Chauvet Professional Fixtures Go to the Core for Killswitch Engage

With its powerful crushing riffs, double bass drum patterns and growling vocals, the music of the Grammy-nominated Killswitch Engage is seriously and unmistakably intense. Any light show at a concert by these metalcore icons had better step up and power out some searing intensity of its own, which is exactly what lighting designer Darragh Guiney did with an eye-popping exclamation point using a fistful of Chauvet Professional products provided by JDI Productions.

At the heart of Guiney's light show for Grammy-nominated Killswitch Engage's appearance in the three-city Monster's Mosh tour was a trio of video walls created with PVP S7. LED video panels. Providing a heart-pounding background for the concert, the panels were used to create four video walls: a larger (4m x 2.5m) display positioned on upstage truss, and three smaller (1.5m x 1m) units in set carts that were arranged behind the drums, as well as on stage left and stage right.

The panels were used to display chilling scenes from scary horror flicks, along with evocative images of the band. "Josh Mihlek, production manager for Killswitch Engage, buried himself in his office for weeks going through old stock footage of hammer horror movies and other real old-style scary stuff," says Guiney. "We offset this with static Killswitch logos and lots of static and staggered fizzy effects. In-between songs, there were drive-in movie type horror trailers with audio. The panels worked very well to display every image we fed them with the intensity we wanted. Our team member Tristan Rudat did a great job controlling the panels."

In fact, the PVP S7 panels were so bright, Guiney ran them at only 70 percent to create a seamless balance with his lighting fixtures, the company says. "The brightness of the panels is really cool," Guiney says. "We used the panels for more than just displaying video images; their color and intensity were so good, we used them to saturate the stage too. We had nice green and blue saturation for cool looks and lovely reds for hot looks. We even strobed the screens in sync with our strobe effects. It was crazy stuff; the PVP S7s are great lighting instruments in and of themselves, aside from being video panels."

To create a big power look on stage, Guiney relied on 16 Legend 230SR Beam moving fixtures, positioning six upstage, four downstage, and two each on top of the three video carts. "I had the four downstage Legends about 8' in front of the video carts on the floor," says the LD. "I positioned them this way for a nice layered big spread-out look that creates the impression that there are more movers in the rig than there actually are. When you offset the depth of the movers by 8' per layer, you get some nice looks.

"I like to work movers in groups of six and four," continues Guiney. "In almost all cases, I go for nice symmetrical numbers when lighting for metal music. This gives me some great classic big rock looks. With the symmetrical arrangement, I can bash out great fan effects, cross air effects, and some big whoosh audience lighting. Also, the 230SR is very morph friendly, so all my looks could be done on a visualizer before the show."

Rounding out Guiney's show were two Vesuvio RGBA foggers, positioned downstage on a riser. When band members stood on this structure, they were "blasted" with a copious stream of safe water-based fog illuminated by the Vesuvio's RGBA LEDs. "The audience and the band both loved it," said Guiney. "It was a fun element to the show."

Guiney praised his head lighting technician Phred Thompson and assistant Andy Mcguirl, along with the entire JDI Productions crew, with helping the three-day three-city Monster's Mosh mini-tour come off without a hitch. "Anyone who's done a show across multiple cities at this pace knows how challenging it can be," he says.

The LD also gave props to his Chauvet fixtures. "It's only been in the past year that I have begun using Chauvet products, and I am really pleased with how all of them perform," he says. "I'm pretty sure I have not had one issue with any fixture or video panel. No gobo wheel or color wheel stickies. No spending the afternoon hovering over an open light--so that's really great stuff. This was a high impact show, and the Chauvet fixtures kept pace."

See Chauvet Professional at PLASA Focus: Orlando, February 17 - 18, 2015.