 56 Mole Fays
12 4-Lite Moles Fays
10 Atomic strobes
7 Solaris T Flash 85,000-watt strobes
84 Hoists
59 10’ sections of Hud truss
For more information, please visit www.upstaging.com.
