Pretty Lights for Pretty Lights' Episodic Festival Tour

	Pretty Lights' Episodic Festival Tour. Photo: Taylor Wallace for aLIVE Coverage

Ever since Atlanta-based lighting designer Greg Ellis discovered Robe's BMFL moving lights which were launched in 2014, he has been recommending them to as many people as possible and reports he continues to be "consistently impressed" with Robe's subsequent product launches.

Ellis just finished the latest leg of a Pretty Lights US tour where 36 Spikies and 14 BMFL Spots graced his lighting rig and helped create a stylish and invigorating show for rising star DJ and music producer Pretty Lights with whom he has worked for the last seven years.

The Episodic Festival Tour comprised five two-day experiences staged over different weekends at interesting and cool locations around the US -- including Telluride in the Rocky Mountains, and Red Rocks Amphitheatre, both in Colorado, as well as Chicago, Nashville, and New Hampshire.

The rig didn't change but the idea was to embrace the different surroundings each time and Ellis' task was to give each one a special and significant ambience.

This involved a lot of improvisation and thinking on his feet ... which is where the BMFL Spots and Spikies came in. The Spikies were arranged in clusters of four -- ACL style -- 24 on six ground-supported towers upstage, with three more four-way clusters on the video trusses, all effectively creating a giant box around the band.

"I love the Spikie -- it's soooooo incredibly versatile," emphasized Ellis. A key approach to lighting the show was that every instrument should multi-task. Spikies fitted the bill perfectly being able to do beams, washes, aerial flower effects, illuminate the cyc and other things.

Pretty Lights fans are extremely in tune with the various visual effects at shows and after the first show in the run, an avalanche of message and chatter echoed across social media channels ... asking, "What were the plaid lights?" as one person described them, referring to the RGB diffraction.

While that takes audience interaction to another level and it's very flattering that everyone is taking so much notice of the lighting, additionally the band thought the Spikies were "the coolest thing ever," declared Ellis ... so what more can a lighting designer ask?

The BMFLs -- also multi-functional -- were positioned on the over stage trusses which were four small fingers, a middle and upstage truss and a header truss -- with some BMFLs on the floor. The design split most of the different types of lights up in their positioning to give a cleaner and more effective look.

Much of Pretty Lights' music is rooted in hip hop and deviating from a more standard EDM format, it's not just two hours of banging techno. There are plenty of up-tempo, soulful, and introspective moments and some very spare and minimalistic aspects of the show ... all of which make it dramatic and interesting and more theatrical to light and quite distinctive from a traditional dance show. There were lots of opportunities for subtle and smaller effects to make a big difference onstage.

Lighting was supplied by the DSI Event Group based in Denver, with whom Ellis has a long working relationship.

Ellis also designs and operates video -- running via three separate media servers -- for the shows plus lasers, so he's multi-tasking as well and is constantly on his toes.

Upstage a 30' by 10' video wall introduced a cinematic element, and all the flown trusses -- four for lighting and two for media -- were clad with video headers. This was made up from Roe Hybrid 15, a 15mm pitch product with a layer of integrated 150W LED light-sources that can also be fed with video, so lightscapes as well and "conventional" video playback can be created utilizing the same video material.

Pretty Lights' Derek Vincent Smith has a passion for filming, and material from his vast library of touring footage over the last few years was edited into special clips for this show. Ellis himself has been experimenting with filming lights and lighting effects in dark rooms, so for this run of shows they ditched any computer animations for this more organic visual material fully sourced from "real life."

The results added a distinctive and more textural visual feel to the performance that worked harmoniously with Ellis' lighting and helped share the intense musicality of the experience with all present.