Initiated by DJ and music producer, Michael Canitrot and visual activist AV-Extended in conjunction with Credit Mutuel, Monumental Tour was a unique livestream electronic music showcase with multiple performance areas across monuments in France.
Lighting Designer, Cédric Davignon of Bordeaux-based Electron Libre Design was “delighted” to design lighting for the first digital gig of the tour, staged at the impressive Phare des Baleines (‘Lighthouse of the Whales’) on the Ile de Ré, near La Rochelle, France.
Davignon selected 10 Robe Spiiders and 13 MegaPointe moving lights to create his lighting design, which complemented large-format projections beamed on to two Ile de Ré lighthouses. The goal, Davidnon said, was to support the video mapping and reinforcement of the music and video with Spiiders located on the ground in front of the building.
Working closely with the impressive content produced by Jeremie Bellot and AV-Extended, Davignon utilised Robe Spiider’s Flower Effect to create ‘panning’ effects that picked up and accented the movement of the projected visuals. “Running the fixtures in mode six enabled some great undulating ring and propeller shapes,” he remarked.
MegaPointes were selected for their “sheer power and versatility”. With 12 positioned – six a side – on the roof of the lighthouse base building, the lighting fixtures punched through the night sky. “It’s one of the few fixtures that’s so bright you can see the beams clearly without any fog,” he commented, adding that while the mist from the sea spray provided some natural atmospheric enhancement on the evening of the event, “this was in no way guaranteed”.
An additional MegaPointe was deployed on the ground aligned with the geometric centre of the lighthouse a few meters away from the building. It shot directly up the tower illuminating the six centrally positioned windows that grace the elegant mast.
Davignon also harnessed MegaPointe’s multi-faceted prisms and the gobo beam reducer to maximize the volume of the light. This helped highlight the massive light source at the top, visible from up to 50km out to sea, and pinpointed the DJ booth that was positioned on the balcony around the top of the tower, from which Michael Canitrot mixed his set.
The LD programmed and ran the lighting using an MA Lighting grandMA2 console, and the event’s lighting equipment was supplied by Groupe AES with video delivered by the Bordeaux branch of event technology specialist, Léni.
Four more equally engaging and special Monumental Tour digital concerts are planned over the next three months, all in three equally impressive sites, with the next stop being Mont-Saint-Michel.