Red Hot Chili Peppers
2006
Products: Versa TUBE
Designer: Grier Govorko
Lighting Designer: Scott Holthaus

The largest display of Element Labs™ Versa® TUBEs ever assembled is touring the world on the Red Hot Chili Peppers™ Stadium Arcadium tour. They form a wall behind the band and then extend from the front of the stage all the way out to the front-of-house mixer. The ceiling is covered with Versa TUBEs flat out over the audience, giving nearly every seat in the house an astonishing visual experience.

Video designer Grier Govorko put together this outrageously innovative array that comprises a total of 720 TUBEs, 660 of them the new 2-meter size.

Using the Versa TUBEs on the Peppers™ tour has allowed me as a designer to take advantage of their relative ease of setup and lack of weight to extend 100 over an audience, he says. This was something that I'd dreamed of doing before but I never had a product able to achieve it.

I'm very happy with the inherent diffusion within the TUBEs, Govorko adds. The soft covering allows for an image to be a little less contrasty than is typical of most LED products, which is something that I like for a soft look, particularly when seen in relation to a typical LED screen running IMAG.

Control system designer Stuart White of Control Freak wrote custom servers to allow Govorko and lighting designer Scott Holthaus have control of all its parameters in real time through the grandMA lighting console. Video director George Elizando is the backstage caretaker of the system. The custom media server I wrote for the Apple G5 Quad Processor supports the entire TUBE system with specific layers dedicated to the various TUBE walls, White explains. The server has five layers, dual sources, each with an A/B bus plus T-bar, along with an effect engine on each bus. Grier's design of having the TUBEs form a ceiling extending over the audience was brilliant. Having this raked array of TUBEs actually made the best view of the show to be the back seats in the arena. You could take it all in from there.

I'm also amazed at being able to reproduce some IMAG images through our TUBE wall, Govorko says. It's an interesting variation on your average IMAG look. It's very amorphous but still registers and the further away an audience member is the more apparent clarity there is. So in an arena, at 150' away, it really makes visual sense while someone in the front rows will have an entirely different perception of what is happening.

John Wiseman, President of XL Video (the tours video vendor), adds, Elements Labs new 2-meter TUBEs are absolutely gorgeous and even though we have the first production run of them out there, the crew has had no problems at all with them. The colors are great and the set-up provides motion it creates in arena you can start a wave of video that begins at the back of the stage and runs all the way to the front of house. Its fantastic.