Aktuelle News & Schlagzeilen

Jack Thomas lights Bayside’s anniversary shows with Chauvet

Jack Thomas serves as the lighting designer on Bayside’s current North American “Errors” tour. The band is appearing two different nights at each venue to cover the vast catalog they have assembled over the past two and a half decades. “I programmed this show with Bayside to be very precise with cue to cue transitions so each moment of every song has its own specific fingerprint”, explains Thomas. “Doing so keeps the energy fresh and exciting.”

His “fingerprints” provide an ideal accompaniment to the emotionally powerful music on the New York punk rockers’ 25th anniversary tour. Calling forth a variety of color blends, special light angles, and a touch of geometric patterns courtesy of his Chauvet Professional Epix Bars, Thomas aims to reflect the personality of each song.

Helping him achieve his vision is a collection of Chauvet’s Rogue Outcast 1 BeamWashes, which like the Epix fixtures were supplied by JDI Productions. “Cody Johnson and the team at JDI were extremely helpful”, says Thomas. “It is important for me on this tour to have the right mix of fixtures in a rig that is easy to travel with.”

Thomas framed his Rogue fixtures across the stage in groups of three. “We have three beam wash each on the floor, stage left and right, as well as three on each riser behind decorative bandstand stage elements”, he details. “These are flanked by four pipes with two Epix Bars stacked vertically on each.”

He leans heavily on color changes to reflect the personalities of each song, often going beyond the customary no-more-than-two-colors-at-a-time rule. “In this show, I’m finding that adding a tertiary color set to the stage incorporates an otherwise missing layer of depth”, he says. “It can be used to convey action and motion separation from the static looks.”

The color mixing prowess of his Rogue Outcast 1 BeamWashes has been essential, he adds, not only in helping him create color combos, but also in covering the stage with monochromatic palettes. Also powerful are his ever-changing light angles (aided by the Rogue units’ zoom range of 3.9° to 55.3°), and the effects he’s creating with the fixture’s outer ring of LEDs.

Dramatic downlighting and layered looks of beams and washes are giving Thomas’ design an added sense of depth as are his silhouettes and gobo effects. And then there is his use of dark space: “To me, dark space is all about contrast”, he explains. “Light is boring without dark space. Cutting through and separating the two gives more dynamic looks overall.”

(Photos: Shane Ouellette)

www.chauvetprofessional.com

© 1999 - 2025 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories