Theis Wermuth of lighting design company Create This has been handling the live visuals for Scarlet Pleasure since 2015.
The Danish musical trio’s popularity is on the rise with the band recently playing its largest concerts to date, a pair of one-off shows that Wermuth lit using an automated lighting rig that included striking effects from rows of Elation Professional ACL 360 Bar moving battens.
Scarlet Pleasure has toured with success for the last 2 years, selling out clubs and smaller live music venues across Denmark. The 2 recent shows – 1 at the Forum Black Box in Copenhagen on 23 March 2018 and the other at the Scandinavian Congress Center in Aarhus the following night – marked a milestone for the band. “Both shows took place in larger venues and both were sold out,” Wermuth said. “They showed how popular the band has become and we’re looking forward to a series of upcoming summer festival dates.”
Wermuth previously used Elation Professional’s colour-changing ACL 360 Bar on Scarlet Pleasure’s 2017 winter tour as a sidelight effect and liked the depth of look they added to the tour’s smaller clubs. “I wanted to achieve the same look on the 2 one-off shows and their larger stages,” the designer said. “We had three horizontal lines of fixtures on each side of the stage running from downstage to upstage – 60 total – and used them as washing side light and to create different beam looks. They were a very visible part of the look of the show.”
Wermuth, who said the band will come with occasional lighting input but generally trusts him to create what he thinks works best, could get very different looks out of the Elation Professional ACL 360 Bars from both horizontal and vertical alignments. “I created waves of light from each side of the stage, rolling waves of beams that gave a lot of movement to the set,” Wermuth explained. “I also used the fixture’s individual pixel control for pixel separation looks, for example where only the outer LEDs on each fixture are lit.”
For another special look, the LD pointed the Elation Professional ACL 360 Bars toward the back of the band’s lead singer with LED video forming a backdrop. The set-up featured 3 large upstage LED screens that often gave off a substantial amount of light but the narrow-beam LED bar luminaire with its seven 15W RGBW LEDs cut through them well, according to the LD. Lighting gear for the 2 special shows, which also included discharge and LED moving heads as well as strobe lights, was supplied through Nordic Rentals.