EvenLED - Solving An Impossible Challenge
Rob Halliday
It was just over a year ago that we were issued with one
of those impossible lighting challenges that everyone
involved in theatre gets from time to time. It came at a
model showing for the new UK tour of the Disney/Cameron
Mackintosh musical Mary Poppins. Compared to the two
earlier productions, the new design takes a quite
different approach to some of the show's principal
elements - the house and nursery of the Banks family -
while retaining other familiar parts, noticeably an
upstage back-projection cloth used both on its own as a
cyclorama and as a backing to a number of painted cloths
further downstage. As before, the cyc lighting would
have to perform an enormous range of tricks - colour
from monochromatic greys to saturated primaries,
graduations, wipes, highlighting particular areas in
particular colours to bring the best out of some of the
painted colourful downstage cloths....
The impossible part? That there was just 56cm (about 22
inches) between the upstage BP and the upstage storage
position for the house, so a tiny throw - maybe just 30cm
(11 inches) once you factored in the depth of any lighting
equipment.
This was going to be tough!
The two previous productions had been challenging in this
regard, but not quite so challenging. At London's Prince
Edward Theatre, the house stored in a central bay in the
stage's back wall; the cyc and BP then flew in to conceal
it, with about 75-80cm available for lighting and filled by
lighting designer Howard Harrison with a 9wide x 5high grid
of LDDE SpectraConnecT5 four-colour
fluorescent battens mounted into a white cloth so as to
form their own bounce cloth. Seven DHA Digital Light Curtains at the top between
the BP and bounce gave a little more variation. It very
nearly worked, but needed a little more throw, or a few
more rows of lights, for the battens to 'join up' more
cleanly vertically: examined closely, the naked BP had
stripes.
The extra space at New York's New Amsterdam allowed a
switch to the technique the lighting designer had first
used on Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands - positioning a
bounce cloth upstage of the BP, then lighting between
the bounce and BP using Clay Paky's CP400 colour mixing floodlight. The show
has 38 of these, eighteen in a floor trough, ten per
side on booms, plus the DLCs along the top. With about a
metre between the bounce cloth and the BP there is
plenty of space to get a coverage, the lights' soft
edges allowing graduations up or wipes across the BP to
function pretty well. The drawback was the amount of
careful focussing and focus maintenance needed: slightly
too hot on either the BP or the bounce was very obvious,
and the location of the booms made them quite vulnerable
to knocks from the large amount of scenery stored in the
wings.
But with even less depth - and no space to hide lights in
the floor - the hunt for something new to light the tour
cyc began.
For some time, I'd been wondering whether a grid of LEDs
might light a BP: at LDI2005, I had been intrigued by the
Komaden Image Mesh, wondering what would
happen if you put a cloth in front of it. The Komaden
people were hard to track down, but in mid-2007 I
followed this up thanks to Barco, Essential Lighting and a session with the
modular MiStrip and MiTRIX products. Conceptually
interesting... but not the right product. They are
designed to be looked at from a distance, and so the
LEDs are relatively narrow-angle. Put them behind a
cloth in the space we had available, and you just saw
dots. Adding diffusion in front of the LEDs didn't help;
for this to work, we'd either have to have incredibly
tightly packed sources (which we probably couldn't
afford), or find a wider-angle LED fixture.
Not that we were in any way wedded to LEDs - indeed, the
use of LEDs as a light source on a big white cloth that the
audience looked directly at was of some concern because of
the lousy fade behaviour of most LEDs: the big, very
visible 'switch' when they go from off to 1%, then a steppy
fade all the way up to full. Some of this is doubtless down
to the resolution of DMX, but playing with the Element Labs VersaTubes as an option
showed that video control has much the same problem. In
applications where you're just changing images or
colours its less obvious; the different fades on the
coloured LEDs hide the steppiness. But in New York we'd
used Pulsar ChromaBattens inside the legs of
the set, and the off-on step and steppy fades were big
problems, particularly when coming out of a blackout.
Pulsar took our comments very seriously, and my
co-associate lighting designer for the Poppins
tour, Oliver Fenwick, and I had a very entertaining
afternoon at their base watching them swap components
around to get smoother fades and a softer start in their
battens - changes that I believe are now standard in their
products. Unfortunately, though now smooth, their battens
still didn't give us a wide enough beam.
I don't quite remember when I became aware of a product
called EvenLED. I have a feeling that I read a
press release about it on-line - an LED fixture for
lighting cycs even with limited space - and mentally
filed it away. I was out of the country for PLASA 2007,
so it wasn't until last October that I actually got to
see the product in action at the London office of its
distributor, MA Lighting. Immediately, though, I knew
the impossible lighting challenge had been solved.
If you've been to any recent lighting trade shows, chances
are you've both already seen EvenLED, and already dismissed
it as another 'me too' low-res video product. To look at,
it is a white, one metre-square, 71mm deep tile containing
a 4x4 grid of three-colour 6w LED sources. Each tile
contains two rigging points at the top and two rigging
slots at the bottom, allowing columns of tiles to be
constructed. Each column hangs from a mounting rail that
has two hook clamps but then a single hanging point for the
EvenLED column, and adjacent columns are loosely linked by
metal clips; a wall of tiles can therefore adjust itself to
cope with any imperfections in how it is hung. Power and
data daisy-chain through the tiles; tiles can be connected
using a true DMX through, so that all tiles respond to the
same address, or an intelligent link that automatically
addresses tiles giving individual control of each colour in
each pixel in each tile. There are no fans, so no noise.
And if a tile fails mid-column? Well, each tile is actually
an outer frame with an inner module housing all of the
electronics and LEDs; just release the clips, hinge that
module back, lift it out and replace it....
But here are the remarkable things: put EvenLED just
25cm-30cm behind a plastic BP-material screen (the exact
distance will depend on the type of screen you have) and
you get bright, even coverage with no hot-spots or visible
sources; the white metalwork of the fixture means that it
acts as its own bounce cloth. Despite being just
three-colour sources, you can get an enormous range of
colours - from greys and pale correction blues through to
proper reds and deep blues. And it fades properly: you have
sixteen bit control of each LED giving smooth intensity
changes, and while the off-on point is quite 'sharp' it
definitely fades rather than snapping on or off. It is the
first LED product I've seen where I've thought yes, maybe
this LED stuff is actually the future....
MA had just a 3x2 grid in their demo room, but it was
compelling, whether you wanted an even wash of colour, a
colour dissolve, a wipe, a graduation, a snap (very
snappy!) colour change, or a rainbow, or a sunrise, or
much, much more. It was doing everything we needed it to
do, and clearly was designed to do exactly this. That was
the net result of four and a half years of development by
the incredibly inventive team at Brother, Brother & Sons in Denmark,
whose priorities for smooth fading, wide colour range
and precise colour matching across units were clearly in
sync with our own.
My only problem was that if I stood back I could perceive -
not see, just somehow feel - a slight flicker or pulse.
Some of the other people in the room could understand what
I was saying, others claimed not to have any awareness of
it, but if magnified to an enormous cyc and affecting even
some of the audience it would be a problem. But MA was
great, taking the problem back to the Brothers, who did
more work to cure the problem even to my clearly
over-sensitive eyes!
A test at the Prince Edward proved that it would work with
the actual cloths, which would be moving from the London
production to the tour. We wanted it. We needed quite a lot
of it - a 13x8 grid, so 104 tiles plus spares. But given
its qualities, EvenLED is, unsurprisingly, expensive. At my
nagging, MA and the Brothers worked to get the costs down
to a point when we could nearly afford it - then came the
dramatic shift in the Euro-Pound exchange rate and all
those savings vanished overnight (something you don't
really find covered in lighting textbooks!) MA pitched that
we should factor in the amount of energy we'd save compared
to traditional cyc lighting techniques (104 tiles at full
white draws just under 63A; in practice, we never get
anywhere near full) - a good and valid point, but one that
would be hard to do the accounting for on tour. Ultimately
the rig went out to quote: of the three rental companies
offering prices one declined to quote for the EvenLED, one
quoted a very high price. The third, White Light, got the gig, with the
producers accepting that some extra money would have to
be found to pay for the 'miracle' product that would
allow all of the set and the cyc lighting to fit into
the space available.
Which just left the issues of packaging/rigging, and
control. Packaging wise, the show's production electrician,
Ian Moulds, and I arranged to have flightcases made sized
both to stack across a standard truck and to each hold
eight tiles, so that during the fit-up thirteen boxes would
be lined up, thirteen tiles hung, the truss flown out a
little, the next thirteen hung and so on, and that's the
cyc lighting not only rigged but focussed. Truss and motors
by Unusual with programmed control by
Silicon Scenery were required because the
13x8 array would come in at just over a tonne - and
because the whole array had to sit just 30cm behind the
BP and fly out - sometimes at speeds of over
1metre/second - to allow scenery to clear beneath it.
Control was quite a challenge. It seemed silly not to have
individual control of each pixel, but that was 1664 pixels
in three colours with sixteen bit control, so 9984 control
'things' - or 20 universes of DMX (EvenLED has an eight bit
control mode, but the fades are noticeably less good and
having fought so hard for the product to have it less than
perfect seemed silly). We'd dealt with the London LDDE
battens just as a grid of channel numbers, but that clearly
wasn't going to work here.
My initial thought was to use a media server just for the
cyc. But talking to Nigel Sadler at Green Hippo revealed a problem I hadn't
even considered: media servers don't do sixteen bit
fades, since video is ten bit data. They could probably
interpolate the rest, but that would be new software....
In any case, I became less sure that a media server was the
way to go. If we wanted graduated level across the cyc,
someone would have to make that as an image, we'd have to
quit the server, upload the image, re-start the server, try
the image then repeat until the result was satisfactory.
What we really needed was a way of dealing with the pixels
in a sensible way directly, ideally from within the
lighting control running the rest of the rig to avoid
having multiple interlinked control systems and backups.
MA Lighting's grandMA console can do exactly this,
allowing you to define a bitmap grid mapped to real
lighting fixtures. Once you've done this you can drop
bitmap images onto the grid, you can apply simple
animations to those images (scrolling, rotating or
looping images), you can write text onto the grid (which
has proved hugely popular for birthday greetings on the
tour....), or you can directly manipulate the grid by
selecting it on the touch screen then using the
intensity and colour mixing controls or - and this is my
favourite thing of all - literally 'etch-a-sketching'
onto the cyc; the diffusion of the BP gives a result
resembling airbrushing. The console, by adding MA's NSP
processors, also has the capacity to deal with the 36
universes the show now consumes - 26 for the cyc (for
ease of rigging, two DMX lines per column, four tiles
per line), 10 for the rest of the rig.
So this is the route we chose, it also giving us the added
comfort that both console and LED wall were supplied by one
manufacturer, so that they could solve any problems that
might occur without any between-manufacturer
finger-pointing.
In fact, there were no problems. The wall was hung in
Plymouth, our first venue. We turned it
on. It just worked - no line-up, no focussing, no
messing around. Any slight trepidation we might have had
about it being bright enough was immediately banished -
it is remarkably bright. It's an amazing effect used
without a cloth in front of it, though that was only for
fun rather than for this show. Behind the BP it has been
just remarkable, doing anything you might want a sky to
do, and more: amongst other things not ultimately used
in the show, it does really nice white clouds moving
across a blue sky. But the best moment came when
lighting another cloth downstage of the cyc. This is a
painted garden with a lot of colour in it, and making it
look good has always been hard. Here I'd had a theory
that if we took a picture of the cloth and dropped it
onto the EvenLED, it would get about the right colours
in about the right places - and that's exactly what
happened, the cloth immediately looking the best it's
ever looked, with the ability to then pull the whole
thing warmer or cooler or emphasise different sections,
making the sky bluer to go with the line '....and a
bluer sky.'
It's been rare for a lighting product to exceed the
expectations I have for it, but EvenLED has done so, quite
comprehensively, even if you do discover an occasional
limitation (for example, you can't do a tiny white dot in
the middle of a blue sky; it goes pink because of the
overlap from adjacent blue LEDs). I'd imagine it would be
really fantastic for permanent lighting rigs - opera houses
and the like - where they could both take advantage of its
amazing ability to light cloths and account for the savings
both in electricity and time (no more burnt out gel, no
more lamps to replace) compared to traditional cyc lighting
techniques.
It'll doubtless be at a trade show near you in the next few
months; make sure you don't just lump it with video, but
take a good, long, proper look at this newest, most
intriguing of theatrical fixtures. Be warned, though: once
bitten, it's hard to go back to lighting a cyc any other
way....
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