Wanting to get back to a bigger lighting look for country music star Luke Bryan’s current “Kill the Lights” tour, lighting designer Justin Kitchenman of FadeUp Design Group created a spectacular upstage wall of lighting effects using 100 Elation Professional ACL 360i™ narrow-beam LED fixtures.
“We chose the ACL 360i after a shootout with other similar fixtures,” Kitchenman explained. “We felt the beam was a bit more defined, performance was comparable, and the price of the fixture allowed us to get the amount of fixtures we desired without blowing up our lighting budget.”
Each compact single-beam ACL 360i light houses a single 60W RGBW LED and projects a narrow 4° beam. With the ability to rotate continuously 360-degrees, the large matrix of beam fixtures makes for a creative and eye-catching show. In Kitchenman’s design, the ACL 360i fixtures are mounted to the back of a video wall that is comprised of (10) 1m wide by 5m high columns. Each column is on an automated system that tracks side to side with full rotation capabilities and has 10 ACL 360is mounted to the back of it.
Kitchenman, who is in his fifth year with the country music star and also serves as co-production designer along with Pete Healey, uses the ACL 360i fixtures in a variety of configurations. “We have looks where it’s a ‘full wall’ with 100 ACL 360i’s in a matrix of light,” he says. “We use them in alternating columns of video and ACL 360i’s, and we have looks where we have gaps in the video columns and the ACL 360i’s are focused through those gaps.”
Luke Bryan’s 2015 “Kick the Dust Up” tour utilized Elation’s high-impact white light Cuepix Blinders™ and Kitchenman is using them again on the current tour. “We use both the Cuepix Blinder WW2 and the Cuepix Blinder WW4 and have them placed on every truss throughout the rig.” Housing 2 and 4 long-life 100W warm white 3,200K COB LEDs respectively, they give a bright, high-density output that mimics the look of an incandescent source. “It gives us the classic look of the 2-lite and 4-lite bangers but with a fraction of the power requirements,” he states. Kitchenman uses 24 of the WW2 version and 16 of the WW4 version in the rig.
Lighting and video gear supply for the “Kill the Lights” tour is by Nashville-based Elite Multimedia Productions, who has been a partner with Luke Bryan since day one of his career. “They have always bent over backwards to provide world class support and service to us no matter the time of day or where on the planet we happen to be,” Kitchenman says. “Elite Multimedia has always been an intricate part of our design and production process. They are often tasked with figuring out how we are going to do it, make it fit in a truck, or get on and off the stage in a timely manner.” Referring to the hard working lighting crew, he finishes by stating, “We have the best lighting crew I have ever had the pleasure being around. These guys have been a cohesive unit for the last four years and operate like a band of brothers.”
Crew Chief: Chris Hummel
Dimmer/ System Tech: Brian Palmer
Dimmer/ Lighting Tech: Curtis “Lucky” Anthony
Lighting Tech: Kurt Rentchler
Lighting Tech: Chris Gilliam
Lighting Tech: Derek “Magnum” LaFrance
Elite Multimedia: Tom Wilson, Monty Raines, Jason “Cannonball” Jenkins
Photos: Todd Kaplan
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