Some Light Shows

ProfPanglos wrote: I saw TD in '86 and they had a really great light show, but hands-down the best light show I've seen is the 2017 (and now 2018!) Jean-Michel Jarre "Electronica" tour.  Unbelievable, cutting-edge tech, darn-near holographic, and crystal clear.  Truly amazing.

Hi,

I could not make it to Seattle to see this ... I can't drive at night and did not have someone to go with to enjoy it.

I love the lighting a lot in many of these things, and the pictures of these shows look very nice indeed and I can only hope that it was more than just the pictures. As I said before, the one thing in theater and film that hurts is the "repetition" of the same thing and the "value" of it all has a tendency to come down heavily ... so while it is nearly impossible and likely too expensive to do an effect only once, the likelyhood in a rock show is to keep it simple and repeat it with different colors.

From a theatrical stand point, you have x-number of light instruments, and the stage is divided into sections ... 3 in the front, 3 in the middle and 3 in the back and then various floods or other specially aimed lights for various reasons. And the stage lighting for each "scene" can be defined in different colors, gels, and instruments, as you can have two sets for one of the sections, even 3 if you have enough money, and sometimes the set eats up some space in the back and you have more instruments for another part of the stage.

The rock design, as you can see, is bizarre to say the least, since other than the center piece for the "star" or lead player, the rest of the band is not even addressed properly, or defined in the lighting at all. Some bands are good at this ... YES, did define their members, PF did not ... Nick Mason rarely got a light and Rick Wright did not want special lights to distract him, is what it looks like. Or another example, there are 197 instruments lighting up Mick Jagger, and only 3 on the bass player ... who's he anyway? See what I mean?

Thus, things like some of the pictures of what some bands have done, becomes just a nice looking, far out this and that ... and it is repeated in different colors, which to me is like changing the background scrim on Judy Garland to blue, green, yellow of black ... and you end up going ... that's called "lighting"?

But the new ideas and future of lighting might include holograms and other ideas, although you will never see these in 95% of all the rock bands that come through your town ... you can really only catch these in the big city when they can do the "big show" and try to blow you away. This was, specially, the problem with Pink Floyd, after DSOTM ... they could only do the really big places, so the cost of the production could at the least, be slightly met, although the story goes they lost money, but they re-couped it in sales instead. 99.9% of the bands out there, do not have that luck at all!

Believe it or not, the best shows, are the ones that ... just take you away, and even "no lights" are better than anything else, because the quality of it all just takes you away better than a blue light, or green, or golden glow ... on that person, and you know that this is priceless.