Creative production design company, 44 Designs, has shaped Mutemath’s live visual look for most of their 15 years as a band. For the first leg of their Play Dead U.S. tour, the company complemented the band’s sounds using colour and effects from Elation Professional’s Artiste DaVinci LED moving spot luminaire.
44 Designs’ Chief Operations Officer, Clayton Thornton, explained that earlier last year the company was looking for a quality LED spot luminaire and brought the Artiste DaVinci into their shop in Nashville, Tennessee, to see how it would perform up against other fixtures in a side by side comparison. “We were blown away by it. The brightness was excellent and the beam out of it was really amazing,” he said. “The colour rendering and saturation of colour was also impressive. It has true CMY colour mixing, we love that, and it also has a nice gobo package.”
Thornton praised the award-winning luminaire for its details as well as features like powerCON TRUE1 In/Out connections that make for easier and safer power connections without having to run separate cables.
“Mutemath is a creative group who open up for creativity in design,” said Jeff Lavallee, owner and Lead Designer at 44 Designs. “The design features in the DaVinci gave us a number of options to reflect the moods and complexities of the music, whether it was a solemn number or a more upbeat tempo song.” Lavallee had at his disposal a full CMY colour mixing system (plus seven additional colours) plus a range of graphical effects from 2 gobo wheels and a 360° bi-directional animation effect wheel. The effects could then be multiplied using either of 2 rotating prisms.
There were 12 of the zoomable Elation Professional DaVinci fixtures used on the show, 4 placed on either side of the stage on custom brackets and used as side light with 4 located upstage for mid-air beam looks. Capable of powering out over 13,000 lumens, the fixtures had the power to cut through the show’s large background projection and did it while maintaining a low power draw compared to equivalent discharge-based lights.
Thornton confirms that the DaVinci’s low power consumption was another important factor in their choice – a quality, he said, that has opened up for use in a wider variety of venues. “We can use them on a theatre or club tour and just plug them into the wall socket if need be,” he said. “Our smaller clients like that and of course our larger clients love the brightness.”
Prior to the Mutemath shows, 44 Designs’ Artiste DaVinci fixtures were used on a Good Charlotte tour, as well as shows with American ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro. For Nothing But Christmas shows in December at The Creek Church in London, Kentucky, the DaVinci’s worked alongside other Elation lighting gear, including Platinum Beam 5R Pro moving heads and Sniper 2R multi-effect lights.