The 1975 headline Glastonbury with largest deployment ever of GLP JDC2 IP
Choosing the Glastonbury Festival for their only live performance of the year, Friday headline band The 1975 relied heavily on their long-standing production designer Tobias Rylander and his team, to bring something special out of the iconic Pyramid stage by way of high-octane visual impact.
Rylander, who has worked with the band for the past 15 years, designing “pretty much every live show they’ve ever done”, is noted for his ability to use video as a lighting tool. But for his ‘one-off’ Glastonbury design, thanks to GLP’s next generation JDC2 IP hybrid, he realised he could also convert lighting into powerful striations of video, bathing the band’s loyal fans in rich colour imagery. He was able to do this by deploying 211 of the super-bright fixtures—the biggest single consignment of JDC2 IP ever.
“We more or less framed the whole stage with JDC2 and impression X5 Bars—along each side, top and bottom, upstage / downstage, on the floor, stage edge and flown,” he said. “X5 Bars were also used on the downstage edge for footlights around the famous treadmill track, as well as around the video floor thrust. He also had the benefit of interfacing with further JDC2s on the delay towers, part of the generic house rig supplied by Neg Earth.
The process—from beginning to end—had been a joy, he added. After GLP’s Mark Ravenhill had assisted with the sourcing and testing phase, he made sure techs were on hand to support production rehearsals, ensuring fixtures could be executed as required, using precisely mapped NDI to all 211 JDC2 IP.
But compressing the various visual shapes and forms for which the creative team is noted into a Pyramid geometric was not without its challenges. “The Pyramid stage is not as big as people think,” noted Tobias. “Our shows and architectural alleys have traditionally been the shape of a square frame and ‘box’. I really had to twist and turn things around to fit the ‘square into a triangle’. But the shape and aesthetic lent themselves perfectly.”
The production designer also paid generous credit to his team. “Michael [Straun] and Darren [Purves], who are both lighting designers and programmers, were vital in figuring out the signal paths and mapping the NDI. Darren programmed all the lights and video, while Michael also took care of lighting for camera which is important with the BBC broadcast.” Another team member, Viktor Rudlöv made content specifically for the JDC2. “Many of the band’s fans were captivated by how words and text were displayed to maintain the show’s flow”, Rylander confirmed.
Darren Purves chose his programming modes for maximum effect. He said, “We opted to use the JDC2’s in Mode 3; this offered us a balance of functionality, with segmented control of the plate and strobe, as well as maximum control of the NDI functions, whilst also keeping the DMX footprint and parameter count at a reasonable level.We chose to use the ‘Flex’ option for the NDI cues. The X5 Bars were in Mode 5, giving us full control over the individual pixels—which was so important.”
Reviewing the success of this visual choreography across 100 memorable minutes of the set, Tobias Rylander reflected, “We have always loved to use bitmaps over both strobes and pixel bars—so to get our hands on a strobe and washlight combined, such as the JDC2 IP, with all the brightness and resolution—where we could use lighting as video—was amazing. But most exciting was to use the JDC2 as our main audience / blinder lights … enabling us to spread video content as light, back to the audience up the hill. The NDI enabled us to spread our heavy video content in colours and textures around the audience.”
The designer already had wide experience of using the impression X5 Bar 1000s. “These do everything from light curtains, tilt and wave effects to receive bitmap and video content using pixel mapping from the servers. We are really happy with the colour quality when putting video through them … and the brightness is also impressive.” As for the JDC2, this was the production designer’s first time out “and it certainly won’t be the last,” he promised. “We used the NDI tech extensively … and I love it!”
As for other support, Liteup MD, Marc Callaghan was lighting crew chief, Luke Hornbuckle was his #2 and project manager, while Ed Lawlor was video crew chief. Other support was provided by Matthew Powell of GLP UK and Koen Buys of GLP Germany. Stated Callaghan: “The support we received from GLP was incredible in implementing this new technology. Matthew Powell, in particular, was a key part of the team.”
