An Avolites Diamond 4 console was at the control centre of a dynamic, eye-catching visuals design for the Eden 2008 season on the Balearic party island of Ibiza.
UK-based lighting designer Alan King was initially asked onboard by live visual performance and digital arts specialists, Microchunk, to design lights for Pete Tong and Groove Armada's groove-tastic “Wonderland” night at the high profile club.
King has worked in Ibiza for several seasons and has been an enthusiastic Avolites user for many years. He was also involved in the specification and design of Eden's newly re-vamped house lighting rig, and instrumental in persuading them to invest in the Diamond 4. They went ahead and purchased the console to control their greatly expanded 2008 lighting and visuals installation.
“The D4 is great for running multiple club nights” states King, “There's 98 instant access buttons that can be filled with Cue Lists. For an application like Eden, which operates 7 nights a week for the 10 week season, each session can be run off the same front surface page, flipping to the playback pages to access different set ups, looks, scenes, chases, pre-set tempos, etc. as you wish.”
Other major reasons for choosing a D4 for Eden was because of its MIDI capabilities - so Tong could trigger lighting and video cues via his Ableton software - and also because the club needed a futureproof console as they intend to continue expanding and upgrading their lighting over the next 5 years. With 12 universes of DMX – 3 of which were used in 2008 - there's plenty of headroom for this to happen, and for any new lighting, digital lighting, video and other effects to be added and integrated into the D4 control platform.
Central to Eden 2008's visuals design was 2800 strings of 16 Barco MiSpheres, which were hung as a video curtain all around the central balcony of the main room. This was fed with content stored and programmed in a Pixel Addict media server, triggered by the D4 on all nights except for Tong's (which he did directly).
The lighting installation features 42 Sidious 250W and 575W Spot moving heads, plus 16 new iSolution 575 Spots, 20 x LED PARs and 4 Tritan 575 Viva Scans – all run from the D4. Analogue strobes are also slaved through the D4 together with the 2 Pangolin lasers.
The 250W Spots circle the dancefloor from the lower level while the four 575's project from the ceiling level onto the balcony floor, with the smaller heads effectively acting as short throw fill to the larger fixtures in the roof. The 575 Scans are on the lower floor around the DJ booth, used for bright and vibrant head height crowd scanning. The 12 LED PARs were used to spot all the dance podiums and the DJ booth, effectively freeing up the moving heads for ‘effects duty' during performances.
King spent 3 weeks installing the video curtain and the new lighting rig and programming the D4 at the start of the season. He adds that the D4's user-friendliness is also ideal for less experienced operators, who can learn and get into its complexities and depth quickly and efficiently.
He then had just 5 days before the season kicked off to train up a new lighting operator - Chris Goodwill. It was sound engineer Goodwill's first big lighting gig, although he had operated an Avo Pearl on a few previous occasions. By the end of the season, he was completely au fait with – and loving - the D4.