The Strokes are currently touring with a color-intense rock show that reflects the energy of the band. Lighting the band for the first time, designers Troy Giddens and Chris Ragan of Intelligent Production Solutions Creative Group were given a blank canvas. The band wanted minimal front lighting and no followspots, which created a moody dark but spectacular final design: including 39 PixelLine 1044s, six PixelLine 110s, four PixelPars, 29 moving fixtures, and 12 strobes.
The 1044s were chosen for their output and pixilation. Used for effects lighting focused directly at the crowd, they create a large array of color and can be viewed from all angles without losing any density. The tight LED configuration of the 1044s ensures that the color output is true to the color source–where white is white and not a mixture of red, green and blue dots.
PixelLine 110s are the only front lights in the design and are mounted vertically to the backside of the downstage towers producing saturated color washes across the stage. Giddens used the 110s for this part of the design, so he could utilize the four-color feature RGBA (red, green, blue, amber). Amber is the most used front wash in the show. As a last minute addition to the rig, four PixelPar 90s were added as truss toners.
A PixelDrive system programmed and controlled the PixelRange fixtures. Neg Earth supplied all the lighting and fabricated the final design.
From the trussing to the custom PixelLine brackets, the end result is exactly how Giddens and Ragan had visualized it. “Neither of us have been happier with a fixture of any kind after the first use, as we have with the PixelLines and PixelDrive," says Giddens. "They have done everything we wanted and much more. We will probably use them in all our future designs in some form or another. They are also amazingly durable, which we realized after a mishap with a bottle of water. After standing the unit on end over night to let it drain and dry out–it fired up and ran like new the next day!”