Eclectic indie rockers Foals headlined Glastonbury’s Other Stage for the first time in their career, bringing an eye-popping show – complete with flown and stage-mounted LED screens and servers from Universal Pixels (UP) – to wow a very eager Friday night festival crowd. The show was part of an extensive UK tour, which necessitated three separate rig configurations to account for the run’s variety of venues.
“From the beginning, this production needed to have a well-thought-out, clear, and scalable design,” explains UP Director, Phil Mercer. “It had to be adaptable and have the same effect on audiences whether they were at small show in Edinburgh, one of the four nights the band did at London Olympia, or the headline set at Glastonbury.”
Although UP has worked with the band’s PM, Mark Jones, for many years, there were others – such as show designers Chris 'Squib' Swain and Dan Hill of Cassius Creative – who were new for this campaign, essentially learning how best to complement Foals’ intense live show from the ground up.
The team settled on a configuration where there would be three rigs available, depending on the size and restrictions of each particular venue.
Rig A consisted of a 17m x 9m upstage wall, a mid-stage 4.5m x 5m Kinesys wall, a 17m x 0.5m downstage Kinesys header, a static 40m x 0.5m downstage header and a 40m x 0.5m downstage footer. All of these video surfaces were made up of Leyard CLM6 LED panels.
Rig B was similar in its configuration, only with a single 17m x 0.5m downstage footer in place of the longer header and footer, while Rig C was designed to take up much less space overall; the upstage wall shrank to 12m x 6m, the mid-stage Kinesys wall came down to 3.5m x 4m, and the width of the downstage Kinesys header and downstage footer were shortened by 5m.
As well as this abundance of LED, UP provided a pair of disguise GX2C media servers and the IMAG screens required for the arena shows indoors.
“This tour was a really big step up for Foals’ production design with these top tier creatives involved,” says Mercer. “Cassius Creative really understood what was needed here, and the visual content from Frey Studio was just brilliant’’
