Taiwanese rock superstars Mayday were on the road in Asia with a large production including 56 axes of Kinesys automation – provided by rental and technical production specialist B’IN Live, who are headquartered in Taiwan with bases in China and Hong Kong.
The epic lighting, visual and set design was created by Leroy Bennet and Seven Designs from Los Angeles – well known for their imagination and style as well as interesting and provocative designs.
B’IN Live, formed in 2014 with the amalgamation of six high level technical specialist companies into a super-production company, provided full technical infrastructures and services, incorporating sound, lighting, video, rigging, automation, set and scenic plus staging and power.
Technical Director and Production Manager for this Just Rock It tour was B’IN Live’s Jeffrey Soon and he co-ordinated all the shows on the current tour which runs until October.
Kinesys Elevation drives were used to move a number of lighting and video elements which includes a 25m wide by 6m tall 12mm LED screen weighing 5 tonnes which moves up and down on eight, 1 tonne Liftket motors being driven by Kinesys Elevation vari-speed hoist controllers.
The screen was on the stage floor at the start of the show and then lifted up after the first number and into a number of other positions throughout the show.
Forty Elevation controllers alone were used to move 10 lighting pods in the roof over the stage. Each of which was loaded with nine Magic Panel 5 x 5 LED matrix moving lights. These pods were each suspended on four Elevation controlled half-tonne Liftkets – they needed to be able to rotate on all axes to achieve the variation of dynamic looks that Leroy wanted.
The final eight Kinesys Elevations were used on four straight trusses also above the stage, which also move up and down. Each of these was loaded with 26 Magic Blade type fixtures – these accounted for just a small percentage of a total of nearly 600 Magic Blade style fixtures on the whole lighting plot!
There were also 14 sets of LED sticks on pods that were moved by a winch system – the requirements for these are a lot more straightforward than the Kinesys moves – and with all these animated elements, the whole architecture of the performance space can be radically changed.
There were around 30 automation cues in the set. These were initially programmed onto a Kinesys K2 system by B’IN Live’s Connie Cheng during the design and rehearsal stage and the showfile was then transferred to a Kinesys Vector computer for the tour, where Connie is also the operator.
B’IN Live now has over 50 Elevation units, 38 one tonne and 15 half-tonne Liftkets and Kinesys K2 and Vector control systems. For this tour they also sub-hired 10 Elevation controllers from Impact Hong Kong.
Kinesys was selected as the most flexible and stable system to provide the extensive automation elements on the tour: “I researched very extensively before choosing Kinesys,” explained Jeffrey, “because it was a serious amount of money, but it has paid off in every respect. There is now a big interest in Asia related to introducing more complex automation into shows.”