2006
Products: Versa TUBE
Lighting Designer: Jim Lenahan

A massive array of Element Labs' Versa(R) TUBEs and TILEs is accompanying Tom Petty on his Highway Companion Tour, a summer jaunt with the Heartbreakers, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the band from Gainesville, Florida.

After using the Versa TUBEs and TILEs on Petty's tour last year, his longtime lighting designer, Jim Lenahan, was so impressed with them that he opted to redeploy them this year. "I decided come up with a rig that would use exactly the same number of Versa TUBEs and Versa TILEs that we had before, but do it in a different way," Lenahan says. "I have 60 half-meter TILEs and 120 TUBEs."

Lenahan came up with a new way to hang the units by designing frames that hold one TILE with two TUBEs hanging down from the bottom of it. "They have these hooks on the back and you can pull them off like they're on a meat rack and hang them on the truss," Lenahan says. "It's really fast."

The LD's design also includes very asymmetrical, curved trusses that nest within each other from upstage to downstage. "All the trusses move during the show and they're all faced with the TUBEs and TILEs," Lenahan explains. "Then in the spaces in between, we have LED Color Blasts for truss toners, but you don't see very much. It's really almost wall-to-wall TUBEs and TILEs."

All the trusses and the other LED walls in the set move. "And they all change in relationship to each other, so sometimes you'll see the trusses moving with that facing of the TUBEs and TILEs," Lenahan says. "When they pass in front of each other and it kinds of gives you a moire effect. Since the TUBEs are hanging down in front of my lights, they shoot between them. So you really don't see the lights at all--you see the beams but you don't see the instruments. When we have a black curtain upstage, so most of the time those lights are invisible, which is what I was after."

In addition to his role as lighting designer, Lenahan is also serving as the video director--which he also did last year. "All of our camera cuts are preprogrammed," explains the LD. "We're able to run the video show through the grandMA lighting console and all of our video cues happen with the lighting cues. Literally I am switching cameras as fast as I am switching lights."

Stuart White of Control Freak set up the video compositor and wrote custom software that allows all this to happen. "They are using the CFS Spyder Control system to run the Vista hardware," explains White. "I love working with Jim - he's incredibly creative and he loves to push the envelope. It's a great looking show. He is also controlling 4 Sony BRC300 3ccd PTZ cameras from the grandMA. They built the cues with focus presets that they could update on a daily basis just like one would do with a light."

"What I like best about the imagery on the TUBEs and TILEs is that you have no idea what it is actually up there," Lenahan says. "It may just be an image of a piece of rusted metal, but the TILEs give you these great subtle variations in color and shades. You have all of those little squares and every one of them is a slightly different shade of reddish brown, with a cream colored background. So you get these images that have a lot of texture and richness. Especially since the color of LEDs is so rich.

"I used to see real saturated color before I started using dichroic colors! And now with the TILEs you can get these colors that you would never even have come up with on your own," he adds. "When you zoom in real tight like when you pixellate a photograph, it gives you these great textural images, kind of like a scenic drop or wallpaper. But I hate that term, wallpaper. Video guys use it all the time--to me it denigrates what I think is very artistic. It's like calling the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel wallpaper!

"Using the Versa TILEs and TUBEs is like repainting your set four times per song," Lenahan concludes. "And I'm using it just as a still, just to set a mood rather than having the same, concentric circles coming at us, boom, boom, boom. Seen it, done it. Plus, I'm using the Catalyst, which also allows you to create all these saturated pieces. When you combine it with TUBEs and TILEs and really wind up that saturation, you can get some really cool things going."