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Joe Beardsmore flows on Tom Odell tour with Chauvet and Colour Sound Experiment

Lighting designer Joe Beardsmore, of Phosphor, created the visual setting for Tom Odell’s recent “Black Friday Tour”. Busking his show on a ChamSys MagicQ 250M Stadium console, Beardsmore moved in sync with the Brit Award winning singer-songwriter and his seven-piece band, blending shadows and brightness, silhouettes, and distinctive light angles to underscore the narrative of this roughly 90-minute show.

Helping him accomplish this was a collection of Chauvet Professional Colorado PXL Curve 12, Color Strike M and Maverick Storm 4 Profile fixtures, which, like the rest of the kit, were supplied by Colour Sound Experiment, with the exception of two ChamSys consoles that were supplied by Phosphor.

Beardsmore positioned 32 of his PXL Curve 12 fixtures around the top of his flared truss. He then arranged 28 additional units on the floor. “The induvial control of tilt and zoom was essential to the look of the show”, says Beardsmore. “I use the PXLs a lot as multiple units - one-third of the pixels wide washing the drape, one-third doing a stage wash, and one-third out to the audience as blinders or strobes. This has allowed me to avoid having a wash layer in my flown rig, which is only beams spots and strobes.”

The use of nuanced lighting angles and fixture combinations from his PXL units and fourteen Color Strike M motorized strobe-washes helped Beardsmore weave his way through light and darkness. “Dark and negative space were really important to my vision for this design”, he explains. “Both musically and creatively, this show had massive points as well as small intimate moments. It’s nice that at times I can have hundreds of lights on for a song, but at others, a song can be just as impactful with a single spotlight or a floor wash creating a shadow.”

Gobos are another tool Beardsmore is using to accent the emotional flow of his client’s music. “There were a lot of very wide gobos straight out to frame the band members in a breakup or dot gobo silhouettes”, he says. “This works really well but also, at times, it can be blinding to the audience. So, I had individual faders for each floor light. I tried to balance the effect with the blinding of the audience, a bit of very slow gobo rotate was also really helpful here to move the blinding effect through the audience.”

Contributing to the gobo effects deployed by Beardsmore was the Maverick Storm 4 Profile. He had the high-output (60,000 lumens) fixture with him at FOH, sitting on a tipped case, using it to project a custom gobo welcoming fans to the “Black Friday Tour”. This image was projected onto a kabuki for roughly forty seconds. “The Storm 4 only needs to be about 15-percent to be bright enough to ghost the gobo onto the drape from FOH”, says Beardsmore, who also used the fixture to project a custom moon gobo for a sing alongside a shadow.

Throughout the show, the LD added an extra dimension to the stage by altering light levels and angles, while relying minimally on front light. He estimates that Tom Odell was front lit about three-quarters of the time when he was singing, and the band members were lit like that only about a tenth of the time. Instead, the musicians were most often lit from above or the floor, when they weren’t being silhouetted from the drapes being lit behind them.

On the subject of silhouetting, Beardsmore says: “It was probably the number one thing in importance of the design. In this case connection and emotion could be created with light much more easily with backlight and silhouettes since vibrancy of color is so powerful. The design had a 34 m long flared truss which started covered up in black, but early in the show its kabuki dropped to a flat cream backdrop - but to me it was never cream, it was whatever I wanted it to be. Its block color was in any color I decided.”

“Ian at Enlightened in Bristol did an excellent job sourcing the drapes”, he adds. “All the team at Colour Sound - Alex, Heidi, and Tiago in the office, plus Simon and Fletch, my hard-working lampies and kabuki techs as well as Tyler at ChamSys and Chris Hale at Chauvet.” Summing up his experience on the tour, Beardsmore notes, “I have learned that I just have go with the flow and play the lighting console like an instrument alongside the band”.

(Photos: Ciara McMullan)

www.chauvetprofessional.com

www.phosphor-tech.com

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