ELEPHANT SESSIONS SHOW

We had the opportunity to talk with Gary Ebdy, also known as Lunas, production and light designer for Elephant Sessions' show at O2 Academy in Glasgow.

He started by telling us about the concept project:

At the initial concept meeting, the band had decided they didn’t want to go down the video wall route that we had used previously.  

So we knew it was going to be a lighting heavy design, but we wanted it to also have some kind of unique visual aspect.  We toyed with a few different concepts for this, eventually ending up with our design being based around an LED ’Shape’. Initially, we were only going to have the front box of LED framing the stage, but the band liked the concept so much that we developed that further into the full shape.  

We wanted to give the illusion that the shape was floating above the stage, with the band inside it. As well as encapsulating the band, the extra elements also meant that we had so many different shapes we could pick out and play with. 

We built a riser structure for the whole band which meant that from everywhere in the venue it appeared that the whole show was suspended above the venue stage. 

We revealed the shape in full midway through the first track, but then it wasn’t seen in full again until 3/4 of the way through the set.  Between those moments, there was so many different lines and shapes we could utilise that it gave each track its own visual identity.  Framing the band in all of these different ways meant that the performance space was constantly transforming.  The shape ended up almost being a performer in itself: it had its own impactful solo moments, but then also visually supported the ever evolving set. 

He also described us the challenges:

Finding a rigging solution for the shape was probably the biggest challenge. We had initially looked at making the shape out of either Martin Sceptron or even GLP X4 bars, but the rigging required to achieve this with these fixtures was going to kill the look we were going for, so we ended up using LED pixel tape. For the look to work, the sections of tape not in use had to almost disappear, so rigging had to be as low profile as possible so as not to ruin the whole aesthetic.  

From a lighting side, we only had two trusses over the stage from which to rig our lighting due to limited rigging points in the venue. So we used specific fixture placement and spacing to create a forced perspective to make it look like the whole set was on many more planes than it actually was. 

Behind every show there is a great team, in fact:

My right-hand man throughout was Adam Thayers.  He did a lot of the figuring out infrastructure and exactly how the design was going to go together in a tight timescale.  There were so many elements that had to line up for the whole thing to work and he ironed out all of those details. 

On the lighting side of things, Scott from SM Lighting couldn’t have been more on board with the concept and what we were trying to achieve.  He put in an endless amount of effort and provided us with custom rigging solutions to ensure the design ended up exactly as we wanted it, down to the finest detail. 

When I was at the stage of considering how to achieve the shape last summer, I bumped in to Tom from BLV (LED tape supplier) at a festival in Athens, and he was telling me about some bespoke LED projects they were working on and I felt this could be the answer.  So when we were both back from tour myself and Adam went and met Tom and Chris at the BLV yard and over the next few months worked on building a system and network to achieve the shape. 

We were all delighted with the end result and the many hours of planning were worth it for the show that was delivered. 

A great show with a minimal set-up full of energy!