With each release, the guys at Lightology have gained more confidence using their MA Lighting grandMA3 console in Mode3 and this year their team has made a push to transfer across to Mode3 for as many of their projects as possible.
They say that Jessica Mauboy’s last tour was a fun show to light and a great chance to put the console through its paces. Lightology’s Shaun Cook designed the show and Aaron Thomas did the programming.
“The transition across to Mode3 has been a very positive experience and we have used the switch to mode3 as a great chance to improve our workflows,” commented Aaron. “We collaborated as a team, learning and understanding what is now possible using Mode3. The initial goal was to start by building a template show file of our frequently used fixture libraries that could now contain Recipes and all of our preferred colour info and 3D geometries. As we spent more time on the console in a live environment, we very quickly gained momentum using Mode3 and started to explore more of what was possible with Recipes and different ways we can use Dynamic Presets and Selection Grids as more than just the building blocks for our sequences.”
Aaron adds that the Selection Grids and the VizKey are at the moment two of his favourite things about using the console in Mode3.
When programming the Jessica Mauboy show, Aaron says that the music is very catchy and familiar to many people and he wanted the lighting to match that bright and cheerful energy of the upbeat songs and create an atmosphere of intimacy and restfulness for the ballads.
“The programming for each song started out by setting up some basic ideas as sequences that I could busk with to explore the ideas around what I wanted for each of the songs,” he explained. “Once those ideas were transformed into concepts I used the MA Markers plugin to continually layer in the impacts and accents I could hear in the music. In the end, some of those initial sequences ended up becoming manually triggered as part of the show and left out the timecode which helped give parts of the lighting a more organic feeling.”
The tour was the ideal opportunity for the guys to try out the Pixera mini compact media server. The operation of Pixera is simple and the combination of an intuitive user interface and small form factor makes the Pixera mini an attractive and versatile product choice for start-ups like Lightology.
“Pixera is a very portable and powerful little bit of hardware!” said Aaron. “We have been looking at the Pixera range for a while now, mainly because of their progressive approach and integration into other 3D engines like Unreal and Notch. This was a project with some creative licence and at the right time for us to work with Pixera in a live environment.
“We Integrated Pixera with Notch for the tour, media server blocks are magic! We could add simple accents to parts of a song with timecode events just as easily as we could review content for a song with the ability to make small changes without any big hassles or the need to wait for a new render! Pixera paired with Notch made the video element on this tour incredibly easy.”
Photography: RachelRachel
Programmer: Aaron Thomas (Lightology)
Design: Shaun Cook (Lightology)
Associate: Bence Sazbo (Lightology)
Systems: Kerry Paff (PRG)
Crew Chief: Paul Eaves (PRG)
Production Manager: Rob Miles
