For his recent 100-city Take a Back Road tour, Rodney Atkins used the industry’s leading lightweight and flexible LED Curtain video wall from PixelFLEX to maximize the concert audiences’ experience through visual images and effects.
PixelFLEX’s unparalleled flexibility enabled Atkins’ production team to incorporate video at any venue, no matter the layout. Whether at a corporate event, a small club or an arena, the team could bend and fly the LED Curtain to capitalize on the available space.
“We primarily used it as a broken wall with six strips – four double hung, two high panels and two single hung panels – to give the illusion of essentially a 40′ x 18′ wall,” said James “Mo” Butts, production manager and front of house engineer. “We ran all sorts of content on it…anything from video b-roll to IMAG to computer generated content.”
According to Butts, the 12 panel, 20mm resolution system, rented from Elite Multimedia, a professional sound, lighting and video company based in Nashville, offered multiple benefits to the Atkins tour beyond its flexibility.
“From a production manager’s perspective, there are four major reasons to go with the PixelFLEX solution,” Butts stated. “Weight, power draw, truck space and cost. There is nothing that even comes close to how much video you get relative to how little truck space is needed to pack the Curtain.”
Still, as Butts points out, the Curtain’s ultra light weight and flexibility is what truly separates it from other LED solutions.
“When you go and do a venue where you can fly video, but you can only fly 600 or 800 pounds a point, the PixelFLEX LED lets you put up your entire rig,” Butts remarked. “If you were working with a rigid wall that weighs four times as much, you’d either have to scale it down or not use it at all. With PixelFLEX I can even put the entire rig on Genie Towers because it is so light weight.”
Pleased with the system’s performance, in tandem with its ease of set-up, tear down and transport throughout the 2012 tour, Atkins’ team is planning to use the PixelFLEX LED Curtain for their 2013 dates starting in March.
“We’re going to use them again this year,” Butts continued, “probably very similar to how we used it last year. The Curtain is ideal for acts that travel in one or two trucks, because of how much you can fit into a small space in your pack. It allows even a one bus tour to do video in a club. There’s no other product out there that can do that with the kind of resolution PixelFLEX offers.”
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